This beautifully illustrated book presents a unique history of how people have worked with nature. For the ancients, gardens served as the home of spiritual and divine beings. The idea that gardens were sacred places continued in the European Middle Ages. Since the seventeenth century, however, nature has been seen more as a physical resource to be exploited. The change in gardening styles reflects this development, with the creation of grand garden terraces and landscapes, such as Versailles, which imposed human order and design on nature. More recently gardening has become an art in its own right, enhancing nature's inherent beauty. Drawing on garden examples ranging from ancient Egypt to Monet's Giverny, Jeremy Naydler argues that gardening is best regarded as a sacred art, connecting human beings with nature and the earth in a truly spiritual way.

Gardening as a Sacred Art

Naydler, Jeremy

Religion & Spirituality

Floris Books

In this guide to the cosmology of ancient Egypt, Jeremy Naydler recreates the experience of living in another time and place. Temple of the Cosmos explores Egypt's sacred geography and mythology; but more importantly, it reveals with unprecedented clarity an ancient consciousness in tune with the rhythms of the earth. The ancient Egyptians experienced their gods not as remote beings but rather as psychic and natural forces, transpersonal energies that played a part in everyday life. This direct experience of the gods shaped the Egyptian concepts of human development, healing, magic, and the soul's journey through the Underworld as described in the Books of the Dead. While building on the pioneering efforts of R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz and others, Temple of the Cosmos is much more than a recapitulation of previous theories of Egyptian spirituality. Rather, this book breaks new ground by placing the work of other Egyptologists in an original, magical context. The result is a brilliant reimagining of the Egyptian worldview and its sacred path of spiritual unfolding.

Temple of the Cosmos: The Ancient Egyptian Experience of the Sacred

History

Ancient Civilizations

Inner Traditions

A radical reinterpretation of the Pyramid Texts as shamanic mystical wisdom rather than funerary rituals • Reveals the mystical nature of Egyptian civilization denied by orthodox Egyptologists • Examines the similarity between the pharaoh’s afterlife voyage and shamanic journeying • Shows shamanism to be the foundation of the Egyptian mystical tradition To the Greek philosophers and other peoples of the ancient world, Egypt was regarded as the home of a profound mystical wisdom. While there are many today who still share that view, the consensus of most Egyptologists is that no evidence exists that Egypt possessed any mystical tradition whatsoever. Jeremy Naydler’s radical reinterpretation of the Pyramid Texts--the earliest body of religious literature to have survived from ancient Egypt--places these documents into the ritual context in which they belong. Until now, the Pyramid Texts have been viewed primarily as royal funerary texts that were used in the liturgy of the dead pharaoh or to aid him in his afterlife journey. This emphasis on funerary interpretation has served only to externalize what were actually experiences of the living, not the dead, king. In order to understand the character and significance of the extreme psychological states the pharaoh experienced--states often involving perilous encounters with alternate realities--we need to approach them as spiritual and religious phenomena that reveal the extraordinary possibilities of human consciousness. It is the shamanic spiritual tradition, argues Naydler, that is the undercurrent of the Pyramid Texts and that holds the key to understanding both the true nature of these experiences and the basis of ancient Egyptian mysticism.

Shamanic Wisdom in the Pyramid Texts: The Mystical Tradition of Ancient Egypt

Reference

Jeremy Naydler has worked as a gardener for many years, serving his apprenticeship in York in the 1970s and subsequently working in various gardens in the leafy Victorian suburbs of north Oxford. The poems gathered together in this volume stem from his experience of gardening as a labour that 'seems ever to bend itself back toward soul'. For him, all gardening is soul work, and these poems live at the interface of soul and garden, where inner experience finds itself reflected in outer reality, and where outer reality speaks of deep, often deeply challenging, inner experience. Ultimately, the work of the gardener involves not only ensouling the garden but also gardening the soul.

Soul Gardening

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

The Godstow Press

The sacred consciousness that prevailed in antiquity is the key to unlocking our future • Shows how scientific consciousness, which gives primacy to the sense of sight, estranged us from the participatory spiritual consciousness of antiquity • Explores the vital importance of the imagination in reconnecting us to the spirit world The Future of the Ancient World sheds new light on the evolution of consciousness from antiquity to modern times. The twelve essays in this book examine developments in human consciousness over the past five thousand years that most history books do not touch. In ancient times, human beings were finely attuned to the invisible world of the gods, spirits, and ancestors. Today, by contrast, our modern scientific consciousness regards what is physically imperceptible as unreal. Our experience of the natural world has shifted from an awareness of the divine presence animating all things to the mere scientific analyses of physical attributes, a deadened mode of awareness that relies on our ability to believe only in what we can see. In these richly illustrated and wide-ranging essays that span the cultures of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, and the early Christian period, Jeremy Naydler shows how the consciousness that prevailed in ancient times may inspire us toward a future in which we once again reconnect with invisible realms. If the history of consciousness bears witness to the loss of visionary and participatory awareness, it also shows a new possibility--the possibility of developing a free and objective relationship to the spirit world. Naydler urges us not only to draw inspiration from the wisdom of the ancients but to carry this wisdom forward into the future in a renewed relationship to the spiritual that is based on human freedom and responsibility.

