Gateways to the Otherworld: The Secrets Beyond the Final Journey, from the Egyptian Underworld to the Gates in the Sky

by Philip Gardiner

Overview

Is there life after death? Is there a world outside our own?

Mankind has wrestled with these profound questions for as long as there has been consciouness. Gateways to the Otherworld reveals that ancient man already knew the answers.

Acclaimed author Philip Gardiner proves that our ancestors were far more advanced—scientifically and spiritually—than previously believed. Through a special technique, ancient Egyptians and others were able to journey to other realities within themselves—in short, to the Otherworld. The author undergoes his own experiments to prove the point.

Gardiner makes us consider the fact that ancient man also knew more about his place in the universe than previously thought. He placed buildings and objects in specific places around the globe. Why? Because at these points he had discovered areas where lines of energy cross—points with distinct relation to the universal and human wave resonance of electromagnetism. When man journeyed to these places, he was joining with God and visualising the effect.

The remarkable conclusions and discoveries in this book not only dispel some age-old myths, but also address questions such as:

• Is there a universal frequency that allows the mind to travel into other realms?
• How does this relate to the holographic universe and the concept of quantum entanglement?
• Does the Great Pyramid hold a real secret to the quantum realm?
• What are those mysterious round towers found scattered around our planet?
• Is there an answer to the phenomena of earth energies?
• What is the truth behind the Crystal Skulls and the rods of power?
• Is ESP real?

What Gateways to the Otherworld uncovers are not just tales of ancient trips to other realms, nor theories on why stone circles were built in specific locations, but real answers based on thorough research and science.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781564149251
Publisher:	Red Wheel/Weiser
Publication date:	11/19/2007
Pages:	263
Sales rank:	748,559
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Philip Gardiner is the best-selling author of The Serpent Grail and The Shining Ones. He has been called "the next Graham Hancock." He is seen on TV, in magazines, and has done many hundreds of radio interviews.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Gateway: What Do We Mean?

The word gateway can summon up all manner of ideas in our mind. In the Western Christian world it could be the Gateway to heaven, guarded by St. Peter, who balances the lives of those wishing to enter, as did Thoth and Anubis in ancient Egypt, who weigh the souls of prospective entrants against the feather of Maat. To Pagans it could be the portal to the world of Annwyn — the Celtic Underworld, with its myriad deities and heroes. To clairvoyants we could be talking about the Gateway to the spirit realm, just like the Shaman who induces trance states to see the parallel world of dead ancestors and Earth spirits. To scientists and theoretical physicists we could be discussing the quantum world of parallel or holographic universes, or even the psychologists' altered states of existence.

All these countless beliefs are linked together through time and space in a way never before realized. They are all evolved methods of the very same process, which we shall discover was at the root of all religions and is implicated in the origin of consciousness. There is an answer and a good reason for them all, as we shall discover, and that answer is the constant we discussed in the introduction.

However, to clearly express the true concept of a Gateway we need to try and understand what it truly means in as simple a manner as possible. Keeping the concept straightforward we can break it down into two distinct parts.

Life After Death

Firstly there is the Gateway after physical death into the realms known by Christians (and others) as heaven or hell, depending on how good or bad we have been. Similar concepts are discussed in other religions, but with minor alterations. Many do not believe in a hell, for instance.

Heaven is generally the dwelling place of God and angels or the pantheon of gods. It is the ultimate destiny of humanity, to rest eternally with the chosen God. This place is conceived of as being high above the Earth or on top of the World Mountain or Tree, but is accessed often through a tomb or cave where we are laid to rest. The Islamic heaven is a paradise, and often takes the form of a garden (al-jannah). It is full of beautiful trees, flowers and plants, wonderful rivers and lakes, and is enclosed and sheltered all around. This place is thought to be so wonderful that no man can imagine its beauty.

