I’ve been recently reminded again of the great genius that is constantly at work behind the everyday events that seem, at first blush, to be accidental.
I’ve just returned from leading a group to Egypt and during our visit to the Temple of Seti I in Abydos, I left the group of forty with my Egyptian guide, Fahti, and went to grab a little meditation time near the structure called the Osirion – home to the Flower of Life.
The Osirion is quite an enigma. It makes no sense relative to the established canon of Egyptian temple architecture or art. Its unadorned monolithic blocks are completely out of place in ancient Egyptian architecture and the “L” shaped floor-plan of the adjacent (and definitely datable) Temple of Seti flies in the face of thousands of years ancient tradition. It is an enigmatic anomaly that is almost totally ignored by Egyptologists and is best known, by those who do know it, for housing the symbols of sacred geometry. It’s also of little interest to tourists. Most people have never heard of the Flower of Life and even those who do visit the structure don’t often see its strangeness, which seems to almost hide in plain sight.
I sat on the rickety wooden stairs that lead down amongst the massive ancient granite stones. The Osirion sits well below the surface level of the ground, and the temple guards, who know me pretty well after all these years, had pulled off the board nailed across the top of the stairway (now too decrepeit to be safe and so normally off-limits to tourists) to let me descend and sit amongst the ancient pillars. I drank in the quiet and the deep sense of immense age that the place exudes. I examined the unusual construction techniques – so odd and out of place here. I meditated. I let the sense of the ancient seep in to my bones.
After a few minutes of solitude I felt someone behind me on the stairs. I assumed it was a temple guard and went back to my meditation. Surprisingly, when I turned to leave I saw, not a guard, but a young European man. With a British accent he asked me “Are you here for the Flower of Life?”
I grinned. You can read my spiritual autobiography to learn why I found that question such a delight.
“Yes” I replied and fished out the gold Flower of Life from beneath the collar of my galabya to show him. “Are you?”
He grinned back “Yes” and produced one in silver hanging from a leather cord around his neck.
“Did you get that here in Egypt?”
“No” he says “In Thailand.”
We both grin. Turns out that Nick had a spontaneous vision of the Flower of Life some months earlier while doing yoga. Like me he felt compelled to try and understand what he’d seen. Like me he had been drawn to the Osirion.
“We have a lot to talk about” I tell him.
“Indeed we do” he replies.
As we walk back toward the temple, chatting, comparing notes and sharing our experiences like old friends. One or two minutes either way and we never would have met. If our bus had been a few minutes earlier, or if I’d stopped to take a piss, we would have missed one another completely. I am struck, forcefully, by how completely NON-coincidental this whole thing is, and I see, hiding right there in plain sight, that great genius at work.
