Why the Great Pyramid Points to Eternity & the Mystery of Life After Death
- J.E.S Travel Designs
- Jan 19
- 8 min read
Updated: Jan 22
King Khufu, Tell Me, Where Did You Go?
Under the Pyramid's Indifferent Stare
I came to the Giza Plateau near the end of a long day, the sun stretched thin and papery behind the haze, as though exhausted after shining on the same stones for thousands of years.
The Great Pyramid stood indifferent to my arrival.
It seemed carved from the day’s dull glare, neither friendly nor forbidding, just there.
And why wouldn’t it be?
It had survived the collapse of empires, armies, and ideologies. It had watched parades of archaeologists and day-trippers stumble around its base, trying to interpret its silent geometry.
Each generation arrived armed with a new set of questions, still stunned that something this old, this vast, refused to yield an easy answer.
I had been staying at the Mena House hotel, just a short walk up the hill to the gates of the Giza plateau.
After buying a ticket at the entrance, I began my leisurely stroll toward the Great Pyramid.
The path was peaceful, a stark contrast to the bustling streets beyond the gates of my hotel, and with each step, the majestic Pyramid loomed larger.
Around me, the occasional murmur of other visitors and vendors softly broke the calm, selling everything from intricate postcards to small camel figurines, but I was more captivated by the serene beauty of the Great Pyramid at the end of a long day.
Everyone Keeps Asking the Wrong Questions
To face the Great Pyramid is to confront an intentional silence.
Over the years, my numerous visits had shifted my perspective.
I no longer pondered the same old questions—how was it built?
How did they manage?
Such idle queries seemed pointless in front of such permanence.
After all, this structure is a tomb, built for Khufu, a Fourth Dynasty pharaoh.
On this day, at this stage in my life, a different question stirred in my mind.
Standing under the vast shadow of the ancient stones, I found myself wondering, "King Khufu, where did you go?" And with that I didn’t mean “where is your body?” I meant, “where are you now?”
Khufu's Lonely Walk Into Eternity
Within the confines of those ancient, meticulously aligned blocks of limestone, Khufu planned to leave his earthly remains while his spirit took its place amongst the stars.
I imagine Khufu in his final days, might have been wandering through the vast, silent chambers of his nearly completed tomb deep in thought.
Here was a man at the zenith of his earthly powers, yet profoundly alone with the knowledge of his impending end.
What conversations did he have with himself in those echoing chambers and corridors?
Was there fear in his heart—a fear so universal, so intrinsically human, that it could bridge the gap of thousands of years between his reign and our own time?
I could picture him pausing by the stone sarcophagus inside his burial chamber, just a as the sun began to slip below the horizon, casting long shadows that swallowed the corners of massive blocks of the pyramid—a visual metaphor for the encroaching darkness of death.
In these moments, did Khufu fear that death would strip him of his regalia and his godhood?
Did those final moments of life reveal him as a man who, like all men, might have yearned for just a few more breaths of life?
A man who, despite the divine assurances scripted in hieroglyphs, might have doubted the existence of an afterlife?
Perhaps, as Khufu pondered eternity, he knew his pyramid would one day witness the hum of a world he could never imagine—a world of camera flashes, postcards, and hurried footsteps.
Tourists, Camels and the Shadow of Eternity
For a moment, a tourist snapped a photo and trotted off to the Sphinx, a trivial gesture in the shadow of such grand ambition.
I circled the Great Pyramid, where the stones at the pyramid’s base loomed as tall as my chest, cracked and worn, yet still locked in place.
A guard drifted near me, rifle slung over one shoulder, more decorative than menacing.
He seemed bored, as everyone who keeps watch over antiquity must be, too familiar with greatness to feel awed.
A handful of tourists, clearly more enthusiastic than knowledgeable about the economics of camel rides, engaged in eager haggling.
The animals bore the ordeal with stoic disdain, their plush, pouty lips curled into expressions of imperious disinterest.
A boy selling post-cards muttered something about ‘Khufu’s tomb,’ as though the story had grown tired on his lips.
But what fascinated me most as I wandered around, dodging another postcard vendor, was the Egyptians’ conviction that life on earth was, if not exactly meaningless, then certainly not the main event.
They saw earthly existence as a kind of preamble—a fleeting, foggy dream - as distorted as a reflection in rippling water - from which one eventually awakened into the true existence beyond death.
In that eternal realm, everything was clearer, more substantial, more… well, more real than the reality we experience here.
Death was more important than mortal life!
The Egyptians Weren’t Exactly Cavalier About Judgment Day
And so they prepared: Khufu’s engineers and priests wrote spells and prayers to guide him through the darkness and deliver him safely to the light.
They placed treasures in sealed chambers, ensured that even in death he’d have what he needed.
If he performed the right rituals, said the right words, his soul would ascend to become an akh, a glorious spirit-form bathed in eternal daylight.
Did he fear judgment?
Perhaps.
Even the pharaoh would face the weighing of the heart, though presumably he expected to pass with a monarch’s confidence.
He had the best embalmers, the best spells and a pyramid so large you could probably spot it from low orbit.
On the other hand, the Egyptians, for all their confidence, weren’t exactly cavalier about judgment day.