From at least the 11th century an enigmatic group known as the Assassins emerged in Persia. They take their name from Hashish (hashish-in, hashish or Cannabis takers), a trance-inducing drug thought by many to help the leaders control the minds of the subverts, and used as a derogatory term. In one famous statement, Hasan, son of Sabah, the Sheikh of the Mountains, said to an official of an emperor's court: "You see that devotee standing guard on yonder turret-top? Watch!" Hasan clicked his fingers and the adherent jumped to his death. This was true control, even if it was later propaganda, but how did the sheikh do it?

It is known that there was a physical paradise built within the compounds of the main Assassins Citadel, which was hidden from ordinary eyes. The new initiate would be drugged and led into this paradise where sweet water ran and beautiful ladies would produce a strong desire in the initiate to return. This psychological game was powerful; so powerful that the adherent would die without question upon the command of his superior, knowing he was going to a much better place after death — but one that he had already experienced through drugs in this life. This, of course, shows the belief that the Otherworld could be accessed while still alive.

This was a psychological paradise built within the mind of the individual via physical means. It was playing upon a belief system that was thousands of years old and deeply entrenched in the minds of the people. All it needed for total and utter control was a little added incentive of drugs and lust.

In Christianity there was a merging of many beliefs in the concept of heaven. From the Judaic Sheol and Paradise to the Hellenistic Hades and Celtic Otherworld. This was due in part to the fourth century council of "bishops" at Nicea. According to standard Christian propaganda, this was the first ecumenical council of the Church called by Emperor Constantine to settle doctrinal dispute. However, the truth is that this was really a meeting between the disparate religions of the time in order to finally create the new empirical Paganism of Christianity. The council drew together "Bishops" from across the religious spectrum, including the followers of the Roman Mithras, the Eastern Buddha, and Krishna (Christna), as well as wealthy Judaism, obstinate Celtic Druidism, and the riotous Dionysius/Bacchus to name a few. This is the real reason that Christianity can be unfolded into all these other creeds — because it was a Holy Grail mixing bowl of their beliefs. This is also why the heaven and hell of Christianity are as diverse as the hell of Hades and the heaven of the Celtic Otherworld.

We will time travel into these various beliefs later on to uncover the deeper meanings that they hold within their grasp. However, I said there were two distinct parts to the concept of the Gateway, and in this second element we discover a truer meaning to these notions.

The Otherworld Now

It is all well and good having a paradise or heavenly home that we disappear to after physical death, but many of us would like to experience this Otherworld now, to know for ourselves that there is a better place awaiting us. There may also be aid to be gained from this Otherworld — such as healing and prophecy from the deities or spirits that reside there.

I will lay down a general concept of this age-old belief in order to better understand the idea in as simple a fashion as possible, understanding that there are as many strands to this thread as there are branches on a tree. I am specifically trying to keep all of this as simple as possible, as much of the detail given in this book will build into a very complex system. Suffice it to say that the reader may turn to my other books (Gnosis: The Secret of Solomon's Temple; The Ark, The Shroud, and Mary) for more background evidence.

Legends, myths, and fables are still alive today with the beliefs of the Otherworld or Underworld of ancient Pagan times, in which great warriors enter and emerge renewed, or the universal and archetypal Shaman goes to bring back healing, prophecies, and messages from the spirit realm. This Otherworld is the place of the spirits — whether ancestors, demigods, or nature spirits. Somehow the Shaman, or, more modernly, priest, enters into this realm via various processes we shall discuss later in light of scientific evidence.

It is a world of magic, mystery, and often madness. It is a place of the mystic, who appears different in some way from the rest of his logical, thinking counterparts. Because there is a drug or meditative introduction into this mystical realm, the visualizations, which are brought back and portrayed in literature and art, are almost impossible for ordinary people to understand — you have to experience the process to fully conceive the portrayal. In this way, this Otherworld becomes — and comes from — the mind of man, which is, through its in-built imaginative processes, good and evil. Hence, we have a place of terror, torment, and darkness, or peace, serenity, and beauty. It is a polarity, created from within the polarity of the mind. It is also archetypal, as the images and notions expressed are innately human and worldwide. However, there is a third explanation, more universal and more profound, as I will explain in later chapters.

