Pyramids Mystical Practices: Were Pyramids Used to Alter Consciousness?
The Egyptian pyramids are usually described as monumental tombs built for kings.
But calling them tombs may only describe part of what was happening within these structures.
Ancient Egyptian religion didn’t draw the same hard line between death, magic, and spiritual transformation that we tend to draw today.
The Pyramid Texts describe the dead king rising into the heavens, joining the gods, becoming an imperishable star, and traveling beyond the ordinary human world.
“The limbs of [the king] are like the stars, the imperishable stars… They take [the king] to heaven, to heaven on the smoke of incense.”
— Pyramid Texts, Utterance 684, trans. Samuel A. B. Mercer
Maybe the tomb was only one piece of a much larger puzzle.
The Pyramid Was Already a Supernatural Place
Beginning with the pyramid of King Unas during the 5th Dynasty, 100’s of ritual utterances were carved onto royal pyramid walls.
We’re talking about spells, invocations, protections, and instructions associated with the king’s transformation after death. 
And these instructions certainly didn’t tell him to simply lie there and rest in peace.
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The king might climb into heaven, fly like a bird, travel aboard celestial boats, join Osiris, travel with Ra, and approach the imperishable stars..
It belonged to a ritual system concerned with his journey into another form of existence.
Similar ideas appear in shamanic traditions using darkness, isolation, dreams, rhythmic sound, and visionary journeys to interrupt ordinary experience.
Different cultures may have played by different rules, but they sometimes seem to have been knocking on the same door.
Could living Egyptian priests or initiates have performed a symbolic version of the dead king’s journey?
That possibility became extremely important to later occult writers, especially Manly P. Hall.
Manly P. Hall and the Initiation of the Pyramid
In The Secret Teachings of All Ages, published in 1928, Hall devoted an entire section to what he called “The Initiation of the Pyramid.”
He believed the Great Pyramid preserved knowledge belonging to ancient mystery traditions and represented far more than a royal burial monument.
Hall certainly wasn’t betting all his poker chips on the tomb explanation.
For Hall, the King’s Chamber was an initiation chamber.
He described a candidate progressing through the pyramid and eventually lying inside the stone coffer, where the initiate underwent what Hall called the drama of the “second death.”
“In the King’s Chamber was enacted the drama of the ‘second death.’ Here the candidate… was buried in the great coffer. There is a profound mystery to the atmosphere and temperature of the King’s Chamber.” – Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, “The Initiation of the Pyramid”
According to Hall, the initiate’s physical body remained inside the pyramid while consciousness traveled through other realms.
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After experiencing realities normally hidden from ordinary awareness, the candidate returned carrying direct knowledge concerning life, death, and spiritual existence.
Hall even described the Great Pyramid as a “gateway to the Eternal.”
That’s one hell of a doorway. 
The king enters death, travels beyond the human world, encounters divine beings, undergoes transformation, and continues existence in another form.
This room was a doorway between the material world and the transcendental spheres of Nature. While his body lay in the coffer, the soul of the neophyte soared as a human-headed hawk through the celestial realms…”
– Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, “The Initiation of the Pyramid”
It’s possible that some pyramid chambers functioned as ancient sensory deprivation environments rather than simply tombs.
Sealed in near total darkness and isolation, an initiate could have experienced altered perception, vivid inner imagery, or trance like states.
Climb Into Your Coffin and Turn Out the Lights
Enter the King’s Chamber without modern lighting and lying inside the stone coffer.
Surrounded by darkness and an enormous mass of stone, you had essentially entered your own tomb while still alive.
That’s one way to pull the rug out from under ordinary reality.
Darkness and isolation remove sensory distractions, while the chamber’s resonance could have added another dimension if chanting or ritual speech was involved.
The Pyramid Texts themselves were utterances and spoken words possessed ritual power.
Castaneda and the Atlanteans of Tula
1000’s of years later, another esoteric tradition connected pyramids with altered perception.
In The Eagle’s Gift, Carlos Castaneda visits Tula, the ancient Toltec center in Mexico where enormous stone warrior figures stand atop a pyramid.
These figures are commonly known as the Atlanteans of Tula. 
Despite the name, they aren’t connected with Plato’s lost Atlantis, so we can leave the sunken continent on the shelf for this one.
Castaneda’s characters give the statues a much stranger meaning.
“The Atlanteans are the nagual; they are dreamers. They represent the order of the second attention brought forward…”– The Eagles Gift, Carlos Castaneda
He also associates them with “the order of the second attention brought forward.” The columns behind them are connected with the first attention, the tonal, and stalking.
In Castaneda’s system, the first attention corresponds with the ordinary world we continuously assemble through familiar perception.
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The second attention opens into another range of awareness normally inaccessible while perception remains locked into its everyday position.
Shifting between these states involves movement of what Don Juan calls the assemblage point.
Now we’re wandering into much stranger territory.
Suddenly the pyramid becomes associated not merely with gods or dead rulers, but with changing perception itself.
Gigantic Not Doings Made of Stone
Castaneda’s ancient sorcerers also associated pyramids and other structures with not doing, dreaming, and the second attention.
Not doing interrupts our habitual interpretation of reality.
In Don Juan’s teachings, disrupting those automatic patterns can loosen perception and help move the assemblage point. 
“I took you to that cave on purpose… because it was created as an instrument to push the apprentice deep into heightened awareness.”
– Don Juan, Carlos Castaneda, The Power of Silence
In a sense, not doing throws a wrench into the machinery of everyday perception.
Darkness, isolation, unusual acoustics, ritual, symbolic imagery, and dreaming could disrupt ordinary awareness.
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From a Castaneda perspective, a pyramid could become an enormous instrument for interrupting the first attention.
A gigantic not doing made of stone.
“This cave is man-made… The Ancient Sorcerers. Perhaps thousands of years ago.”
– Don Juan, The Power of Silence
Don Juan also warned that the old sorcerers became obsessed with the second attention, power, unusual states of awareness, and specific locations.
Their accomplishments could become traps of their own.
They may have learned how to open strange doors without always knowing when to leave them closed.
Hall and Castaneda Meet in the Dark
Hall and Castaneda were describing completely different traditions separated by geography, culture, and thousands of years.
Hall imagined Egyptian initiates symbolically dying inside the Great Pyramid and experiencing realities beyond the physical world.
Castaneda described ancient Mexican sorcerers associating pyramidal structures with dreaming, not doing, and the second attention. 
Different roads, but perhaps they wandered into some of the same territory.
Darkness, sound, isolation, expectation, ritual, and controlled attention can all influence human consciousness.
Combine them inside a sacred environment and you have something approaching a technology of consciousness.
Not computers, wires, or machinery.
Old school tech baby!
References:
Cia.gov/library/Manly.P.Hall_The.Secret.Teachings.of.All.Ages.pdf
nagualismo.com.br/en/the-eagles-gift-the-other-self-the-fixation-of-the-second-attention/