In November 1976, I went on my first A.R.E. overseas tour to Egypt, Jordan, and Israel. This fabulous adventure with over 100 participants was led by Hugh Lynn Cayce, the elder son of Edgar Cayce. With special permission, small groups of our members were allowed to spend the night in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid! I eagerly volunteered and, although sleeping on a thin mat on a very dusty stone floor was uncomfortable, I was so excited that nothing else mattered.
We were locked inside the pyramid for the night with a portable toilet around the corner. Our group voted to have a candle lit since when the electricity was turned off, this mysterious chamber was totally and completely dark. Mark Lehner, who has become a renowned Egyptologist, told us that if any problem arose, we should just say “Zahi, Zahi” to the guards. For many years, Dr. Zahi Hawass was the senior official in charge of the monuments on the Giza Plateau. Mark went on to help measure and map the Sphinx with great detail and accuracy and to lead the excavation of the Lost City of the Pyramids where the workers who built these wonders had lived.
Recently I came across the notes I made during the night I spent in the pyramid:
- Our chanting sounded like pipe organs.
- During meditation, something brushed the bridge of my nose. Could it be a fly or a mosquito? (Or something else more ethereal, I now wonder.)
- Our pyramid-shaped candle cast a shadow on the wall that was shaped like a hooded figure.
- At some time, I thought I heard a dog whine. (Interesting in view of my dream below.)
Despite sleeping poorly, I recorded a dream that revealed some of my anxiety about this unique experience:
I dreamed we were in a pyramid in Tibet. A wild and mangy dog got in the gates and came in where we were up on top of small picnic tables. I was afraid. The dogs ate and growled, and I turned over two tables in fright. Somehow I crossed the room, but I wanted to get back to where I had been. The guards were Arabs with rifles, and we all wondered how the dogs had gotten in. By the time we left, we felt better about the dogs.
During our stay in Cairo, our tour members were able to participate in three psychic experiments designed to test the effects of the Great Pyramid on clairvoyance, telepathy, and dreams:
- After meditating in the Great Pyramid, we were asked to sketch or write a description of the contents of a sealed envelope. Then after meditating outside of the Great Pyramid, we were asked to do the same thing with a different sealed envelope.
- We were asked to record our dreams, knowing that each night that we were in Cairo, Charles Thomas Cayce, Edgar Cayce’s grandson, would pray for all of us whether or not we were sleeping in the Great Pyramid. While praying, Charles Thomas would be looking at a target picture. Later, our dreams were examined to see if the target picture had been incorporated into them, and whether or not this occurred more frequently for dreamers sleeping inside or outside of the pyramid.
- Those who chose to sleep in the pyramid were asked to seek a dream by formulating a question focused on either our group’s common spiritual purposes or on a personal concern.
After we returned home and the results of the experiments were analyzed, Charles Thomas wrote a letter to the group outlining some of the results:
- With the picture-drawing experiment, there was no difference in the number of ESP hits inside or outside of the pyramid.
- With the dream telepathy experiment, there were more hits outside of the pyramid than inside it.
It seemed that the pyramid shielded individuals inside the King’s Chamber from outside influences. Since the Cayce readings say that the Great Pyramid was a temple of initiation in which Jesus and John the Baptist underwent spiritual training and had mystical experiences, it would seem that shielding initiates from external influences would have been very important.