This Otherworld contains the cauldrons and tools to better ourselves and to improve our lot here on Earth now, not in some afterlife. It is also, though, the place from where our tormentors emerge — the place of trickery and deceit. This Otherworld concept can easily be shown to be the origin of the first part — the heaven or hell to which we go after death. The beauty and splendor of our imaginings and the dark demons of our mind are the angels and demons of heaven and hell. These places, both before and after death, were the same thing to our ancient ancestors.

These inner concepts of the mind evolved through vast periods of time and through hundreds of wonderful and mighty civilizations into anthropomorphic resonances that remain with us today. The archetypal figures of these hidden worlds were brought out of the mind for all to see as the sun, moon, and stars; as the spirits of the trees and animals around us; as the sibyls of the underwater realms and the ghosts of the mountains. In the same respect, these everyday natural objects were taken inside and given life as human figures.

Today we see these inner spirits in tales from the Mabinogion or the Gilgamesh Epic, in the Arthurian legends and alchemical mutterings, in biblical revelations and Greek philosophies. All can be drawn back to this inner working of the mind of man. All can be shown to have emerged from the Gateway of the human mind into the Otherworld of our existence.

But can the Gods really have emerged from within our own minds? Have we really created in vast periods of time the one God who is the manifestation of all those that went before? Is there no spirituality of real worth? And if there is, can it be described using modern scientific language?

Scientific Reasoning for God

Humankind has a strange place in the annals of history as the only species that can supposedly touch God in its prayers and meditations. But is this true? To answer such questions we have to ask another one. Does God exist? The answer to this age-old question may indeed lie inside the brain itself, and not on some esoteric trip of the light fantastic.

Simply put, the brain is an organic computer with electromagnetic neurons firing across it at an amazing speed — as we shall see in later chapters, some information actually travels faster than the speed of light. Internally there are yet further parts that release hormones dependent upon the neurons that are fired. Why these neurons are fired depends upon the activity we are currently undertaking — be that making a cup of coffee or praying — or the effects of the world around us, such as electromagnetic impulses from solar activity. Every activity or thought creates a different set of "sparks" that release hormones in different ways and in varying amounts — the mix being a kind of alchemical wedding and seemingly beyond comprehension at present. However, as science furthers humankind's knowledge of itself, we discover through reductionism the various elements that make up the whole. This then gives us a picture, so that we can now put the puzzle together.

But what science neglects are the spiritual aspects and the interconnected natures of the universe as a whole. Just like us, the earth and the universe have electromagnetic energies, which also release effects on a universal and global scale. Things such as tectonic plate movement cause electromagnetic activity in the atmosphere, which in turn cause storms or other atmospheric effects.

The universe also has strange "neurons" that fire constantly across it, called neutrinos, among many other kinds of interactions. These neutrinos come in threes andare only now being understood to actually affect the Earth and us (not to mention the universe). All of this, as we shall discover in the holographic and quantum universe, shows the unique interconnectivity between us — as evolved elements of the universe — and the universe itself.

Let's look at a simple example of this ordered interconnectedness.

The universe theoretically began with a big bang approximately 15 billion years ago. The process will slow down until one day it will also theoretically turn in on itself and we will have a big crunch — at which point it will start all over again. The sun goes up and comes down each day. We rise in the morning and sleep in the evening. We breathe and even blink to a rhythm or cycle. The pump inside of us we call the heart is repeating a cycle also. Even down to the smallest atom (and even smaller subatomic particles), we have these universal cycles — they are the things that give energy and life. They are a constant, and we are part of that constant. Even the waves of the sea are the same as the waves of sound or light. In this way, and in more complex ways, we are connected to the waves, particles, and cycles of the entire universe. This wave constant has been called resonance, and is a key to unlocking the secrets of humankind's place in the cosmos.

