Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [197]
Wolfson refers to the famous story in the Hekhaloth Rabbati where R. Nehuniah ben Ha-Qanah is sitting on a marble dias, apparently in a RASC, describing the sights of his journey through the heavens to an assembled Sanhedrin. He says something puzzling, and the attendant rabbis wish to recall him to earth. The method is not entirely clear but appears as follows: allow ben Ha-Qanah to come into contact with an object that might be polluted enough to affect his ability to remain in heaven but not polluted enough to affect his status on earth. Since there are aspects of this story that seem historically improbable (e.g., the Sanhedrin) and others that seem illogical (e.g., Rabbi Hakkanah then proceeds on his way again), the literary quality of the tale cannot be ignored. On the other hand, it is generally consonant with the material which Ḥai Gaon reports that he knows about, in which the mystic sat on earth while his “soul” traveled through the palaces and progressed toward the highest heaven.
The Gaon was aware that the journey took place internally, while the adept was on the ground. It was a social occasion in which the whole Sanhedrin was gathered around him. This culture did not interpret the experience as a hallucination, rather a RASC. There is good evidence suggesting that the experience was a self-induced, altered state of consciousness. But that does not automatically make it hallucinatory or insane. Changes in states of consciousness are trainable, even under conscious control both in their trigger and ending mechanisms, and have meanings specific to the society that values them. The understanding of the events was positive, though the evaluation may differ as the text filters down through the ages. For example, Jewish scholars have not been reticent to voice their distaste for these phenomena because they do not meet the scholars’ own definitions of Judaism.
The Heavenly Journey, Dreams, Visions, and the Soul’s Journey after Death
MARY DEAN-OTTING, in her book Heavenly Journeys,6 displays in convenient form many of the motifs of the heavenly journey. The notion that God communicates through dreams is part of the epic tradition in Israelite thought, being a special characteristic of the E source in the Pentateuch. Furthermore, the book of Daniel is probably the source for the notion that revelation could be sought by incubating dreams. Dean-Otting herself does not shy from the conclusion that these psychological states are characteristics of the ascent in Hebrew thought and vice versa, that ascent is characteristic of altered states of consciousness. Though her study does not stress the relationship between ascent and RISC, it seems to many scholars to be the most obvious interpretation of the evidence.
In a way, visions are no different from dreams. We all have dreams, several times a night. In the morning we find them strange and sometimes worthy of mention, but usually we dismiss them immediately. Without training, we remember very few for more than a couple of hours. Since most of us do not produce the hormones important for memory while we sleep, what we train ourselves to remember may not be the dream itself but a rationalized, faint recollection of it. If we lived in a different kind of culture, however, one in which dreams were thought revelations, we would be sensitive to their import in entirely different ways and, chances are, we would