Soul flight
[1] By means of such trance states, shamans profess to provide services for their fellow tribespeople and one of the techniques they employ in order to achieve such ASCs is soul flight.
According to Eliade, the core principle of shamanism is the application of techniques of ecstasy which enable people to interact with the spiritual world on behalf of the community.
[1] Selection for the role of a shaman may be derived from a crisis, an illness, or an episode of insanity; all of which are interpreted as experiencing personal death.
This initiation crisis usually involves an experience of suffering which is followed by death and dismemberment (i.e. descent into the underworld), an ascent unto the upper world and interactions with other souls and spirits along these both ways (cf.
By visibly transforming during initiation and trance, the shaman attempts to convince tribal members that he or she can interact with invisible forces that control uncertain outcomes.
Back then, wisdom is thought to be power-oriented: to become a wise Bronze Age man or woman meant to learn how to acquire and hold on to power.
It was believed that the Ba lived on after the body had died, and flew out of the tomb of his or her owner to join with the Ka ("life force", cf.
[6] Orpheus, the legendary musician and prophet from Greek mythology, was believed to have descended into Hades to recover his lost wife Eurydice.
[10] According to the Orphics, the soul is godlike in its essential nature but, due to some primordial sin, it descended to earth where it lives in a succession of bodies, human or otherwise.
[15] It is plausible that Pythagoras was initiated into shamanic training through something which was called the "Thunderstone ceremony", which involved isolating oneself in a cave and going through some sort of radical transformation before coming back out of it.
Referring to a passage from Homer's Odyssey ("Let us flee, then, to our beloved homeland"[17]), Plotinus inquires into the manner of this flight: "This is not a journey for the feet; the feet bring us only from land to land; nor need you think of coach or ship to carry you away; all this order of things you must set aside and refuse to see: you must close the eyes and call instead upon another vision which is to be waked within you, a vision, the birthright of all, which few turn to use".
[18] A passage in the eighth book of the Confessions, Saint Augustine discusses the flight of the soul in a way that resembles Plotinus' treatise.
[21] The Imitation of Christ, which is the practice of following the example of Jesus, is considered to be the fundamental purpose of Christian life by Saint Augustine.
[22] In the words of Francis of Assisi, poverty is the key element of following the example of Jesus and he believed in the physical as well as the spiritual imitation of Christ.
In accordance with the medieval world-view of 14th century Europe, the poet envisions a rich afterlife where he, accompanied by one of three guides, visits many mysterious places and encounters numerous souls, spirits, and shadows.
[25] With regard to the Commedia, Carl Jung argued: "The compelling power and deeper meaning of the work do[es] not lie in the historical and mythical material, but in the visionary experience it serves to express".
[26] Around the same time when Dante was compiling his Commedia, Meister Eckhart commented the following on where one must look to find spiritual salvation: "[To] grasp all things in a divine way and make of them something more than they are in themselves.
[27] According to Meister Eckhardt the way toward the soul lies inwards, as he writes: "Therefore do I turn back once more to myself, there do I find the deepest places, deeper than Hell itself; for even from there does my wretchedness drive me.
[28] During the Renaissance, Europeans refocused their attention on the ideas and achievements of classical antiquity, which became particularly manifested in art, architecture, politics, science, and literature.
[29] The invention of the printing press instigated a new age of mass communication, with the result that the flow of ideas between people reached unprecedented levels of speed and range.
Because God had opened his spiritual eyes, Swedenborg felt he could visit heaven and hell to communicate with angels, demons, and other spirits.
[33] In arguably his most famous work, Heaven and Hell, he gives a detailed description of the afterlife and explains how souls live on after the physical death of one's body.
Between 1790 and 1793, while the Revolution was gaining momentum in France, William Blake composed a book in a similar literary tradition about the visionary's practice of soul flight.
Like Dante in his Commedia and Milton in his Paradise lost, the poet visits Hell and Heaven where he meets and speaks with angels and demons.
As such, he deliberately presented a more unified vision of the cosmos wherein the upper world and the underworld are both parts of the same divine order; i.e. the marriage of Heaven and Hell.
The Red Book, as it is popularly known, was published in October 2009 and it chronicles Jung's struggle to regain his soul and overcome the contemporary malaise of spiritual alienation.
[37] Within the same context of the visionary tradition in Western literature of some of the aforementioned authors, Jung argued that before you can find the way toward spiritual fulfillment you first must descend into your own Hell.
