Z’Ev Ben Shimon Halevi - Psychology and Kabbalah

Psychology is the science of the mind. The Greek root word psyche means soul or that which is not of the body but is the invisible component of a person. In prehistoric times, death was recognised as the moment of division between the body and what animated it. All over the world, people acknowledge this phenomenon and, indeed, take enormous pains to placate or honour the departed intelligence. Anyone who has seen the corpse of someone well known to them experiences the same sense of total absence, not only of life but of that peculiar essence which made the person unique. This recognition of an unseen yet palpable dimension of a human being must have generated the first enquiries into what it was that came into being at birth, possessed a certain character during life and disappeared at death. Here began psychology.

In the earliest stages of humanitys life on Earth, the main preoccupation was to learn to survive. People had to adapt to the interplay of the four elements, to use plants and relate to animals. Now, while these first human beings may have been primitive, their consciousness was of a quite different order from anything they might have encountered in the wilderness. Not only did they observe the ways of nature as the seasons turned but they recorded and collated experience in a manner that no other species could. Animals might respond to a drought by migrating or sleep through the winter to avoid its difficulties; but this was an inbred instinct completely unconscious at the individual level. Human beings saw the rhythms of the Earth as recurring patterns, then as principles from which they built up a picture of the Universe in which they lived. The most intelligent and sensitive of these early shamans formulated their conclusions into myths that explained the processes in the world about them. These speculations included the origin of the human race, whence it came and whither it was going. It is known that not a few had an experience of revelation in which they were shown the situation of mankind from a higher dimension. One such person was Enoch (Genesis V). He, according to kabbalistic legend, is said to be the source of various esoteric traditions that pass on these mystical illuminations.

By the time the first civilisation arose in Egypt and Mesopotamia, complete cosmologies had come into being about the World that lay behind the mundane events of daily life. The periodic upheavals of war, earthquake or famine were accepted as moods of the gods and goddesses who inhabited the invisible realm from which people came at birth and returned to at death. Great priests and kings, by sacrifice and deed, might influence events but, ultimately, the upper Worlds ruled the lower because no one, except perhaps the mystics and magicians, understood the laws of those unseen levels.

Now while birth and death were the dramatic entry and exit points of the unknown region, and therefore of great interest to everyone, there were some who were particularly interested in what went on between. Most people, it was noted, just existed, oblivious of any purpose but to survive; others were more outgoing and dominating while still others retired or sought to live an interior life, either in madness or deliberate contact with the invisible realms. These observations led to speculation about types of people, temperaments and fate which is the distinct pattern of a life as a persons particular nature interacts with the conditions into which they were born.