My latest article is out now in New Dawn magazine: Special Issue Vol.9 No.6 – it is called Life Patterns & Blood Lines: Reincarnation for the Western Mind. This edition is brimming with insightful articles, and among them is one titled “Practice Dying” – Plato (Wisdom from the Ancient World). The ancient Greeks were familiar with the concept of ‘Death before Dying,’ particularly in their mystery schools where the practice of ‘Incubation’ was taught. Ten years ago I contributed an article to Insight Magazine (August 2005 issue) called ‘The Ancient Wisdom of the West: Way of the Iatromantis.’ Here are three short excerpts from it:

“In Egypt, the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut still sits captivatingly against the hills of Thebes (Luxor) in an area known as Deir el-Bahri. It was built three and a half thousand years ago… there set in a garden among the colonnades and terraces of the temple enclosure, was a sanctuary where initiates indulged in a practice known as Incubation. … They invoked the name of Imhotep, one of the earliest luminaries in their already well-established history.”

“The Greeks accepted the ‘baton’ of esoteric teachings from the Egyptians and… the Greek version of it was to lie down in an enclosed space, often a cave, and enter a trance-like state that was somewhere between sleeping and waking. They likened it to the hibernation of animals and called the place where they lay down a lair.”

“The Greeks recognised the Underworld (Hades) to be a gateway to the higher realms. And not only was it a state to be reached upon dying – it was indeed possible to achieve a state of Death before Dying. The Greek name for an initiate of this practice was Iatromantis, someone who had been to the Underworld and returned to this plane. … The figurehead invoked by the Iatromantis was Apollo.”

The plane referred to here corresponds with the higher dimensional plane on which Solar beings dwell – among them, the ancient leaders Imhotep and Apollo.

Credit for image (L): Luxor Temple, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/Entrance_of_Luxor_Temple.JPG
Credit for image (R): Temple of Apollo, http://www.crystalinks.com/TempleApolloRome.jpg