In high school, when it was time to learn about Darwin’s evolutionary theory in science class, we had to get a signed permission slip due to its contradiction with most religious teachings. I remember thinking how silly that was, of course I’d choose science over religion.
I was brought up going to Christian church every Sunday. When my mom let us choose whether we wanted to continue come 9th grade, I was a hard no. Zero part of my logic-limited mind could find truth in the idea that there’s a man in the sky judging us, or that humans descended from a man and woman named Adam and Eve in a magical garden, doomed to suffering after their defiant eating of a fruit.
Then, as I continued down the track of Western science and was hypnotized in a new way, a new set of challenges followed.
These were the familiar Western challenges that are actually revered in our culture—an achievement-attached career, externally-sourced identity, material-attached sense of security, and for me these led to an eating disorder and chronic anxiety.
Thankfully, as goes the human experience, the suffering pushed me inward, to the path of spirituality in order to seek what I wasn’t through the material realm, despite what I was taught in science class.
Why would what’s been taught to be true cause so much suffering in our world? Because it’s not true, or at least it’s incomplete. A half-truth. Matter and spirit are two sides to one coin. Science and spirituality need each other for explaining reality, or at least pointing to it (the truth is ultimately inexplicable as we’ll see).
My path then, like many in the West, became a seeking to reconcile these esoteric teachings with my materialist science upbringing. This brought me to the time of Ancient Egypt, which since has become a source of awe and deep inspiration.
Science and spirituality weren’t always mutually exclusive. There was a time when they were leaned on in unison, one supporting the other and vice versa. One of the earliest examples of this was the time of Ancient Egypt—the lesser-known birthplace of philosophy and psychology, astronomy and astrology, alchemy and chemistry, mathematics and reason.
The mystery schools from this era in 5th-3rd century BC provided the jumping-off point for great minds of Ancient Greece including Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Parmenides, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and others, and whose philosophies maintain to this day.
This was a time and place when science and spirituality were deemed two halves to a whole, both equally vital in forming the fundamental explanations of the universe, and this is how knowledge was taught.
These schools were exclusive not by class but by readiness of mind and spirit. “The lips of wisdom are closed, except to the ears of Understanding,” as was the saying. Hence the name Mystery Schools, and why we sadly only know bits and pieces from what was passed down mouth to ear over millennia. Only those initiated knew the full truth of what took place within—a profound confluence of logic and experience.
The purpose of these schools was to awaken to the deepest truths of the universe and existence in order to live according to its wisdom, and its teachers knew this to only be reached through the transcendence of the conceptual mind. They knew that words are mere pointers to the truth, so they used them only to provide a framework within which a lived experience—direct contact with the truth itself—could later integrate back into 3D reality.
So, this is how the Mystery School students were recruited and selected, not through a promise of intellect, but through a promise of death and rebirth—a resurrection from mental ignorance into embodied wisdom.
The students, deemed “initiates”, were selected after a period of psychological trials and then put through years of conceptual teachings followed by experiential initiations designed to activate this knowledge from within, often frighteningly so.
These initiations were designed for facing and transcending fear. Fear was seen to be the bridge to cross from matter to spirit—it is the primordial human emotion we all feel when we solely identify with matter (i.e. the body, a job, a home, a relationship, etc). When we believe we are separate beings in a material world, we feel vulnerable, and we fear death. These initiations brought students to face this fear of death physically as well as psychologically through trials like staying for days in a sensory deprivation chamber or drinking a brew of consciousness-expanding plants like the blue lotus.
Fear was transcended when initiates walked through these proverbial fires and came out alive and well, an experience that brought them out of body (matter) and into their soul (spirit) to not just know but become the eternal essence where one is merged with all and therefore invincible, fearless.
The brave souls that completed this curriculum left reborn with a whole new perspective on themselves and life, one free of fear and full of peace and awe for the unseen truth underlying their physical world.
