The Night When the Veil Thins

As we approach All Hallows' Eve, a shiverish, magical, crazy night in a more than usually crazy year, I am thinking of its many meanings. It is the topsy-turvy, inside-out, upside-down time, when the past lies ahead of you and the future walks behind you, breathing on your neck. It is a night when the doors between the worlds swing open, when the dead walk among the living and the living move among the dead. It is a night when you want to be able to discern who is who and what is what. 

The last night of October is the start of Samhain (which is pronounced "sow-in"), the great Celtic festival when the dead walk among the living, the fires are extinguished and rekindled, the god and the goddess come together in sacred union, and as the year turns from light to dark, the seeded earth prepares to give birth again. It's a time, when the Celts knew what they were doing, to watch yourself and watch comings and goings from the barrows and mounds that are peopled by ghosts and faeries. It's a time to honor the friendly dead, and the lordly ones of the Sidhe, and to propitiate the restless dead and remember to send them off and to set or re-set very clear boundaries between the living and the hungry ghosts. It's a time to look into the future, if you dare, because linear time is stopped when the hollow hills are opened. 

As Celtic scholar Marie-Louise Sjoestedt wrote, "This night belongs neither to one year or the other and is, as it were, free from temporal restraint. It seems that the whole supernatural force is attracted by the seam thus left at the point where the two years join, and gathers to invade the world of men." 

If you have never learned to dream or see visions or to feel the presence of the spirits who are always about - if you have never traveled beyond the gates of death or looked into the many realms of the Otherworld - this is the time when you'll see beyond the veil all the same, because the Otherworld is going to break down the walls of the little box you call a world, and its residents are coming to call on you. 

It's a time for dressing up, especially if you are going out at night, although there is likely to be much less of that in this time of pandemic. The Celts put on fright masks not to extort candy but to scare away restless spirits before they scared them. Out and about ,they carried torches to light the way, and especially to guide the dead back to where they came from when the party is over. Before Europeans discovered pumpkins in America, they carried lit candles in hollowed-out niches in turnips. Some of my friends in Ireland still do. 

All of this was so important, and such wild, sexy, shiverish fun that the church had to do something about it. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III decided to steal the old magic by making November 1 All Saints' Day, or All Hallows Day; so the night of Samhain became All Hallows' Eve, or Halloween for short. A century before, an earlier pope had borrowed the date of the old Roman festival to propitiate the dead - the Festival of the Lemures, or Lemuralia - and renamed that All Saints' Day. But since Roman paganism had been largely suppressed, the church fathers decided to grab the glamour of the Celts, among whom the old ways are forever smoldering, like fire under peat. 

Few people who celebrate or suffer Halloween today seem to know much about its history. For storekeepers and the greetings card business, it's a commercial opportunity. For TV programmers, it's a cue to schedule horror movie marathons. For kids, it's time to dress up as vampires or witches and extort candy from neighbors. My preferred way to spend Halloween is to rest quietly at home, sometimes with candles lit for my dead loved ones, and a basket of apples and hazelnuts beside them, tokens of the old festival that renews the world and cleanses the relations between the living and the dead. 

Text partially adapted from The Dreamer's Book of the Dead by Robert Moss (Destiny Books)

Photo by RM: Birch woman in the Samhain circle of Brigid's Gardens near Rosscahill, County Galway.

Reclaiming the Art of Dying

In most human societies, preparation for death and the afterlife is a central part of life. The practice of the ars moriendi  -the art of dying - does not reflect some morbid preoccupation. It is actually life-affirming rather than life-denying. By coming to know Death as a friend, you release the energy you have invested in trying to bottle up your darkest fears. When you establish for yourself — through personal experience — that there is life after life, you will find you take a more relaxed and generous view of the vicissitudes of everyday life. When you examine your life from the standpoint of your death, you will surely find that there is no reason to perpetuate old quarrels and jealousies. You will wish to put things right between yourself and others, to give up petty agendas and live fully and creatively for the years allotted to you.

In postindustrial Western societies, the neglect of the art of dying has led to a vogue for spiritual practices drawn from other traditions, such as Tibetan Buddhism, which offers a detailed geography of the afterlife that may or may not be relevant to you if you are not a Tibetan Buddhist. Our general neglect is fed by both fear and denial. The denial thrives on our hurry sickness, our tendency to fill up our time with compulsive, external activities — interspersed with infusions of passive consumer entertainment, IV-fed through the TV tubes — leaving no space for the inner search. Filling our lives with a bustle of responsibilities that leaves us with “no time” to commune with soul is mockingly described by a Tibetan master as “housekeeping in a dream.” Sögyal Rinpoche asks, “Would anyone in their right mind think of laboriously redecorating their hotel room every time they booked into one?

