Life Dreams: Field notes on psi, synchronicity and shamanism PDF
Preview Life Dreams: Field notes on psi, synchronicity and shamanism
Field Notes on Psi, I Synchronicity, and Shamanism Douglass Price-Williams 3 Life Dreams: Field notes on Psi, Synchronicity, and Shamanism Douglass Price-Williams Pioneer Imprints 2008 Copyright © 2008 by Douglass Price-Williams All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means - electronic, mechanical or other - without written permission from the author, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. The experiences and stories used as examples throughout this book are true, although identifying details such as name have been changed to protect the privacy of others. Book design and typography by Alden Bevington Set in 12-point Adobe Garamond Pro by Pioneer Imprints www.pioneerimprints.com First printing, March 2008 ISBN 978-0-9818318-1-7 123456789 10—03 02 01 Call it a moment’s work (and such it seems) This tales a fragment from the life of dreams; But say, that years matur’d the silent strife, And ‘tis a record from the dream of life. Samuel Taylor Coleridge Contents © About the Author viii Acknowledgments ix Prologue xi 1 The Man With the Receding Hair 1 2 The Nature of the Ally 25 3 Interlude: Colombian Sorcery 51 4 Double Trouble 78 5 The Scarab in the Eye 105 6 The Days of the Snake 129 7 Nepalese Shamanism 165 8 On the Trail of the Don 193 9 Between a Thunderbird and a Coyote 230 10 Revelations 267 11 Realization at Taos 302 12 The Lamp of Understanding 323 13 The Fifth Man 353 14 A Change of Heart 373 Epilogue 408 Appendix: Time Charts and Books Cited 419 viii About the Author Douglass Price-Williams was born in London, England, and emigrated to the U.S. in 1964, later becoming a U.S. citizen. He served as a Radio Officer in the British Merchant Navy during the last years of World War II. Before getting his Bachelors and Doctoral degrees in Psychology from the University of London, he studied body-use under EM.Alexander, the creator of the Alexander Technique, and taught this technique in Copenhagen and England. Professor Price-Williams is recognized as one of the founders of cross- cultural psychology and as one of the pioneers of psychological anthropology. He has taught on University level for nearly 4 decades; at the London School of Economics, University of Kansas (Visiting), as Chairman of the Psychology Department at Rice University and 20 years in the departments of Anthropology and Psychiatry at UCLA. He has produced close to one hundred fifty published writings in his career and has served on numerous editorial boards. As an anthropologist he has done field work in Mexico and Guatemala, two regions of Nigeria, the big island of Hawaii, Nepal, Bali and in the aboriginal communities of Australia. He became a clinical psychologist in California in the early 1980 s and co-conducted dream groups with artists for fifteen years. His interest in transpersonal matters began when he studied in England for ten years with J.G.Bennett of the Gurdjieff-Ouspensky movement. He has consulted with Meher Baba, Pak Subuh and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and has studied and practiced numerous methods of meditation. ix Acknowledgements The first draft of this book was read by Professor Stanley Krippner, Dr. Jacques Vallee, and a Jungian teacher and therapist. I am very obliged for all of their suggestions and criticisms at that stage of the manuscript. Stanley Krippner in particular has my endless gratitude for encouraging me to persist in publishing this book, after many failures to interest agents and publishers. Indeed it still would not have been published if Stanley had not procured a brilliant and patient editor by the name of Alden Bevington. Through the hands of Alden Bevington the manuscript was transformed from its com plicated and blurred state into a readable text. This has been a difficult book for me to write; without Alden’s guidance it would have remained unpublished. In addition the author expresses his gratitude to the Chair for the Study of Consciousness, Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center, and to the Leir Charitable Trusts for their support in the preparation of this book. There are a number of people to whom I owe another kind of debt. These are the men and women who shared their experiences with me and gave me, either in written form or orally, descriptions of their shared ex periences. Some of them are now dead, others I have lost contact with, and the rest I still keep in touch with. I hope that some of those that still remain might one day find an opportunity to compose their own version and interpretation of the events that we shared.
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