Reply #5: Hi, Ecumenist [View All]

[rumpel]

As I read this post after I read a very interesting article (which link I posted in a thread last night. I will provide here later also)
I somehow have a feeling, that what you refer to as "dream" is not, at least in part not a dream. But could it be an OBE?
It seems there are two parts in this experience.

The first is the OBE part, where you are being taken by a "teacher" on a "shamanic" initiation, which the article explains, albeit in a somewhat different context. The vivid experience, recollection etc. sounds to me a little different from common dreams we have. But then again, no one really knows what a dream is.
The second part, may be a "dream" or "vision", which may lie in a particular time zone, either in the past or the future, or an event, immediately preceding your "shamanic journey", which may all be in the future. As you know for the soul, there is no time.
You may be crossing different time zones, as your soul self, "seeing" events in different time zones.

Now, this is a part of the article, Some Evolutionary Speculations:
by Dr. Kenneth Ring

In my book Heading Toward Omega (Ring 1984), I argued that NDEs and other transcendental experiences may be serving as an evolutionary catalyst for humanity's collective psychospiritual development. I still adhere to that view, but here I'd like to extend this thesis in a new direction. That direction has already been suggested in Michael Grosso's The Final Choice (1985), where, in speaking of out-of-body experiences, he indicates that they “may represent the matrix for the next environment in the psychosocial evolution of man” (p. 102, his emphasis). I embrace that position, too, but would like to elaborate on it briefly.<6>

We now know that millions of persons have already had out-of-body experiences, NDEs, and other similar experiences (see, e.g., Rogo 1983; Gallup 1982; Hay 1982), and there are various reasons to suppose that their numbers have increased dramatically in recent years (e.g., Ferguson 1980; Russell 1983; Ring 1984). Likewise, the number of UFOEs — not just sightings — seems to be growing exponentially, too. Budd Hopkins (1987b), for example, estimates that there may be hundreds of thousands of such cases hidden among us. And shamanic journeys of one sort or another also seem to be increasingly common and commonly sought after in our contemporary world.

Altogether, we seem to be undergoing a period of mushrooming growth in the occurrence of what Carol Zaleski has called “the otherworld journey” for which the traditional shaman has long been the prototype.

If this is actually so, might it be that what we are witnessing is the beginning stages in the shamanizing of modern humanity? And what that would mean is precisely this: that humanity would be finding its way back to its true home in the realm of the imagination, where it would be liberated to live in mythic time and would no longer be strictly bound to the prison of historical time. In short, I am suggesting that in this period of apparently accelerated psychospiritual evolution these two worlds may be drawing nearer to each other so that we, too, like the shaman, will be able easily to cross over and live in both worlds.

Kenneth Ring, Ph.D., is professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut and past president of the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS). He is the author of Life At Death: A Scientific Investigation of the Near-Death Experience, Heading Toward Omega: In Search of the Meaning of the Near-Death Experience, and over forty articles in the fields of social psychology, transpersonal psychology, and near-death studies. Dr. Ring received his Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Minnesota. He lives in Ashford, Connecticut.

http://www.near-death.com/experiences/articles011.html