Our fear of death is bound up with our confusion about who we are. We fear losing all the props, connections, and résumés that we confuse with identity. We are terrified of being stripped of rank and title and credit cards and cell phones and being sent naked into the next world, as Inanna must descend naked into the underworld.

Your death is a rather important subject, not just the when and how, but the question of what follows, and what it all means. On a subject this vital and this intimate, you would be ill-advised to take answers on trust from other people. But how can we know before dying what lies on the other side, and know this as personal truth? In two ways: through a visitation by a resident of the Otherworld whose information can be verified; or by soul travel, by making a personal journey to the Other Side. My book Conscious Dreaming explores dream visitations by the departed. Here I want to suggest a variety of techniques by which you can embark on conscious dream journeys to explore the conditions of the afterlife for yourself.

An art of dying adequate to our needs and yearnings today must address at least these five key areas: 

        Practice in dream travel and journeying beyond the body. By practicing the projection of consciousness beyond the physical plane, we settle any personal doubts about the soul’s survival of physical death.

       Developing a personal geography of the afterlife. Through conscious dream journeys, we can visit “ex-physicals” — and their teachers — in their own environments. We can explore a variety of transit areas and reception centers, adapted to the expectations and comfort levels of different types of people, where the recently departed are helped to adapt to their new circumstances. We can tour the “collective belief territories,” some established centuries or millennia ago, where ex-physicals participate ins hared activities and religious practices. We can examine processes of life review, reeducation, and judgment and follow the transition of spirits between different after-death states. We can also study the different fates of different vehicles of consciousness after physical death.

      Helping the dying. The application of insights and techniques gained in these explorations to helping the dying through what some hospice nurses describe as the “nearing death experience.” In many of our hospitals (where most Westerners die) death is treated as a failure, or merely the loss of vital signs, followed by a pulled-out plug, a disconnected respirator, and the disposal of the remains. As we recover the art of dying, many of us in all walks of life — not only ministers and health care professionals and hospice volunteers — will be able to play the role of companion on the deathwalk, helping the dying to approach the next life with grace and courage and to make the last seasons of this life a period of personal growth. The skills required in this area include the ability to communicate on a soul level with patients who are in coma, are unable to speak or reason clearly, or have suffered severe memory loss. A vital aspect of this work is facilitating or mediating contact between the dying and helpers on the other side — especially departed loved ones — who can give assistance through the transition. Dreamwork and meditation are invaluable tools in helping the dying to prepare for the conditions of life beyond the body.

               Helping the departed. We pray for our dead in our churches and temples, and no good intention is ever wasted. However, you may have a hard time finding a priest who is willing to take on the role of psychopomp, or guide of souls, and provide personal escort service to spirits of the departed who have lost their way and gotten stuck between the worlds, causing pain and confusion to themselves and sometimes to their survivors. Yet the living have a crucial role to play in helping to release earthbound or troubled spirits. For one thing, some of these “ex-physicals” seem to trust people who have physical bodies more than entities that do not, because there is comfort in the familiar, because they did not believe in an afterlife before passing on — or quite simply because they do not know they are dead. An art of dying for our times must include the ability to dialogue with these spirits and help them to find their right path.

              Making death your ally. Finally, we are challenged to reach into the place of our deepest fears and master them: to face our own death on its own ground and re-value our lives and our purpose from this perspective. When we “brave up” enough to confront our personal Death and receive its teaching, we forge an alliance that is a source of power and healing in every aspect of life. We may now be able to carry a sense of divine comedy that can help us weather whatever life throws at us on a given day.

Art: "Storm Bird Brings Me Back" by Robert Moss

 

Text adapted from Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death. by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library. Here you will find detailed practices and travel repots.

 

Meeting Doppelgangers from a Possible Future

 

Perceiving your own double is a rarer experience than sighting someone else's doppelganger, and easier to accomplish in dreams than in waking states. Jane Roberts, the remarkable psychic medium who channeled the entity Seth, has left us an extraordinary account of spotting a double who seemed to belong to the future, the embodiment of an older self she did not want to become. The episode is reminiscent of dreams that show us what life may be like if we continue along the road we are following.  

