Perhaps a little bit of science here… We all have more nightmares than we do peaceful dreams. This is true across the board. They figure it’s a survival mechanism. The ancient word for the Land of the Dead in a South American nation was Xibalba which meant the place of all fears.

I would prefer nightmares to insomnia. This is why the lost souls were feared. They were sleepless.

Really? I hardly ever have nightmares. You hardly recall your nightmares, but you do have them. They stem from your bottom up processing. I have heard it said, and I will bring this back to the Books of the Dead I promise, that the person who fears nothing loves nothing. What do you think of that?

A powerful and profound idea.

People both fear and love sex thus demons are so heavily sexualized. Even ancient death figures were portrayed in that way. In the Tibetan Book of the Dead they report that in the stage of the bardom just before reincarnation, you begin to experience karmically induced hallucinations and these are mostly sex scenes. People fear hunger. They fear their own hunger and how very much they like eating, thus demons or wrathful buddhas are shown with huge fanged mouths.

We fear how much we would devour, and what the consequences of that might be even more so these days. The hungry demon might kill us. What we actually fear there is that we might kill ourselves. Those members of the ancient tribe, who could not endure food rationing, scared the others around them. They would even begin to act “crazed.” Memories of cannibalism are brought up because of how crazy some people act when they are “SO HUNGRY!” I am describing these because these are the symbols that keep popping up in the world’s Books of the Dead.

Amit the devourer was a figure in Egyptian mythology. She would devour the souls of those found wanting. Pardon if I focus heavily on the Egyptian Book of the Dead, it does have the biggest body of written lore behind it. What people don’t realize about the gods in Egyptian lore is they are not masters to be followed, and the reason the Egyptians never had a single codified cannon, one single holy book, is because the gods lived with them. Their records were descriptions of no ruler deity that was just supposed to be trusted. They were records of things that really happened.

Remember the animistic model I refereed to earlier? The gods judged human souls based on human actions. They judged a soul based on how you judge yourself and only in that way. If you came about your death in a time of starvation, you would be judged by how well you managed that experience. How well did you ease that suffering for your people. No one else weighed down your heart, you did, and the ultimate question the gods would ask you was, “Is there one living soul who would speak well of you?” That was intentional, just one. Can you guess why? Is this clarifying the connection between the book of life and the Books of the Dead?

Because being popular is so important? No, just one person, not a popularity contest.

Oh, yourself? No. One other living person. You will die. This is certain. So why are you living?

You have to judge yourself?

Have you made a “connection”?

Are you living for yourself? Would you understand what it even means to live for yourself? This question is the bridge. You will die, so why are you living? The dead are remembered, what are they remembered for? So those two questions. Why are you living? What are the dead remembered for? Are these different? The book of life and the Books of the Dead are written upon the human heart.

That sort of shoots holes in the doing good deeds in private philosophy. The privacy is a form of egotism, but so is the self aggrandizement. Blowing your own horn is just as pointless. There is a figure that appears in each of the Books of the Dead that corresponds to that very behaviour. To the Native Americans this figure was Raven seeking to feed off the dead, and any single action you do dies as soon as it’s done. If you seek fame for its own sake, you are a carrion eater. You number among the ravenous ones of the waste, the jiki-niki or hungry ghosts.

You don’t dream another life as much as it seems like maybe you do. You dream a thousand deaths, countless deaths. This is why dream imagery seems so strange. Everything seems so life and death, so very meaningful, and often times very over blown.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~