{"id":4027,"date":"2012-01-07T00:00:44","date_gmt":"2012-01-07T05:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/dreamgates\/?p=4027"},"modified":"2012-01-05T23:11:34","modified_gmt":"2012-01-06T04:11:34","slug":"paleopsych-101","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/2012\/01\/paleopsych-101.html","title":{"rendered":"Paleopsych 101"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>At a benefit dinner, the wife of a bank president asked me, \u201cWhat exactly is it that you do?\u201d<\/p>\n

I told her, \u201cI\u2019m a paleolithic psychologist.\u201d<\/p>\n

She nodded respectfully, possibly associating me with the clinical psychiatrist seated above the salt.<\/p>\n

I had stolen the phrase from Frederic Myers, the great Victorian psychic researcher. Myers coined the term Paleolithic psychology as an erudite joke, to describe \u201cthe habits of thought of the savage who believes that can travel in dreams.\u201d \u00a0He apologized to his respectable readers for \u201cthe apparent levity of a return to conceptions so enormously out of date\u201d \u2014 while sowing the seed of doubt that \u201cmodern science\u201d had actually surpassed the \u201cprimitive\u201d understanding of the soul.<\/p>\n

Myers chose the path of true science, which is always ready to revise the reigning hypotheses in the light of fresh evidence. \u00a0In his master work Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death<\/em>, he wrote: \u201cMy own ignorance\u2026I recognize to be such that my notions of the probable or improbable in the universe are not of weight enough to lead me to set aside any facts which seem to me well-attested.\u201d He arrived at a \u201croot-conception\u201d of \u201cthe dissociability of the self, of the possibility that different fractions of the personality can act so far independently of each other that the one is not conscious of the other\u2019s actions,\u201d and that \u201csegments of the personality can operate in apparent separation from the organism.\u201d Myers observed such phenomena in \u201ctrue apparitions\u201d of the departed, but also in \u201ctraveling clairvoyance\u201d by living persons, which sometimes produce \u201cphantasms of the living\u201d that are visible in other places.<\/p>\n

In his book Primitive Culture<\/em>, Myers\u2019s contemporary Edward Tylor, who held the first chair of anthropology at Oxford, beautifully summarized the challenge to modern science that is posed by shamans and frequent fliers who are at home with the spirits and often journey in their realms:<\/p>\n

The issue raised by the comparison of savage, and civilized spiritualism is this: do the red Indian medicine man, the Tatar necromancer, the Highland ghost-seer and the Boston medium share the possession of a belief and knowledge of the highest truth and import, which, nevertheless, the great intellectual movement of the last two centuries has simply thrown aside as worthless? Is what we are habitually boating of and calling new enlightenment, then, in fact a decay of knowledge? If so, this is a truly remarkable case of degeneration and the savages on whom some ethnographers look as degenerate from a higher civilization may turn on their accusers and charge them with having fallen from the high level of savage knowledge.<\/em><\/p>\n

The basic insights of paleopsychology are as follows:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Spirits are real.<\/li>\n
  2. We are not alone: we live in a multidimensional universe peopled with beings \u2014 spirits of nature, gods and daimons, angels and ancestors \u2014 who take a close interest in our affairs and influence our lives for good or ill.<\/li>\n
  3. We are more than our bodies and brains, which are only vehicles for soul.<\/li>\n
  4. The soul survives the death of the body.<\/li>\n
  5. Soul journeying is the key to the spiritual worlds and the knowledge of ultimate reality. The soul makes excursions outside the body in dreams and visions. The heart of spiritual practice is to learn to shift consciousness at will and travel beyond time and space. Through soul-flight, we return to worlds beyond the physical plane in which our lives have their source and are able to explore many dimensions of the Otherworld.<\/li>\n
  6. Souls are corporeal, though composed of much finer substance than the physical body.<\/li>\n
  7. People have more than one soul. In addition to the vital soul that sustains physical life \u2014 closely associated with the breath \u2014 there is a \u201cfree soul,\u201d associated with the dreambody, which can travel outside the body and separates from it at physical death, as well as an enduring spirit whose home is on the higher planes.<\/li>\n
  8. Souls \u2014 or pieces of soul \u2014 can be lost or stolen. This is the principal \u00a0cause of disease and misfortune.<\/li>\n
  9. Some people have more souls than others and have the ability to make excursions to different places at the same time.<\/li>\n
  10. At death, different vehicles of soul go to different lots. Through conscious dreaming, it is possible to explore the conditions of the afterlife to prepare for one\u2019s death and to assist souls of the dying and departed.<\/li>\n
  11. We are born with counterparts in nature. For example, we are born with a totem animal and a relationship with natural forces (wind or water or lightning) that are part of our basic identity and help to pattern the natural flow of our energy.<\/li>\n
  12. We are born with counterparts in other places and times, and in other dimensions of reality. When we encounter them through interdimensional travel, they become allies and sometimes teachers.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    ~<\/p>\n

    Adapted from Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death<\/em> <\/a>by Robert Moss. Published by New World Libray.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    At a benefit dinner, the wife of a bank president asked me, \u201cWhat exactly is it that you do?\u201d I told her, \u201cI\u2019m a paleolithic psychologist.\u201d She nodded respectfully, possibly associating me with the clinical psychiatrist seated above the salt. I had stolen the phrase from Frederic Myers, the great Victorian psychic researcher. Myers coined…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":224,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,78,20,22,42,43],"tags":[926,923,921,894,927,920,919,924,925,922],"class_list":["post-4027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-active-dreaming","category-ancestral-traditions","category-history-of-dreaming","category-shamanic-dreaming","category-shamanism","category-soul","tag-astral-travel","tag-dissociation","tag-edward-tylor","tag-f-w-h-myers","tag-obe","tag-paleolithic-psychology","tag-paleopsychology","tag-phantasms-of-the-living","tag-soul-flight","tag-spirits"],"yoast_head":"\nPaleopsych 101 - Dream Gates<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/2012\/01\/paleopsych-101.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Paleopsych 101 - Dream Gates\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"At a benefit dinner, the wife of a bank president asked me, \u201cWhat exactly is it that you do?\u201d I told her, \u201cI\u2019m a paleolithic psychologist.\u201d She nodded respectfully, possibly associating me with the clinical psychiatrist seated above the salt. 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He is the creator of Active Dreaming, an original synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism. Born in Australia, he survived three near-death experiences in childhood. He leads popular seminars all over the world, including a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. A former lecturer in ancient history at the Australian National University, he is a best-selling novelist, journalist and independent scholar. His nine books on dreaming, shamanism and imagination include Conscious Dreaming, Dreamways of the Iroquois, The Dreamer's Book of the Dead, The Three \"\"Only\"\" Things, The Secret History of Dreaming, Dreamgates, Active Dreaming and Dreaming the Soul Back Home: Shamanic Dreaming for Healing and Becoming Whole. His most recent book is The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse. Over the past 20 years, he has led seminars at the Esalen Institute, Kripalu, the Omega Institute, the New York Open Center, Bastyr University, John F. Kennedy University, Meriter Hospital, and many other centers and institutions. He has taught depth workshops in Active Dreaming in the UK, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Brazil and Austria and leads a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. He hosts the \"\"Way of the Dreamer\"\" radio show at www.healthylife.net. He has appeared on many TV and radio shows, ranging from Charlie Rose and the Today show to Coast to Coast and the Diane Rehm show on NPR. His articles on dreaming have been published in media ranging from Parade to Shaman's Drum.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.mossdreams.com"],"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/author\/rmoss"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/224"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4027"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4027\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4036,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4027\/revisions\/4036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/dreamgates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}