As recounted in The Seth Material, Jane and her husband Rob are on vacation in York Beach, Maine in 1963. She is beginning to discover her psychic gifts in contact with Seth; Rob is suffering severe back pains. They decide to go to a lively night spot to try to raise their energy. They are amazed to see an older couple seated in their line of sight who look just like them, but older and sour and embittered.

Rob has a visceral response. He grabs Jane, pulls her on to the dance floor and they do the Twist till the band packs it in. Utterly out of character for Rob. When the music stops the sour old couple have gone. Did Jane and Rob just separate themselves from a probable path to a miserable future?

They ask Seth, who says the embittered couple “were fragments of your selves, thrown-off materializations of your own negative and aggressive feelings.” He talks about how we are constantly generating thought forms that can take on physical life.

He does not say it clearly, but my impression is that Jane and Rob encountered doppelgangers from a possible future, then twisted probabilities when they joined the dance, leaving the sad couple on a path not taken. I am adding it to my casebook documenting how the Many Interactive Worlds hypothesis in physics - which contends that we are constantly splitting into parallel worlds - operates on a human scale.


Illustration by Robert Moss

The Soul of an Irish Priest Is Called Out of His Body

 

One of the oldest Christian accounts of a visionary experience written in the vernacular is a fragmentary text titled The Vision of Laisrén. It was translated from the Irish by the great German scholar of Celtic literature, Kuno Meyer. I report a visionary encounter with him in The Dreamer's Book of the Dead. Meyer thought Laisrén was probably an abbot who died in 638, while the surviving text was copied a couple of centuries later.

In the narrative, Laisrén is a priest who falls asleep in a church he has been working to purify, exhausted by fasting and labor. A voice tells him to get up. "Arise!" When he ignores it, the command is repeated. Struggling to his feet he sees the east end of the church ablaze with light. There is a shining figure between the chancel and the altar. He hears the command, “Come towards me!”

The cleric shakes from head to toe. Then he sees his soul hovering over the crown of his head and does not know how it came out of his body. He sees the roof of the church open and “two angels taking the soul between them and rising into the air.”

He sees a host of angels coming to join them. But legions of demons bristling with fire are gathering too, armed with spears and darts and javelins, with “fiery hair growing through them like the hair of a thistle. A battle is joined for the soul of the priest. Despite the horror show graphics, it is fought with words. The chief demon lists the priest’s derelictions. The head angel declares that the charges are inadmissible since the priest has been cleansed by confession. The demon argues cleverly that there is one charge from which Laisrén may not be excused: he is guilty of failing to follow the command in Matthew 18 to “become as little children.”

Laisrén's angelic advocate ends the trial by asserting that the priest was called out of his body on a mission. He is going to be shown hell so he can report back to humans with an up-to-date weather report. He now takes off in angelic company on a flying visit to a sinister mountain glen and a peek into the black mouth of pit. Laisrén’s perspective has shifted. Instead of looking up at the soul with the eyes of the body, he sees through the eyes of the soul, or perhaps more precisely, the subtle body. There is the island - or Ireland - in the far distance. The text breaks off before he gets back.

Source: Kuno Meyer (trans.) Stories and Songs from Irish Mss  1. "The Vision of Laisrén". Otia Merseiana (Publication of the Arts Faculty of University College Liverpool, 1899) pp 116-9.

Illustration: St. Molaise island, County Fermanagh from Omnium Sanctorum Hiberniae. Laisrén is said to have lived on the island as a hermit in earlier years, and Molaise may be his other name. 

In the Forest of Mirrors: Wanderings of the Yanomami Dream Image

At the moment of sleep, the body stays on the grid of the physical world, while the dreamer's living image [pei utupë] casts off and travels in the time of dreams (mari tëhë). This happens as it does at the moment of death: the image released from the body, becomes a specter (pore) that wanders the shores of heaven (hutu mosi). During the day, the image is confined in the body, at night, during dreams, it leaves its corporeal base and wanders far and wide, taking solid form, able to take other forms. As a living image, the dreamer can enter contact with other beings that inhabit the cosmos - with ancestors and gods, with animal and nature spirits. During the day, people take care of business. The business of the night is different. Around the close of day, the dream image begins to stir, getting ready for flight. The end of the afternoon is also the time of saudade, bittersweet nostalgia for a home in another world. .

