What Happened to me Inside the Great Pyramid
Initation gives you what you need, not what you want.
There was a red moon rising over Cairo by the time we arrived outside the entrance to the Great Pyramid of Khufu. The plateau was totally deserted, except for a few stray dogs. Along with our guide, our small group of seven walked up a short flight of jagged steps towards a grotto-like hole in the side of the pyramid.
It was a chilly December night outside, but just a few feet into the pyramid, the air rapidly became hot and thick. A short walk further inside led to a tight upward-sloping passageway. You could only climb it stooped over at a right angle, with your back pressed against the stone ceiling. I was told it was only twenty five meters long, but I lost count after sixty rungs on the wooden footholds. I tried not to think about being trapped between my friends climbing ahead of me and behind.
On the other side of the passageway we emerged into the Grand Gallery. My relief at being in a slightly larger space was quickly tempered by the realization that the air was getting stiller and hotter. I was already sweating heavily.
Another hundred yards and I found myself standing in front of a small hole leading into the King’s Chamber, one of the world’s most mysterious and sacred spaces.
And I was as scared as I’ve ever been in my whole life.
The Mystery of the Pyramids
There are a whole range of theories as to the function of the Egyptian pyramids generally, and the King’s Chamber specifically. On the same day I returned from Egypt, popular podcaster Jesse Michaels interviewed Italian scientist Filippo Biondi on his alleged discovery of man made structures and columns that extend as much as a half a mile below the Giza plateau. Biondi and Michaels raised the highly speculative possibility that these structures could have had an energetic function that would align with fringe ideas about pyramids as power-generators.1
For his part, Joe Rogan recently said his best guess is that the pyramids are a “stargate” portal that allows astral travel to other solar systems.2 As obviously wacky as it sounds, it’s something confirmed by direct experiences of other people who have visited it. Sacred site expert (and previous Leading Edge interviewee) Freddy Silva also tells a story of his entire group witnessing thirty figures dressed in white satin materializing out of the walls of the King’s Chamber.3 It was the experience that finally led to him quitting his day job. Legend also claims that Napoleon emerged pale and shaken after spending a night in the Chamber. According to later accounts, he was asked on his deathbed what he experienced there and he replied, “What’s the use? No one would believe me.”
All of these different theories were as terrifying as they were exciting.
Why was I even there?
The short answer is that a group of my dearest friends asked me to join them on the trip. The long answer is that this year has seen me drawn into a series of ideas that seemed to be culminating in that exact moment. My trip to Portugal back in May first taught me how sacred spaces use acoustics to generate altered states of consciousness. It became increasingly clear to me that out of body experiences were central to these initiatory rituals. I believe they are also the key to a potential paradigm shift in modern culture. This is because they would help us transcend the materialist worldview towards one where we realize that the evolution of consciousness, of the soul, is the primary purpose of our existence. Shortly afterwards, Dan Brown’s #1 New York Times bestseller Secret of Secrets made precisely the same arguments.4
What’s factually true is that the King’s Chamber is a rectangular room built entirely of massive Aswan granite blocks and located about 43 meters above the pyramid’s base. It contains a lidless granite sarcophagus that is too large to have been moved in after construction, indicating it was installed during the building process. If it was indeed intended as a burial site, it’s interesting that no inscriptions or burial artifacts were found inside. Acoustic measurements show the chamber and sarcophagus have strong natural resonant frequencies.
The Chamber itself wasn’t that claustrophobic, but it was incredibly humid. I had a splitting headache. I was starting to sweat through my T-shirt and linen trousers. I tried not to think about how far I was from the pyramid’s entrance. If I had a panic attack and needed to escape, I wasn’t getting out to fresh air for a long time. My companions then asked to kill the lights. After a little grumbling and settling-in time I agreed. We were completely alone, in absolute darkness, in the middle of the night, under millions of tonnes of stone.
Potentiator of the Body
The Law of One material I’ve found so oddly compelling this year is closely associated with Egypt. The advanced non-human entity named Ra claimed they visited Egypt during a time when its people were spiritually advanced and seeking guidance. Egypt’s polytheistic model apparently made them more open to Ra’s metaphysics. The Egyptians subsequently made an association between Ra and their Sun God. The name stuck.
The Law of One makes the typically esoteric claim that Ra materialised the Great Pyramid using “intelligent energy.” It was intended as a technology to help with initiation and healing, specifically of the body. It’s an idea that didn'’t seem entirely ridiculous when I was standing at the foot of the pyramids, in full recognition that we still don’t fully understand how they were actually built.5
According to Ra, the 22 archetypes of the Tarot were offered to us as a tool to help us penetrate the veil of forgetting; to access the collective unconscious. In advance of my trip to Egypt, I reflected on the purpose of my visit and I drew a card. It was Wisdom or The Sage, also known as “the Potentiator of the Body.” To me, this means having the judgement to interpret the many signals of our body. Ra describes all emotional experiences, especially the intense ones, as an orchestrated “catalyst” to learn the lessons necessary in our current incarnation.
