I have been reading a fascinating book by Robert Masters called The Goddess Sekhmet: Psycho-Spiritual Exercises of the Fifth Way. According to the Introduction, the book was written in a non-ordinary state of consciousness inspired by the Goddess Sekhmet’s Mysteries and by the Work of the Fifth Way (the Way of the Five Bodies). What comes now are excerpts from the book related to Reality as understood by the Fifth Way:

“The Way of the Five Bodies requires a consciousness which simultaneously differentiates each of the five while, at the same time, all of the five are functionally integrated. … its known source is the magico-spiritual Way of the goddess called Sekhmet by the Egyptians. …

According to this way, there are two primordial, co-existing, interactive and absolutely antagonistic realities: Cosmos (the Powers and Principalities of Order) and Chaos (the Disordered Powers and Principalities). The essentially irrepresentable Powers are functionally represented by Neters, or beings experienced by humans as Gods and Goddesses, angels and demons, and others known to religion and mythology. These Powers in their Principalities … are locked in a thus far perpetual struggle, each seeking the other’s transformation. They are indestructible, but subject to transformation so that a final resolution would be the transforming of Chaos into Cosmos, or that of Cosmos into Chaos. Out of this conflict, sometimes called The War in Heaven, have arisen ‘intermediate’ realities, including the humans.

The whole of reality has substance but is neither ‘material’ nor ‘spiritual,’ and it is more or less subtle in varying degrees. Much of it is altogether inaccessible to and unknowable by humans. Some of it can be glimpsed or revealed, but not participated in by human beings. Within an exceedingly narrow sector of the whole of reality is the dimension of the human. “

The way of the five bodies distinguishes the following realms of reality:

1. Chaos: “a realm of such subtlety that it could, if experienced, be misunderstood as Void or NonBeing, also Darkness. In terms of the War in Heaven, this realm and the existences natural to it are the ‘Place’ and the ‘UrGods’ of Evil, working with absolute intensity toward the transformation of Cosmos into Chaos.”

2. Cosmos:” the ‘Place’ and ‘Forces’ of Order, Good, Light, Creative Harmony, and the Cosmic UrGods. Implacable as Chaos, Cosmos unwaveringly and with absolute intensity pursues the goal of transformation. Cosmos and Chaos are of the same degree of subtlety and only their subtle substance is completely and eternally real.

… Above the realm of … Chaos is the disordered material realm of the subatomic particles, matter with chaotic, not just unpredictable, positions and velocities. … below the realms of … Cosmos, there is the realm of spirit, and equally potent and seemingly irrefutable laws of teleology predictive of evolution of consciousness and eventual transformation of matter into spirit. … It is also called the realm of Evolutionary Order.

3. The five human dimensions or worlds (a midpoint between the realities of chaotic matter and evolutionary spirit):

a) the gross material or physical body (AUFU), which has a brain but no mind

b) the double (KA): the body usually experienced by the mind of that body; a body image

Ka

c) the Shadow (HAIDIT): “mental and unconscious reality of most dreams and images experienced in trance and drug states, the personal and the collective unconscious, the source of art and creativity”

d) the Magical Body (KHU): “it is only rarely consciously experienced but it shapes that ‘work of art’ or ‘myth’ which the HAIDIT in its own consciousness lives, and which it imposes on the KA, which in turn lives out the same myth, but almost always unconsciously. … the importance of the KHU, which can serve either Cosmos or Chaos, is very great.”

e) Spiritual Body (SȂHU): “this is the world of authentic religious experience as it is attained to by rigorous practitioners of spiritual disciplines….”

Further reading:

http://www.janetcunningham.com/Ancient-Egyptian-Subtle-Bodies.html