This is a summary of the Yanomami view of dreaming. The Yanomami are a people of the rainforest on the borders of Barzil and Venezuela. For the Yanomami dreaming is what happens when the pei utupë is freed from the body at night. Pei utupë is usually translated as “image” but in a sense different from modern English language usage: the image that travels is like the Greek eidolon rather than a representation. It may be the “free soul” the Swedish school looks for in every aboriginal culture. [1] Hanna Limulja, a Brazilian anthropologist who lived with the Yanomami, makes herself their speaker in writing about these excursions:

By day we live and see what our eyes can see, it’s as if the daylight obscures what is hidden in the density of the body, the forest and the world. At night, the image, freed from the body, can truly see afar. Travelling to places where the body has never been, the pei utupë wanders, always at the risk of getting lost and making the body suffer. One does not dream during the day, because the day is of the living, of bodies, of matter that rots upon death. Night is the world of images, of the dead, of shamans’ helper spirits, the xapiripë. It is in the Yanomami person’s pei utupë, where what really matters is found.

You must be alive to dream, yet you must die a little each night in order to dream deep. The death experienced each night when the "image" goes wandering with the spirits is "the simulacrum and anticipation of the ultimate death that reaches everyone, the definitive death that separates the body from the image, the living from the dead." [2] 

Here is Yanomami shaman and spokesman Davi Kopenawa talking about relations between humans and ancestral spirits called xapiripë. "The xapiripë dance together on huge mirrors which come down from the sky. They are never dull like humans. They are always splendid."

 

The xapiripë descend to us perched on mirrors, which they keep suspended a little bit above the earth, so they never quite touch the ground. These mirrors come from their home in the sky.

     In a shaman’s house of spirits, these mirrors are propped, hung, piled and placed side by side. When the house is big, the mirrors are big. As the number of spirits increases, the mirrors multiply, one on top of the other.    The xapiripë don’t mix with each other. They have their own mirrors on the beams of the house: mirrors of warrior spirits, bird of prey spirits, and cicada spirits; mirrors of thunder spirits, lightning spirits, and storm spirits. There are as many mirrors as there are spirits, they are beyond number.

     We live among mirrors. Our forest belongs to the xapiripë and is made from their mirrors. [3] 

Mirrors not only hold and reflect images; they multiply them. Thus an ancestral spirit may reappear in many images:

 

When the name of a xapiripë is spoken, it is not a single spirit we evoke, but a multitude of similar spirits. Each name is unique, but the xapiripë it designates are very numerous. They are like the images in the mirrors I saw in a hotel. I was alone, but at the same time I possessed many images. Thus, there is just one name for the image of the tapir turned into spirit, but the tapir-spirits are very numerous...This is true of all the xapiripë. People think they are unique, but their images are innumerable. They are like me, standing in front of the hotel mirrors. They seem alone, but their images overlap each other as far as infinity. [4] 

This makes us reflect on the importance of mirrors in many shamanic and magical traditions. Looking into a reflective surface may reveal a world beyond the world. A shaman's mirror may be a soul catcher, or a shield, or a place in which to see.
     The night before I read this passage, a man told me he dreamed that his departed mother appeared to him, offering sage counsel. He described her as standing on a "glassy river" that went up into the sky.          
      In order to see and interact with the spirits, Yanomami shamans inhale yakoana, the powder of the yãkõanahi tree, "the food of the spirits".The snuff is prepared from resinof the virola elongata treewhich contains a powerful hallucinogenic alkaloid, dimethyltryptamine (DMT). It is said that by blowing yakoana snuff into a novice's nostrils, the shaman initiating him transmits the xapiri spirits with his "breath of life", wixia. [5] However, the spirit food is taken only during the day. Night is for dreaming, pure and simple. 

Kopenawa says, "When we truly want to know things we people of the forest try to see them in dream. This is our way of studying." There is a basic distinction between the dreaming of the maritima, one who dreams strong, and others. "Someone who is not looked upon by the spirits doesn’t dream. They just lie around in dumb sleep like an ax abandoned on the ground." The dream shaman flies with the spirits. [5]

References

1. Ernst Arbman, Untersuchungen zur primitiven Seelenvorstellung mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Indien in Le Monde Oriental, vol. 20 (1926) pp. 85-226; and vol 21 (1927) pp.1-185; Ake Hultkrantz, Conceptions of the Soul Among North American Indians: A Study in Religious Ethnology Stockholm: The Ethnographical Museum of Sweden. Monographic Series. no. 1, 1953.