The Future of the Ancient World: Essays on the History of Consciousness

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Contemporary life is deeply reliant on digital technology, and computers have come to dominate nearly every aspect of our culture. What is the philosophical and spiritual significance of this dependence on electronic technology for our relationship to nature and for the future of humanity? Moreover, what processes in human perception and awareness have produced the situation in which we find ourselves?
As Jeremy Naydler elucidates in this penetrating study, we cannot understand the emergence of the computer without seeing it within the wider context of the evolution of human consciousness over millennia. He shows how modern consciousness has evolved in conjunction with the development of machines and their increasing shadow.
Computers are the product of a long historical development, culminating in the scientific revolution of the seventeenthcentury. During that period the first mechanical calculators were invented, and efforts to create increasingly complex “thinking machines” began in earnest. Nevertheless, the seeds were sown many hundreds of years earlier, deep in antiquity. Naydler paints a vast panorama, depicting human development and the emergence of electronic technology. His painstaking research illumines an urgent question that concerns every living person today: What does it mean to be human, and what, if anything, distinguishes us from machines?

In the Shadow of the Machine: The Prehistory of the Computer and the Evolution of Consciousness

Temple Lodge Publishing

<div>With its wireless networks encompassing the globe, the Digital Revolution is altering the very fabric of our lives with alarming rapidity. New technologies are bringing about an ever closer union between human beings and machines, whilst at the same time transforming our planet into an increasingly hybrid 'cyber-physical' world.</div> <div>The current rollout of fifth generation wireless communication networks, or 5G, is central to the project to create a global 'electronic ecosystem', in which we will be obliged to live. This will provide the basis for an all-pervasive Internet of Things, and the widespread integration of Augmented and Virtual Reality into human experience. But what genuine human needs will this serve? Does the planet really need to be made 'smart'? Will our health, and that of other living creatures, really be unaffected by exposure to escalating levels of electromagnetic radiation?</div> <div>As we enter a new era of extreme technology, driven by a momentum that seems beyond the constraint of any spiritual or moral consideration, both human beings and nature face an unprecedented challenge. Jeremy Naydler argues that it is a challenge that can only be met through a re-affirmation of essential human values and the recovery of a sacred view of nature. From this grounding, we can work towards a truly human future that, rather than creating yet more pollution and toxicity, will bring blessing to the natural world to which we belong.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div>

The Struggle for a Human Future: 5G, Augmented Reality, and the Internet of Things

Social Sciences

Review\n"This thoughtful book challenges the gardener in us to work as an artist and experience the sacred presence around us by becoming creatively engaged with the hidden formative forces of Nature." --Network Review 
"The main thrust of this profound and inspiring volume is to remind us that gardens are essentially sacred spaces in which we may work together with Nature in order that we may help her--and ourselves in the process--express more fully the divine presence hidden within the heart of her outward beauty." --Resurgence 
"An exceptionally well-referenced, delightfully illustrated and informative work." --New View 
"In his beautifully illustrated book, [Jeremy Naydler] re-sounds the call of the garden as a 'necessary counterbalance and corrective.' It's a welcome message towards re-sanctifying our world." --Nexus Magazine 
"Gardeners will love this book. Occasionally you look down the garden you have worked all day...and you have that peace, that sense of the numinous that cannot be understood except by somehow knowing that it is vital. Our author has been so kind as to declare it for us: gardening is a sacred art." --Derek Cunningham, Self and Society----\nThis beautifully illustrated book presents a history of our relationship with nature, beginning with the civilizations of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia―when gardens served as “the dwelling place of the gods.” Tracing this history through subsequent epochs, the author shows how human awareness of the divine presence in nature was gradually eclipsed. As nature came to be viewed primarily as a physical resource to be controlled and exploited by us, this was reflected in the ordered, rational designs imposed on such gardens as Versailles. 
Today, gardening has come to be seen less as an instrument of control and more as an art in its own right that enhances nature’s inherent beauty. Jeremy Naydler suggests that the future of gardening lies in its being regarded not as just an art but more as a sacred art that once again honors and works with the spiritual dimension intrinsic to nature. 
Gardening as a Sacred Art is illustrated in color throughout.

Gardening as a Sacred Art: Towards the Redemption of our Relationship with Nature

El templo del cosmos: La experiencia de lo sagrado en el Egipto antiguo (Spanish Edition)

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Siruela

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