They painstakingly prepared for it, which suggests at least a mild performance anxiety.
It’s one thing to think yourself divine while you’re alive and lounging on a throne; it’s another to face the life-review when your mortal coil is long since dust.
The Egyptians’ certainty about the afterlife stirs a strange empathy.
Their belief in a structured, well-prepared journey after death feels oddly comforting, especially when compared to the fragmentary glimpses offered by modern Near-Death Experiences.
Today, those who were briefly clinically dead return with accounts of traveling through tunnels, meeting deceased relatives, and feeling an overwhelming sense of peace and love.
To an ancient Egyptian, this wouldn’t have sounded bizarre at all—just poorly organized.
Where’s the guidebook?
The spells?
The instructions for bypassing the terrors of the underworld?
They might say our modern NDE enthusiasts have had the coat check experience of the afterlife’s grand ballroom—just a fleeting glimpse, without the rigorous spiritual paperwork.
Death, Bureaucracy, and a Guidebook for the Afterlife
Indeed, the Egyptian afterlife was more structured, with different regions, deities, and bureaucratic hoops to jump through.
But at its heart, there’s a familiar notion: life doesn’t end with death.
Consciousness continues.
The Egyptians would have nodded vigorously at the idea that your earthly life was a kind of dress rehearsal, and the real show begins when your physical form takes its final bow.
Modern NDE accounts and ancient Egyptian teachings both point to a continuity of some essence of self beyond the pale frontier of death—though the Egyptians would have insisted you need the right spells to find the dressing room.
Time Travel For Beginners: What the Pyramid Tell Us About Us
Strolling around the pyramid’s perimeter, I felt an odd mix of humility and awe.
The pyramid stands as a physical expression of a psychological truth: that humans have always wrestled with the big existential questions—
Who are we?
Why are we here?
What happens next?
The Egyptians answered with geometry and stone, rituals and text.
They believed firmly that they knew what would come after: a glorious, eternal life if you’d lived righteously and prepared diligently.
As for me, I was there with my sensible walking shoes, a camera, and a profound sense of human continuity.
We are separated from Khufu’s time by an unimaginable gulf—nearly fifty centuries—yet we share certain fundamental concerns.
They looked to a structured, rule-bound afterlife where status and good conduct mattered.
We grapple with vaguely similar notions today, though perhaps with less certainty and more existential dread.
Instead of spells, we have hospice workers and psychologists; instead of pyramids, we have memory cards in digital cameras to store our photos, hoping in some way to outlast ourselves.
It’s not the same as a pyramid, admittedly.
To stand before the Great Pyramid is to confront the enormity of time, but also to feel a small, warm sense of connection across millennia.
The pyramid stands as testimony that they staked everything on that belief.
When I think of Khufu’s spirit—if it indeed soared free, guided by prayers and incantations—I wonder where he is now?
The pyramid, in its eternal silence, betrays nothing.
All we know is this: Khufu believed in continuity after death. He arranged for continuity in the afterlife, and trying to prove what happens after death is as elusive as catching fog with your hands.
The Egyptian afterlife concept tangles with modern rationality.
I look at the tourists snapping photos: what do they think?
Do they sense that for Khufu, and for countless Egyptians who lived and died in his shadow, their civilization was not just something that ended with the tomb’s sealing?
It migrated into eternity, a grand cosmic diaspora.
Today’s visitor is left with secondhand stories, academic speculation, and chipped limestone.
We can measure angles, analyze hieroglyphs, but understanding the feeling—life as dream, death as awakening—is harder.
Our world is anchored in certainties of science and skepticism.
We admire the engineering but shy away from the metaphysics. Yet the pyramid’s entire purpose was metaphysical.
For them, building something that monumental had a logic: you create a permanence in the visible world to secure passage in the invisible one.
Modern life rarely invests so profoundly in the intangible. We’re a pragmatic species now. We build skyscrapers and rockets but anchor them in material goals.
Yet something in the pyramid’s audacity suggests a different mindset. It says: The greatest journey is not through the deserts of the earth but beyond the horizon of death. The pyramid, seen this way, is a departure lounge.
The Short Road Back to My Hotel
I walked away from the looming structure as the light grew darker.
A donkey cart rattled past as a man called in Arabic for someone to move aside.
By the ticket booth, schoolchildren jostled, and a man with a tray of tea-glasses hurried toward the Sphinx Café.
It was a scene that might have played out a thousand times in some form: the commerce of life at the foot of a tomb for a man who has been dead so long we can barely grasp it.
I sipped water from my bottle and felt a quiet assurance, a sense of connection to the countless lives that have passed through this place.
We humans have always striven to know what lies beyond. We have always suspected that something of us endures. It’s an intuition of the human heart. Without it, life loses its greatest incentive.
The Egyptians expressed this through colossal architecture and careful funerary rites; today, people who return from the brink of death tell us with gentle insistence that there is more to our being than flesh and bone.
The Great Pyramid and the stories of NDEs are distant cousins in an eternal conversation—one carved in stone, the other documented in books and podcasts by those who’ve glimpsed beyond.
On that road back to my hotel, I acknowledged that the conversation continues, its conclusion still a mystery, beckoning us forward into the unknown—where love and understanding may await.