2. Hanna Limulja “Notes on the Yanomami's Dreams” Revista de Antropologia. vol. 65 no.3. (Nov. 2022) p.17

 3. Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, "Les ancêtres animaux" in B. Albert and H. Chandes (eds)Yanomami - l'esprit de la forêt Paris: Fondation Cartier / Actes Sud, 2003, pp.72-3.

4. ibid, p.73.

5. Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, The Falling Sky Words of a Yanomami Shaman Trans. Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy. Cambridge Mass and London; Harvard University Belknap Press, 2013, p.492

6. Davi Kopenawa, "Sonhos das origens" in C.A.Ricardo (ed) Povos indígenas no Brasil (1996–2000), São Paulo: ISA, 2000.

Ilustration: RM with NightCafe

 

Jung on the Virtue of Making Dream Pictures

 

In his 1929 lecture "The Aims of Psychotherapy", Jung issued a passionate appeal for art therapy - specifically, for the art of turning dreams into pictures.

First, he notes that it was often a very positive development in a patient's inner life when their dreams featured photos, paintings or films and even more so when the dreamer declared "If only I were a painter I would make a picture of it". When this happened he would encourage his patients to actually draw or paint their dreams and abandon any protestations that they lacked artistic ability. "Many of my more advanced patients, then, began to paint."

He noted that this shifted the dreamer away from a passive attitude to dreams, and to life. "He puts down on paper what he has passively seen, thereby turning it into a deliberate act. He not only talks about it, he is actually doing something about it."

In making a dream picture, the dreamer comes to reflect on a dream in depth and starts to bring vital energy from the dreamworld into embodied life. "The concrete shaping of the image enforces a continuous study of it, in all its parts, so that it can develop its effects to the full. This invests the bare fantasy with an element of reality, which lends it greater weight and greater driving power."

He insists that making art from dreams helps the dreamer to become "creatively independent". The patient no longer depends on the doctor's opinion. "By painting himself he gives shape to himself." He has gone beyond ego to work with his "interior agent" and "the hidden foundation of psychic life".

Then he goes right to the top, or perhaps over the top. 'It is impossible for me to describe the extent to which this discovery changes the patient's standpoint and values, and how it shifts the center of gravity to his personality. It is as though the earth had suddenly discovered that the sun was the center of the planetary orbits and of its own earthy orbit as well." [1]

Painting Philemon

"Since I did not understand this dream-image, I painted it"

In 1914 Jung dreamed of a figure he called Philemon. He came to play an extraordinary role in Jung's imaginal life. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he recalled:

"There was a blue sky, like the sea, covered by flat brown clods of earth. It looked as if the clods were breaking apart and the blue water of the sea was becoming visible between them. The water was the blue sky. Suddenly there appeared from the right a winged being sailing across the sky. I saw that it was an old man with the horns of a bull. He held a bunch of four keys, one of which he clutched as if he were about to open a lock. He had the wings of a kingfisher with its characteristic colors.

"Since I did not understand this dream-image, I painted it to impress it upon my memory."

The tremendous - indeed Otherworldly - significance of the dream encounter was confirmed for Jung when, a few days later, he came upon the body of a dead kingfisher, a bird rarely seen around Lake Zurich.

He said in his memoir that “Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I.

"He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air, and added, “If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them.” It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche. Through him the distinction was clarified between myself and the object of my thought. He confronted me in an objective manner, and I understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against me.”

Jung's first portraits of Philemon - at least, the first that have survived - are a pencil drawing and a study for a lost picture that once hung in the room of Jung's wife Emma. They are reproduced in the lavishly illustrated book The Art of C.G.Jung, recently published by the Foundation of the Works of C.G.Jung. Their great interest is that they show the bull horns and a vigor of flight that are missing from Jung's later painting of Philemon in The Red Book.

1, C.G.Jung, "The Aims of Psychotherapy" in Collected Works volume 16 trans R.F.C.Hull (Princeton: Bollingen Series, 1985) 47-49

"Lady of Many Colors'. Dream drawing by Robert Moss.

