As I've said, one of the left hand path distinctions is a desire not to merge with 'the One', and thereby lose personal identity.

The Egyptians also didn't go in for that:

"In the Egyptian view the existent is in need of constant regeneration from the depths of the nonexistent; only that can it maintain its living existence. It is, however, lost if it overlooks the negative, corrosive, deadly side of the nonexistent. The Egyptians are aware that every personal being, including the gods, must die; but they state specifically that only the nonexistent is dead in the sense of being in an enduring state. "The Egyptians remain detached and balanced, and avoid falling into nihilism or abrogating the self by surrendering to an unlimited state of nonexistence in which everything is possible; both these attitudes would constitute a devaluation of the existent and a fixation with the nonexistent. Several writers have stressed quite correctly that no trace of mysticism can be found in Ancient Egypt. The Egyptians never succumbed to the temptation to find in the transcendence of the existent release from all imperfection, dissolution of the self, or immersion in and union with the universe. They remained active and often, to us, startlingly matter-of-fact; any sort of ecstasy appears quite alien to their attitudes. For them the nonexistent is the inexhaustible, unrealized primal matter, the pleroma from which they take strength and which challenges them to create something that exists without qualification or hindrance."
(Eric Hornung, _Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt_, page 182)

Hornung goes on to explain:

"Scarcely any other civilization has integrated the nonexistent and its creative potential so perfectly into its way of life, acknowledging the nonexistent without falling prey to it. Perhaps this is the source of Egyptian creativity, of the balance and sense of the measure of things which we encounter in all manifestations of Egyptian culture, and which are striking especially in comparison with other Near Eastern cultures of the time. The seriousness of the 'brothers in Egypt' which Holderlin praised, and the rigidity that seems to characterize all Egyptian artistic forms, cannot disguise the fact that the Egyptians lived a full life whose energies overflowed at festivals, even though (or precisely because) they remained constantly aware of the horizon that limits this earthly existence. They were aware of the rule that a living, humane order can be maintained only if it includes within itself an appropriate component of disorder and acknowledges that non-existent within and around us."
(Ibid, page 184)

What might seem an obsession with immortality is also a constant reminder that 'LIFE IS A MOMENT'. Perhaps they were thusly inspired to 'Remember themselves', as Gurdjieff speaks of in much more recent times.

So it's interesting to learn that those of us who are on the quest for Sovereignity do have some things in commonality with the ancients that I hadn't realized.