The day before we went to Egypt, we prepared with a trip to Chartres Cathedral in France. The idea was that exposure to one of the most sacred sites celebrating the divine feminine would help ground us in love. Despite dogmatic religion’s many attempts to erase the connection, a great many similar sites are dedicated to the divine feminine; commonly associated with the wisdom of the body. Whether it’s Isis, Mary Magdalene, the Black Madonna, Persephone or Sophia, the divine feminine was seen to be a secret source of wisdom and transformation. Indeed; the word philosophy comes from philo-Sophia: love of wisdom. “Incubation” in these sacred spaces, spending extended periods in darkness, was also associated with Goddess encounters.
It was only after my experience in the King’s Chamber that I realised quite how significant the divine feminine was going to be for me personally.
The Sarcophagus
We were in the King’s Chamber for two sessions of two hours, divided by a two hour break, ending at 1am. We did absolutely everything to ensure our time there would scrupulously respect the sacredness of the space. And the details of my companion’s experiences are private. During our second session, one of our party asked for the air purifiers inside the chamber to be turned off. While it made the resonance inside the chamber clearer, it made the air even more stale. Once again I swallowed my objections and tried to ignore the panic. It helped that, even if I completely lost it, I knew I was totally supported by my friends.
I lay in absolute darkness, while we matched our voices to the resonance of the room. The whole Chamber was throbbing. It was eerie, otherworldly and beautiful. I hummed until I found the frequency of the granite around me, which was easy to do. My whole head and torso started immediately vibrating in sympathy. The sarcophagus resonates at ~117 Hz, a low-frequency sound that apparently enhances interoceptive awareness, which helps you feel more connected to your body.
I waited for something dramatic to happen.
A Good Day to Die
On the morning of our visit to Giza, one of my companions had the idea of a ritual we could perform leading up to our time in the Chamber. He gave each of us seven rocks. We would make each rock something we wanted to leave outside the pyramid, a part of ourselves that we didn’t want to take into a sacred space.
As I spent my morning in reflection, I realised how little of my life I wanted to discard. My life is practically perfect. What I really wanted was to become more present to the life I had, especially as a father and husband. I also particularly wanted to let go of my lingering fears of insanity: the one thing that could instantly detonate the beautiful life I’ve built. After my awakening experience in 2017, I became totally destabilised overnight, and felt like I lost absolutely everything in the process. I had also felt totally alone.
The only handful of times I’ve felt really dysregulated in the years since my awakening have been when I was overwhelmed by uncertainty and strong emotions. The day before entering the pyramid, we had a preparatory session with one of Leading Edge’s most trusted mystics. Unprompted, he told me one of my gifts was being able to see complex scenarios in my mind, using what he called my “energetic prefrontal cortex,” as well as the ways they might play out. But the corresponding curse was that constantly running these simulations in my head overloads a brain trying in vain to control all the outcomes (I get awful air travel anxiety!). Entering the Chamber was the first time in my life I was reluctantly walking into a room where I felt that literally anything could happen.
Walking around Giza that morning I was suffering from a crippling headache in the front of my skull, which reached a climax as we entered the Chamber. It was so bad it brought me back to the rare migraines I experienced as a child. More than once, when I was being dropped off by my parents back at my deeply toxic boarding school, my vision started blurring in my left eye and I became incapacitated by the pain. I now suspect that the situation was too uncertain, and the emotions were simply too large for me to control. Then again that night, my fear and anxiety about facing possible death or insanity in the pyramid was overwhelming my brain. As Carl Jung said; “all neurosis is the avoidance of legitimate suffering.”
But there was something else present that day as well, a rare visitor to my guest house. There was an extremely faint sense of embodied joy and calm.
Finding God at Home
In my recent interview with Dr. Chris Bache, he described how the purpose of our lives is for our consciousness to become integrated enough to experience ever deeper levels of reality. To be strong enough to see more of God, without being shattered by the experience.
For me, I find God most often when looking into the faces of my children.
But my confession is I often get bored when contemplating the prospect of being present with a seven and four year old for hours at a time. The dissociative dopamine of the doomscroll is too powerful a draw. I’d rather go back into the relative safety of my intellect and play around with scenarios and ideas. And all my years of attempts to app-block and brick my iPhone have failed. This distant dad was someone I wanted to leave in Giza.
Part of the reason I can’t be more present in the moment is because my primary relationship with my body is one of discomfort. The only time I really notice it is when it’s desperately trying to get my attention. As embodiment teacher Philip Shepherd puts it so wonderfully: “the reason you aren’t living in the present, when all is said and done, is because you don’t feel the present living in you.”