Death of an Oracle and the Oracle that Never Dies

 

The Sibylline Books were the oldest and most respected oracle of the Romans. According to legend, the original set – in Greek hexameter – were sold to an ancient king of Rome by a wise woman, or sibyl, from the region of Troy. They were replaced several times. Under the Empire, they were moved from the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill in Rome to a vault under the temple of Apollo on the Palatine Hill. An august college of secular priests, whose members had typically held high state office, were entrusted with pulling verses from the collection –as you might pull Tarot cards from a deck – to perform a reading. 

The Sibylline Books were most often consulted to get a second opinion on an anomalous event, like the flooding of the Tiber or the birth of a two-headed ram, but also to elicit the will of the gods on important undertakings and to receive guidance on what measures the state might need to take to propitiate the powers above.

In 405, the master of Rome was a half-barbarian general named Stilicho who had been fighting a series of savage battles against Alaric and the Goths; Stilicho usually won, but at ruinous price, and without clear resolution. He did not like his ratings from the Sibylline Books, which hinted that he was out of favor with the gods. He did what other men of power have done when they disliked the opinions of diviners and dreamers; he tried to shut them down, in this case by ordering the destruction of the Sybilline Books. Though the Empire was now officially Christian, the culture of Rome was still deeply pagan, and this was widely viewed as an outrageous act of blasphemy that would bring punishment from the old gods. 

Soon news reached Rome that barbarian hordes had crossed the Rhine, heading for Italy. A cabal of disgruntled officers overthrew Stilicho; in 408, he was beheaded.. Two years later the Goths sacked Rome. There were many pagans who muttered, I told you so.

Around the same time that Stilicho was destroying the great oracle at Rome, across the Mediterranean in Cyrene a philosopher of noble blood named Synesius – soon to be made a bishop of the Church – completed a treatise On Dreams that argues, elegantly and persuasively, that dreams are our personal oracle and we should never allow anyone to interfere with it. This oracle is the birthright of every human, regardless of class or condition, and it travels with every dreamer. All that is required to consult it is to lay your head on a pillow – though the results you get will have a lot to do with how you live your life and how you cleanse (or fail to cleanse) your perception.

If we stay at home, the dream oracle stays with us; if we go abroad she accompanies us; she is with us on the field of battle, she is at our side in the city; she labors with us in the fields and barters with us in the market place. The laws of a malicious government cannot stop her. A tyrant cannot prevent us from dreaming, unless he banishes sleep from his kingdom. [The dream oracle] repudiates neither race, nor age, nor condition, nor calling. This zealous prophetess, this wise counselor, is present to everyone, everywhere.[adapted from the 1930 Augustine Fitzgerald translation] 

This is an oracle we can ignore (at our cost) but thankfully it can never be destroyed.

Art: "The Sack of Rome by the Barbarians" by Joseph-Noël Sylvestre (1890)

A short history of soul flight

 

The science of dream travel is ancient: in the evolution of our species, it probably predates speech and may have helped to generate language. Dream travel has a fascinating pedigree.

In many human cultures the most profound insights into the nature of the divine and the fate of the soul after physical death have been attributed to ecstatic journeys beyond the body in waking dream or vision. In most human cultures, the existence of parallel worlds inhabited by gods, daimons, and spirits of the departed has been accepted as simple fact, a fact of extraordinary importance. Visiting these other worlds was a top priority for our ancestors, as it still is wherever there is living spirituality. From the travel reports of the boldest and most successful journeyers between the worlds, mythologies and religions are born. Soul journeying was understood to be the key to orders of reality, hidden from the five physical senses, that are no less “real” than ordinary reality and may be more so.

 For the Jivaro people of South America, everyday life is regarded as “false.” “It is firmly believed the truth about causality is to be found by entering the supernatural world, or what the Jivaro view as the ‘real’ world, for they feel that the events which take place within it are the basis for many of the surface manifestation and mysteries of daily life.”

Among dreaming peoples, the reality of the soul journey and the objective, factual nature of the travelogues brought back are not in doubt. The travel reports will be compared with those of previous explorers.

Shamans ride their drums to the Upper and Lower Worlds to gain access to sources of insight and healing, to commune with the spirits and rescue lost souls. Aboriginal spirit men journey to the Sky World, climbing a magic cord projected from their own energy bodies, at the solar plexus or the tip of the penis.

