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By Root 2177 0

but the detailed ascent to heaven would be equally due to social and cultural expectations of the adept. Mystics usually train for years for their out-of-body experiences, while drug abusers normally do not even want them. There are still other people who seek to have these experiences quickly, without long training. For example, a quick check of self-help books in print will yield dozens of books that teach subjects how to “astrally project themselves” or have “out-of-body” experiences. This suggests to me that it is not that difficult for a motivated learner to achieve the experience. Mystics and shamans who have very detailed experiences must be predisposed by their years of practice and study to have specific kinds of experience while in disinhibition or deafferentation. Combined with that experience is whatever content is available in the culture for explaining such intense, mystical experiences. If the adept has been studying the texts of previous journeys in a specific mystic, apocalyptic, or shamanic tradition, chances are that the content of the experience will confirm the tradition.

There may well be similar physiological conditions behind the “Near Death Experience.” When combined with trauma, people close to death may reach disinhibition. But they also experience the familiar, long dark tunnel, the bright light at the end, combined with the distinct feeling that they are floating or moving rapidly through the tunnel. The tunneling vision is likely due to malfunctioning of the optical centers of the brain. While we do not understand these states well, it already seems clear that in back of them are neurologically determined experiences that feel distinctly like being out-of-body.

If there is a biological basis for these experiences, there surely is also a broad vocabulary of images which the individual mind brings into the experience, based on personal history, training, and culture. I suggest that the difference between deafferentation or disinhibition and a detailed mystical ascent to heaven is the long mystical training of the adepts who learn both techniques for achieving the physical states and the culture’s social and cultural lore about what the state means.23

Are Jewish Apocalyptic and Merkabah Texts Exegesis or the Record of a RISC?

APOCALYPTIC texts are not simply exegeses of previous texts but combine study with revelatory experience. The texts themselves may even be palimpsests of many adepts’ experiences stretched over generations. It is sometimes impossible to separate the literary from the mystical experiences.

One way to adjudicate between RISC and exegesis is to look at the nature of the religious innovation and its expression. Is the innovation small enough to be considered within the realm of exegetical activity, or is it so great that only a vision could justify such a change? There are significant places in the book of Daniel where exegesis cannot explain the great innovations: For instance, in Daniel 7, the scene is a heavenly throne room with two manlike figures, one an “ancient of days” and the second a “Son of Man” (bar ’enash in Biblical Aramaic and in the postbiblical dialect barnasha’). “Son of Man” is not a title and can only mean the divine figure has a manlike form, because the phrase “son of man” usually means simply “a human being” in most Semitic languages. The exact phrase in Daniel is “one like a Son of Man” (kebar ’enash), signifying that the next figure in the vision was shaped like a man. The use of the preposition “like” also signifies that this is not Daniel’s usual consciousness.

The best guess as to the identity of the figure shaped like a man is that he is a depiction of the Glory of the LORD, the Kabod YHWH, the same principal human manifestation of God-an angel or a principal angel in whose form God deigns to appear, for some angels were envisioned in human form. At his second appearance, Gabriel is described as “the man Gabriel whom I had seen in the vision at first” (Dan 9:21). Then in Daniel 10:5 “a man clothed in linen,” probably an angel, is described in