Through certain kinds of meditation, fasting, prayer, the use of drugs, and dancing (dervish), humankind can actually affect his own electromagnetic "wave resonance" and make it similar to that of the earth/universe — something akin to F-sharp, as we shall see. This resonance is found throughout the ancient world in megalithic monuments, pyramids, Shaman texts, and elsewhere. This is the God resonance, which aids in the cause of "illumination" inside the mind of man, so that he believes he is in contact with God, whereas he is truly in tune with the resonance of the universe. God is simply a human visualization of the effect — like seeing a face in a cloud; a kind of archetype, which alters as you move through various cultures. Some archetypes remain the same the world over, such as snakes or spirals. For instance, somebody in North America may see the shape of Jesus in a cloud phenomenon, whereas in India they may see the same cloud formation, but will visualize it as Krishna. It is the same part of the universe that the two humans perceive — they are just visualizing it in their own unique cultural ways.

Now, I believe we will prove for the first time that ancient humans understood their place in the vast resonant universe more than we currently give them credit for, and it is for this reason that they placed certain buildings and objects around the globe. Why? Because at these points upon the globe (and points that are within the universe and ourselves), we have discovered convergence points where lines of energy cross — these points have distinct relation to the universal and human wave resonance of electromagnetism. When people journeyed upon pilgrimages to these places, they were joining with God (universe/earth) and visualizing the effect.

This, in short, is the journey to God and the creation of the Gateways to the Otherworld.

In order to better understand the "original concept of the Otherworld," we must now move into an esoteric world of understanding. And, in order to discover the true Gateways to this Otherworld, we must try to discover the beliefs of the ancients with regard to the modern psychological term for it — the vacuum.

This emptiness is nothing more than the space within the atom — the majority of the atom in fact. You see, the truth is that all things are made up of atoms and all atoms are basically empty — they contain an emptiness, which is little understood. The same can be said of the universe, which is also made up not of what can be seen, but by what cannot be seen. A true ancient symbol of this very fact is the dot within a circle — a symbol that is thousands of years old that represents the sun and also the polar axis, as my good friend and author Crichton Miller explained to me. However, it is not only the external sun, but the internal enlightenment, beautifully associated with the vacuum.

You may have heard or read about the so-called akashic records — a realm within our collective unconscious where all the information of the universe is supposed to be recorded and stored. Again, this abstract realm can only be what the eastern mystics refer to as the absolute — the very center of consciousness, which is also the dot at the center of the circle.

Akashic Records

The word akashic derives from the Sanskrit akasha, meaning "the fundamental and etheric substance of the universe." This etheric substance is thought to fill all space and to link all things together. Because this mystical substance connects everything to everything else, then a vast record of knowledge is built up, and it is into these akashic records that we can supposedly tap. In the West we call these records the book of life, a location where the full extent of our lives is recorded, awaiting our ascendancy to heaven.

So let's think about this for a moment. The akashic records are where all the information of the entire universe resides, and the word itself means the "substance of the universe." So the substance of the universe holds the records of everything from all time.

If this is true, then the vacuum within the atom, the "empty" space of the universe and even the supposed junk DNA of the human, could really be all interconnected like some great internet, passing information to and fro. Adding to this the fact that the ancients claimed they were able to go into these records and see them for themselves, then we have the supposed ability to enter into the vacuum consciously.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Gateways to the Otherworld"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Philip Gardiner.
Excerpted by permission of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Introduction,
Chapter 1 Gateway: What Do We Mean?,
Chapter 2 The Shaman: Our Guide?,
Chapter 3 Serpent Realm,
Chapter 4 Science of the Gateway,
Chapter 5 Round Towers and the Science of the Pyramids,
Chapter 6 A Giant Leap for Humankind,
Chapter 7 Ancient Scientists,
Chapter 8 Memory Man: The Science of Enlightenment,
Chapter 9 Mind the Earth,
Chapter 10 Finding the Gateway,
Chapter 11 Otherworld Myths,
Chapter 12 The Great Pyramid,
Chapter 13 The End Is the Beginning,
Conclusion Time for Thought,
Appendix I Material Locations of Gateways,
Appendix II A Timeline of Serpent Worship,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,
About the Author,