Before compass and sextant, before charts, the great open-sea navigators guided their shipmates across the oceans by fine attunement to the patterns of waves and wind and stars and by the ability to scout ahead and consult a spiritual pilot through dream travel. Traditional navigators in the Indian Ocean reputedly had the power to travel ahead of their vessels in the form of seabirds or flying fish to set a safe course. 

The ancient Daoist masters were known as the feathered sages because of their reputed power of flight, which sometimes involved shape-shifting into the form of cranes.

In ancient Greece, shaman-philosophers were renowned for their ability to travel outside the body, appear in two or more locations at the same time, and commune with their colleagues. The Pythagoreans taught and practiced soul travel and believed that spiritual masters born centuries apart could communicate by this means.

The ability to project consciousness beyond the physical body, to fold space-time, influence events at a distance, and project a double are all recognized siddhis — or special powers — of advanced spiritual practitioners in Eastern traditions. Vedic literature from India is full of vivid accounts of soul-flight by humans and beings-other-than-human. In the Mahabharata, the dream-soul, or suksma atman, is described as journeying outside the body while its owner sleeps. It knows pleasure and pain, just as in waking life. It travels on “fine roads” through zones that correspond to the senses, the wind, the ether, toward the higher realms of spirit.

Shankaracharya, the ascetic exponent of Advaita Vedanta, practiced soul-flight and the projection of consciousness to another body. Challenged to a debate on sex — a subject of which he was woefully ignorant at the time — he is said to have left his body in a cave under the guard of his followers while he borrowed the body of a dying king, whose courtesans schooled him in all the arts of the Kama Sutra.

Soul travel was well understood in the Sacred Earth traditions of Europe, from the earliest times until the murderous repression associated with the witch craze. One of the most fascinating accounts — less reliant than most on confession extracted under torture — is Carlo Ginzberg’s monograph on the Benandanti, or “good-farers” of the Friuli region, who journeyed to defend the health of the community and the crops.

Soul journeying is also central to Christian spirituality. In II Corinthians, Paul refers to his own soul journey when he speaks of “a man who was caught up into the third heaven, whether in the body or out of the body I know not.” St. Columba, the founder of the great monastery at Iona, regularly traveled outside his body to scout developments at a distance.

St Anthony of Padua was renowned for his ability to travel outside the body and appear in two places at once. There are reports of him preaching in two churches at the same time.

In Jewish tradition, the story of Elijah’s chariot of fire is the model for visionary ascent to higher realms. Among the Kabbalists, soul-flight to the higher planes was held to be the reward for long years of study and solitary meditation. A key element in Kabbalist meditation (hitboded) was the chanting and correct vibration of sacred texts. Rabbi Isaac Luria (1534–72) recited phrases from the Zohar over and over, as Eastern meditators use their mantras. He entered and altered state in which he received visitations from spiritual teachers — notably Elijah — and could travel freely outside the body, to visit “heavenly academies.”

Soul-flight is not an art reserved for yogis, mystics, and shamans. The projection of consciousness by “remote viewing” or “ traveling clairvoyance” has been central to the history of warfare. Go back through the old battle sagas and you will find tales of warrior shamans who shape-shifted to spy out enemy positions. The druid MacRoth, in the Irish epic the Tain, performs this service for his royal patron, flying over the enemy ranks in the shape of a black warbird. Native American sorcerers were employed by both the French and the English to carry out similar scouts during the French and Indian War.

One of the most famous soul journeyers in European history was the Swedish scientist Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), the son of a Lutheran bishop. He was in his fifties when powerful visitations by the spirits transformed his life; he then embarked on repeated journeys into their realms. He encountered angels who escorted him on guided tours of many kinds of heavens and hells..

It is not surprising that the dream explorer who coined the term lucid dreaming was another soul journeyer. Dr. Frederik can Eeden (1860–1932) was a Dutch writer, physician, and member of the British Society for Psychical Research (SPR). In 1913, he gave a lecture to the SPR in which he reported “lucid dreams” in which the dreamer retains the memory of his waking life, remained conscious, and could carry out “different acts of free volition.” He observed that the phenomenon of multiple consciousness and “double memory” — of both waking and dream events — “leads almost unavoidably to the conception of a dream-body.” He later wrote a novel, The Bride of Dreams, about dream travel outside the body.

Frequent flier Robert Monroe asserted with reason that “a controlled out-of-body experience is the most efficient means we know to gather Knowns to create a Different Overview” — a new definition of reality.

Text adapted from Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Illustration: "Green Flight" by Robert Moss