By the end of our second session in the Chamber, I was in so much pain I was hunched over the sarcophagus nursing a familiar ache in my back. For as long as I can remember I have suffered from chronic discomfort in my lower right-hand back.6 After those four hours in pitch darkness the only thought in my head was how much I have always hated the appearance of my own body. Especially the fat around my lower back.
To mark the end of the final session we gathered in a circle. One of my companions instinctively grabbed me around the waist and cupped a love handle. This is the part of my body I am most ashamed of, and in turn it’s the part that supports me the least. Rather than cringe and withdraw, I let myself soften and receive his embrace.
I can’t feel safe in my body and I’m rarely aware of when my body is receiving love. In the time since coming home I’ve tried to notice where in my body is feeling joyful. I am aware I’ve made promises like this to myself, and my family, too many times. But this time I hope the intensity of the initiation experience gives me a fighting chance. And there are some signs the universe wants to help me.
Cats and Corkscrews
The night before I entered the Great Pyramid I had an especially vivid dream. When I woke up I recalled a clear sense of “there was left, there was right, and the pyramid was in the middle of them both. Its foundations were home, they were safe.” Then my childhood black and white cat appeared in the dream to tell me he loved me and that it would all be OK. On our minibus to the pyramids that night, I chuckled when I sat down and found a three-foot-tall poster of a black-and-white Egyptian cat deity Bastet directly in front of my seat. Bastet represents the feminine, balance and protection.
Within 36 hours of landing back in New York I had a session with an expert on accessing somatic wisdom and finding joy in my body. It had been booked, by somebody else, well in advance of my trip to Egypt. Within 72 hours I finally committed to try a new kind of physical therapy I’d been recommended called Egoscue. In less than half an hour they used a clever photo process to diagnose my chronic back pain as being caused by a forward corkscrew in my right shoulder.
Out of curiosity, I looked up the “spiritual significance” of this imbalance. Across multiple traditions, the interpretation is apparently that I was exaggerating my right-hand masculine side, my intellect, at the cost of my intuitive feminine left. I was drawn to return to the transcript of the session with our mystic before the King’s Chamber. He had described seeing a diagonal energetic line in my body going from my left hip up to my right shoulder, in the same direction as the corkscrew.
Shortly afterwards, I was referred to another intuitive, a channeler. I was obviously curious if she’d mention the corkscrew too. First she asked why I wanted to see her. I mumbled something inarticulate about wanting to serve life. I hadn’t said anything else to her, and was off camera. She replied that wasn’t actually why I was there; I was there because I was repressing the intuition of my body. She then immediately described seeing what she called a “torsion” in my system that was skewing me away from my feminine body up to the masculine in my head. Her poetic phrasing was “the mother always recognizes the voice of the father.” That my body would resonate when I hear truth.
Mysticism aside, I subsequently learned that thousands of somatic-therapy accounts report that, when the right-side torque releases, people commonly describe an ability to receive and a deeper sense of safety.
A $40 physiotherapy session 40 years ago could probably have saved me all this trouble, but I’m not sure that was how this was supposed to happen. A lifetime of diets and workouts had always failed to shift those shameful love handles. But after just a few weeks of consciously rotating my body a couple of degrees clockwise, they have begun to vaporize, even over Christmas carb season. My back finally feels strong. Now I’m curious and excited to see what happens to my embodied intuition.
Maybe I got that headache because I was dehydrated in the Sahara Desert. Maybe my back hurt because I’d been standing all day. Maybe those intuitives got lucky, twice. I don’t think I’ll ever fully shed my skepticism, and I’m grateful for the healthy role it plays in my explorations at the fringes. But the net effect of the last few weeks has been to tip me from 51:49 skeptic to 51:49 believer. And it wasn’t because of a single dramatic experience in the pyramid, but all the little moments since.
Nobody was more disappointed than me that my time in the Great Pyramid didn’t involve contact with aliens, angels or “proof” of the existence of life after death. Then I could write to you all with certainty about the triumphant culmination of all this year’s explorations.
But initiation means getting what you need, not what you want.
And I didn’t need to leave my body, I needed to come home to it.
Freddy Silva Source. Aubrey Marcus had an even more bizarre series of experiences in Egypt, and I’m quite glad I only heard about them afterwards.
There have been entire books written about this but for example: The Great Pyramid itself is aligned to True North with an error of just 0.05°, built on a base that is level within 2 centimeters across 230 meters, and composed of 2.3 million blocks placed with sub-millimeter precision. How?
Dr. John Sarno’s work famously argues that lower back pain is associated with repressed rage. While I am not certain that’s my precise diagnosis, I became acurely aware of how my general lack of emotional granularity blocks the wisdom of the world.
Wow, Tom! I love your writing style. It felt like I was right there with you on the journey. Thank you for your openness and vulnerability. I’m so intrigued about Egoscue!
Bravo!! Love how you told the story, Tom.