The effects of teaching matter and spirit synergistically are clear in Ancient Egypt culture, as their separation is clear in our culture today. Pharaohs were advised by the priests. Pyramids were designed by those manifesting from the wisdom of spirit, in concert with their knowledge of astrology and mathematics. The feats of engineering and development that occurred in this time far surpass any other civilization at that time and in many ways haven’t been met since, despite being pre-industry and technology.
Ancient Egypt is the mecca of science and spirit and the miraculous manifestations that come from a civilization driven by both.
So what happened? How did we stray from this?
What’s esoteric (meaning “understood by a small number”) often stays that way. Though the selectivity and discretion of these schools were important for their integrity, they also prevented the wisdom from expanding. This combined with the Christian Roman Empire working to silence their teachings through the destruction of the Alexandria library, Pagan temples, and all scholars and sages within.
The Ancient Greek philosophers that studied in Egypt during that time like Pythagoras, Plato, and Socrates, without likely having gone through the full initiation, took back to their country conceptual reason only, sans spirit.
Along that thread, centuries later came the Age of Enlightenment (ironic name), the separation of church and state, the scientific method, Darwinian theory, Newtonian physics, and the West’s fearful attachment to matter and ignorance of spirit.
It’s even seen in our language—the noun ‘matter’ is also the adjective ‘to matter’. Or the noun ‘substance’ is the root for the verb ‘substantial’. To the West, only matter matters. The unseen is considered unreal—only what we can see, hear, feel, touch, or taste is considered true and worth teaching. Cue centuries of war and homicide, rapid growth in industrialism and capitalism, environmental destruction, and a mental health crisis.
In this matter and spirit separation, spirituality went down its own path to ignorance—to that of religion, which, in most cases, is a set of dogmatic and patriarchal belief systems the Church self-servingly picked and chose from original religious texts. This manifested as taking everything in the Bible literally vs. symbolically, deifying Jesus Christ, and detaching religion from internal (“the kingdom of heaven lies within”) to something external, a place where the Church could control.
But all is well, this is simply the mysterious process of our evolution. And evolving we are, quickly. As Eckhart Tolle says, “We can’t deeply know something until we lose it.” This separation was needed in order for it to reemerge from a place of deeper reverence and wisdom.
Spirit is returning, gaining back its clout and re-weaving into science and culture as it was in Ancient Egyptian times, though in an even more robust way that includes modern knowledge we’ve gained since then—including the discoveries of quantum physics and epigenetics in the 1900s, both of which eerily align with the ~3000-year-old spiritual texts that were taught in the Mystery Schools such as Hermetic Philosophy and the Chinese I Ching.
In the attempt to discover the basic material ‘stuff’ that makes up the universe, modern physicists were stumped with a revelatory finding that warranted its own field—quantum physics. What this field has discovered is that the basis of our reality is not particles of matter, but waves of potentiality. That the universe (including all beings within it) is like a living mind, ever-changing, all connected and interacting. The word ‘universe’ itself is aptly named, meaning ‘one song’.
Epigenetics, synergistically, is the study of how our environment, interactions, and state of consciousness impact the nature and expression of our genes, thereby proving our interconnectedness and harmony—One Song.
In modern science’s effort to dig to the most fundamental truth, it has had no choice but to rest on its ancient sister—spirituality. That we are, essentially, emanations from the One, the ineffable, the transcendent, the unmanifested—God. If you can summon the courage to release the ignorance that hangs on that word, it can return to our lips as the original sacred pointer to the truth.
The opportunity today is to bring back this duality with the new resources and discoveries we’ve gained since. To weave modern knowledge of fundamental reality with its lived experience through psychedelic medicine, breathwork, or meditation, and bring the magic of this synergy into our work and lives. To play in matter, while being rooted in spirit. This is the antidote to the problems we face today, and our chance to learn from millennia of imbalance and step into a new era of embodied wisdom and harmony.
To go deeper,
Read
Secrets of the Mystery Schools
Watch