who don’ t know the way the book is structured, there are three lines for every statement. At the top are the hieroglyphics that were found in the papyrus, written by the high priest Ani, several thousand years ago. Below that are the phonetic sounds the hieroglyphics make and on the third line are the English translations. |
I first looked for the phonetic sound‘ maxeru’. It appeared to mean priest, or priestly nature.‘ Khereb’ was harder to find. In fact, I couldn’ t find it at all that day. It wasn’ t until a year later, when visiting a friend who was doing readings at The Crystal Ball in Dymocks Arcade in downtown Sydney, that I came across it. In the waiting room, on a coffee table full of magazines and books for the edification of those waiting for their allotted reading appointment, a book stood out.
The book was called Egyptian Magic *. I picked it up and flipped through the pages. Every now and then a woodcut appeared displaying illustrations as shown on the walls of various pyramids in Egypt. Below each one was a description. As I turned the pages, I suddenly caught sight of the word‘ khereb’. I couldn’ t believe my eyes.‘ A khereb priest performing the ceremony of the opening of the mouth.’ Apparently, the khereb priest was the court magician whose rank was only just one level below the pharaoh in importance, and the opening of the mouth ceremony was conducted to enable the dead to speak to the living. It could only be performed by a khereb priest.
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So the priest whom I had seen superimposed on the painting in my living room was saying that he was a khereb priest and that I possibly was or had been one in a past life. That to me was mind-blasting. I could, of course, have read about priestly affairs in Ancient Egypt at some point in the past and simply forgot about it, as some sceptics might say to quash my conclusion, but I don’ t think so. I had not read much about Egypt up to that point, and certainly nothing about high priests and their machinations. It was a totally unique experience.
Reincarnation makes sense to me as it appears unlikely we could amass the kind of wisdom some of us possess in one lifetime. It is far more likely we were born with certain memories gleaned from experiences in past lives, even though those memories may be buried in our subconscious minds. Perhaps our minds have a way these past-life memories can be released into our conscious minds, allowing us to make use of that we may have learnt before we were reborn.
Parapsychologist Ian Stevenson, who wrote extensively about reincarnation cases he was guided to discover in India, Sri Lanka, Lebanon and Turkey, found that children in the main found it easier to remember their past lives. Their memories of past lives seemed to fade after some years.
The idea of reincarnation crept from the Zoroastrian religion to the Jewish and on to the
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Christian belief systems. The evidence for this can be found in reincarnation researcher Herbert Bruce Puryear’ s book, Why Jesus Taught Reincarnation: a Better News Gospel. Edgar Cayce also wrote a lot about his research into reincarnation.
Ian Stevenson looks at reincarnation from all possible angles in his book, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, from fraud to cryptomnesia, where a child whose claims he was investigating would somehow have known someone who had the information he later recalled about their life. He mentions genetic memory, where some of the experiences emerge from experiences of the individual’ s ancestors. Other possibilities Stevenson offers are extrasensory
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perception, which he feels would not require the child to make contact with anyone in particular on a physical level for it to occur.
My own experiences have taught me to take ideas such as these with a grain of salt. I ultimately feel I have lived past lives, but I cannot say for certain this is true. To quote Woody Allen,‘ I sure as hell hope that there is such a thing as reincarnation, otherwise I spent way too much on that carpet over there.’
A previously unpublished excerpt from Simon Turnbull’ s memoirs, God in a Chip.
* We believe these titles were authored by E. A. Wallis Budge – Ed.
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