[publicclassics] Traveling through Time: Exploring Ancient Creativity and Consciousness

[Todd Swanson]

Hello,
Through Monday, September 4, 2017, my book Traveling through Time:  Exploring Ancient Creativity and Consciousness will be available free through an Amazon.com promotion.  https://www.amazon.com/Traveling-through-Time-Creativity-Consciousness-ebook/dp/B01N90GJ7S/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1504374354&sr=8-2&keywords=traveling+through+time
This is a tale of an interior and exterior journey over the course of a year through myth, mysticism, Mysteries, madness, and the Middle East. 
When you find yourself sick as a dog for a week, lying on the floor of a hotel room on a different continent, with the single thought “Omigod, what have I done?” running through your mind in an endless loop, after time a special clarity emerges. Less than two weeks after I arrived in Greece for a planned year’s trip, I completely collapsed physically, mentally, and emotionally. I contracted the worst chest cold of my life. Attempts to obtain a five-year Greek resident visa fell through and with it my plan to buy a home in the islands and write a book on the Eleusinian Mysteries. I found myself limited to a European three-month tourist visa. An all-pervading sense of panic reverberated to the core of my being and seized my heart. I felt the fear would be with me always.
News stories reported the imminent collapse of the Greek economy. Worldwide, people wagered if Greece would exit the European Union or be kicked out. To make matters worse, war in the Middle East loomed on the horizon. Millions of refugees attempted to flee danger and chaos only to find closed borders and open hostility. Alerts sounded worldwide as terrorism, ugly and violent, erupted fueled by a growing rage on all sides. Country after country, including my own, began to demand Armageddon unaware of what was being asked. 
The world is constructed of interconnecting time and events. As I met more people, explored more sites, as events and circumstances swirled around me, at times I felt thrust toward the crashing rocks of Scylla or pulled under by the whirlpools of Charybdis. I came to understand the intertwining of myth, legend, and consciousness after entering a sort of European and Middle Eastern dreamtime. A sense of time jumping developed - moving cognitively through chronological strata with its layering of events folding one on top of the other. One day I would explore Bronze Age Mycenae or ancient Troy and then read the Iliad and Odyssey evenings in my hotel room. I spent two weeks at the archaeological site of Eleusis timing my visit to be there during the days the Mysteries would have been held had they continued to the present day. At Delphi, I consulted the oracle. While seeking another hallowed oracular site in Lebediea I found the pools of memory and forgetfulness mentioned by classical authors. I explored archaeological areas over 3,500 years old in the Aegean and wandered along a cliff of a locale often proposed to have been the lost continent of Atlantis. 

The connecting thread is the ancients’ discovery and use of altered states of consciousness. This change of consciousness was brought about through meditation and ritual behaviors and continues to form the foundation of our perception of reality today. The book examines the intricate filigree of thought and supposition that weaves the fabric of illusion and reality and poses the question: What is real? 
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