Pamela Kribbe

Egypt has roots which go beyond the horizon of what is familiar to us.

When I walk through the ancient temples and tombs, there’s a sense of mystery that points to a society thoroughly permeated by the notion that this world, perceived by our five senses, is but a shadow of a much more profound and fundamental reality. This deeper reality can be perceived only with inner senses.

Only the inner senses of the heart and the intuition can grasp the presence of something intangible that exudes from the old stones, artefacts and highly refined artwork. Only they are sensitive to the presence of the sacred.

One of the most shocking aspects of the modern world in my view is the lack of reverence for anything other than that which can be calculated, analyzed or controlled by the human mind.

Clearly, science has brought us tremendous achievements and the dethronement of false religious authority is a major one of them.

Rigid dogma, power abuse and superstition, such central characteristics of institutionalized religions, were and are rightly scrutinized by the scientific, modern mind. However, a painful result of the breakdown of the religious worldview seems to be that we lost any sense of the sacred, that which goes beyond the rational mind.

It seems the scientific mind holds the throne now and is ironically taking on some of the authoritarian character traits it once rebelled against. There seems to be no space left for the sacred, the presence of something bigger that opens us up to a more expanded notion of who we are.

The ancient culture of Egypt can awaken us to our souls, the part of us that is free from the five senses, from time and space, yet alive in a dimension that cannot be grasped by either the mind or by the rules and dogmas of religion. The space of the sacred is something we sense when a child is born or a loved one passes away. We sense the presence of a higher force that cannot be captured by words or mind made laws. We have to be humble in its presence, acknowledge our ignorance, but it’s freeing to do so.

Bowing down to the sacred in our lives has nothing to do with bowing down to authorities outside of us. It’s about recognizing the unfathomable mystery of life, from which we are born, and to understand its language without getting trapped in narrow minded and rigid ways of thinking, whether scientific or religious.

Savoring the presence of the sacred is about letting ignorance in, not knowing but sensing, not controlling but allowing, being liberated from the cages of our own ideologies, opening up to silence, stillness, the voice of mystery.

Thank you Egypt for keeping this door open. Your roots go beyond what is familiar to us, stretching into a dimension of reality that was forgotten by both science and organized religion. By holding the door to the sacred open, you remind us of Home, the dwelling place of our souls, who dance to the language of the heart, and whose divinity embraces us at the end and the beginning of our mortal lives. We are soul, not mere man, and we suffer when we cut off the sacred from our everyday lives.