The ancient philosophy(s) I’m most familiar with are Platonism and Indian Vedanta/Buddhism. I do have a lot of time for the so-called Perennialist interpretation of world philosophical and spiritual traditions, which says that they all present as variations of one underlying paradigm and source. However, that’s more of a faith or sentiment on my part; I don’t know, and doubt if anyone does know the fact of the matter. Whether there’s anything to the Perennialist view or not, there certainly is a lot to be said for tracing a great deal of our common currency spiritual ideas to Egypt (and to India, China, Iran and other centres too of course, but Egypt is the most relevant to the ‘west’, at least historically).
Egyptology is a fascination I think I derived at quite an early age from my mother. You could say then that Egypt is within the matrix of my sense of ‘self’. Studying (as a layman) Egyptology as presented by the late and very great scholar, Jan Assmann, I came to realise that Egypt is in a sense within all of our matrices if we grew up in the Euro-American sphere (which again, is an extremely arbitrary and leaky definition).
To the extent that we can trace (or even identify with more than arbitrarily defined markers) cultural religious history in the broad Mediterranean world, it begins in Egypt, and is sustained by derivatives of Egyptian forms. The divergent traditions from the Celtiberians (and, though we can’t be sure in the pre-Roman era, probably the peoples in northern France, Britain and Ireland if Poseidonius is correct about the Pythagoreanism of the druids) in the west to the Persian gulf (at least) in the east, appear as ways of thinking that were first articulated to a significant extent (not denying that they were common among all people) in Egypt. Plato acknowledged this not only for himself but for his philosophical ancestors, principally Pythagoras.
The Levantine cultures which developed in time Judaism and the Phoenician civilization and, further north, the Ionian culture which produced the philosophy of Thales, all drew from the Egyptian spring. This is evidenced by their referencing the primordial waters and unity of divinity in their mythological, or mythologically informed philosophical paradigms. The primordial waters; NUN, the generative abyss, which self-divides into spirit and matter and then reintegrates in the process of creation, the Orphic Night on which God, gods, the world, and humans all have their ground (and from which they appear together) is there already, centuries before Greek philosophy and Hebrew theology in the pyramid texts and hymns of creation (Atum, Amun, The Complete One, The Hidden Of Name, is really the archetype for the Demiurge, Yahweh/El, Adad/Bel, Assur/Marduk, Zeus etc). Indeed, the primordial abyss which is literally everything and nothing appears in the Chaldean Oracles as the ‘twice – beyond’, the hypercosmic void.
Void, Chaos, abyss, nothingness...
Sounds kinda scary and bleak, doesn’t it?
Actually, it’s anything but bleak – at least when understood in philosophical terms. The ‘void’ is a void of particularity; of particular, differentiated and limited things. It is APEIRON to use a Greek term, un-limited, boundless, DYAD, no-thingness. Limit, or order is a structure impressed onto the limitless by intellect, NOUS, MONAD (the latter when conceived in religio-mythological terms is the Demiurge, the Creator). But NOUS could be conceived itself as the self-awareness or self-projecting of the limitless, the abyss, the dyad, in the same manner as the phenomenal world is the self-objectification of the will in Schopenhauer’s philosophy.
In that sense, the abyss is nothing other than the real identity of absolutely everything. It is so inconceivably potent (it is potency as the real actuality) that it cannot be spoken about beyond approximation. In Arabic terms it might be Al Haqq – the Real. In Neoplatonism it is THE ONE, beyond even Being. Itself, it is THAT by which all speech is possible (I’m alluding here to the Kena Upanishad where BRAHMAN reveals itself to the gods as being the hidden power by which they exist at all and accomplish anything).
For (some) Buddhists, it is referred to as SUNYATA, Emptiness. It is reality ‘emptied’ of the limitations imposed by the conditioned and conditioning consciousness of sentient beings. In other words, it is the true absolute and original nature of reality including sentient beings. It is encountered as the ground of our ordinary sense of self and our relation to the world as a presence that is conversely the absence of a particular self or ego. Schopenhauer might call its presence the inner being-in-itself of all things, while Kant might call it noumenon, or Chinese philosophers call it inner-pattern. And interestingly enough, the Egyptians of the New Kingdom had developed a religious theory with this orientation; the BA theology. Ba is the inner reality, soul, or Self of the universe. The universe is the manifestation of Ba.
So, from the depths of time and space, stars , black holes, bangs- big or otherwise, the vastness and bewildering variation of phenomena- living and non-living, to the innermost heart of a mayfly, a ghost, a wisp of marsh fire, a single teardrop; this entirety, this paradoxically limitless totality is in itself, absolutely and intimately, It-Self.