The Ancient Egyptians Beliefs In The Afterlife “REVEALED” | Joe Rogan

There's so many mysteries to it. For anybody to pretend that they have all the answers to something as perplexing as Egypt is nuts. I think this is an area where I often get criticized. But I think when we look at a civilization and what it is and what it's achieving and why it's so special, when we look at our civilization today, we are fantastic at technology. We are brilliant at science. We can make the best possible machines. And we're a society that is built around production and consumption and a society in which people define themselves in terms of what they own, what they possess, what they produce. And it becomes a very materialistic society, a society that's focused on material things where we define ourselves by our material possessions. Ancient Egypt had a totally different focus. Yeah, they were great at making material things, but that was secondary. Their main thing was, what are we here for? Why are we living this life? What happens to us when we die? They investigated that mystery more deeply than any other culture that I know of. And they were doing so right from the beginning of records. And they were documenting this journey to the afterlife in hieroglyphs. And it's like, what were you documenting? How do you know? How did everyone agree on this particular myth or this story? Unless there was some experience being brought to bear in it. It's one of the things that we point out in season two, is that the ancient Egyptian notion of a leap to the sky after death, to the Milky Way, of a journey along the Milky Way, of encountering challenges and dangers and risks there, monsters that would block your path, gates that you had to know the password to get through. That idea is found all over the world, the path of souls. It's found all over the Americas. What do you think that they're trying to say? Well, I think first of all, it's evidence of a remote common origin of this idea. When it's found amongst cultures all around the world that apparently had no contact with one another, and are often separated by hundreds or thousands of years, the same idea is found about what happens to us after death. The only reasonable explanation I can come up with is that they've all inherited this idea and then developed it in their own ways from a remote common source. And that's one of the main reasons that I'm curious about the possibility of a lost civilization, that these spiritual ideas are found all around the world. And they involve the journey of the soul after death and a leap to the heavens. Sometimes it's called an underworld, but really it's set in the sky. And this journey that takes place where you are judged on what you've done with your life. This is something else that we avoid in the world today, is taking responsibility for our own lives. The ancient Egyptians required you to take responsibility for your life. And if you did not do so, the outcome after death would not be good. You had to celebrate the gift of life. You had to realize the incredible gift that you had been given. And one of the opportunities of that gift is the opportunity to accumulate wisdom. And that's one of the things, hopefully, that we all do as we get older, is get a bit more wisdom and a bit more understanding. But in the case of ancient Egypt, that idea is developed over 3,000 years. And it's essentially the same at the beginning as it is at the end. Death is not the end. This is the conclusion of a society that put its best minds at work for 3,000 years on this problem. Death is not the end. We may think it is. Scientists may tell us it is. But when a scientist says death is the end, there's nothing more. We're just physical bodies and when the light goes out, it goes out forever. That's actually not a scientific fact. That's not something that's been investigated or can be investigated. Consciousness itself is so confusing. Just consciousness. What is it? Why are we conscious? Is it local or are we tuning into consciousness? And when you die, where does that go? Where does that energy go? Is a soul a real thing? What is the essence of life? What is the essence of human life and human consciousness? Those are perplexing questions. They're very perplexing questions which actually are of great significance to every one of us. Suppose death just is the end. Then that's a way not to have to take too much responsibility for our lives, for the impact that we've had on others, for the pain that we may have caused or for the joy that we may have caused. If death's the end, there's no up or downside to that, whatever we do. But from the ancient Egyptian point of view, death's not the end. And you have been given the precious gift of life. What did you do with it? And there are moral aspects to that question. There's these 42 assessors. They're called the negative assessors who ask the soul of the deceased questions about what they did in life. And those are all moral questions. They bear some relationship actually to the Ten Commandments. But there's another question which is called the weighing of words. And that question is, what did you do with the gift we gave you? We gave you the gift of the human life. We gave you the gift of the opportunity to love or to hate at your choice. We gave you the gift to live in a human body, to have this incredible consciousness, to be able to integrate all kinds of information from all kinds of spheres. What did you do with it? Did you leave the world a better place or a worse place than when you came into it? Did you hurt and damage and cause pain to others consistently out of wicked intent, not accidentally but deliberately causing pain? And there are human beings who do that. For the ancient Egyptians, that kind of behavior meant an introduction to Ammit, the eater of the dead. And Ammit is displayed in the judgment scene. He's a creature, part hyena, part lion. And he sits there. And certain souls do not go on. Their journey ends. And it ends because of the choices they made during life and because they never took responsibility for what they did. Well, it kind of makes sense. A natural selection of the souls. In a way. If there's natural selection of humans and natural selection of animals that allows them to prosper and to get better and to evolve, it makes sense that that would happen with the soul as well.