In Christian doctrine, the trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as
three persons in one Godhead is considered to be one of the central
Christian affirmations about God. The 8th
Ecumenical Council of Constantinople "abolished the human
spirit" (as an abstraction) which began the schism which
separated the Eastern Catholic and Rome. By about the 11th century
there was an emergence of heaven and hell dualism. The 17th-century
French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes gave dualism its
classical formulation of the mind/body split.
Then about ~1820 came transcendentalists who saw divine experience inherent in the everyday, rather than believing in a distant heaven.
Wilhelm Wundt opened
the Institute for Experimental Psychology at the University of
Leipzig in Germany in 1879. He declared the human to be a
sophisticated animal. Pavlov
believed that consciousness had no value for behavior psychology he
also said "never been seen, touched, tasted or moved it is a plain
assumption just as improbable as the old conception of the soul."Rather
than looking inward to incorporate the subject’s thoughts and feelings,
they focused on observable behavioral outputs.
So Spirit was marginalized in the 9th century and the Soul was marginalized in the 19th century. Many
contemporary spiritual traditions now view the psyche as an unreal
construct and is a part of the false self. However 66% of North
Americans say that they've had at least one spiritual experience. Alexander Bard
says that as technology went up, religion went down, until it is only a
pretense. And he says that our attempt to be religious has been
infantile in that it promised that you could have everything forever -a
lousy, shameful, terrible Theology. And it also opened the door to
tyranny.
Helena Blavatsky was the main source of Theosophical
teachings and discussed the major themes of Theosophy in many
articles and several major works, including The
7 Rays of Light and the Initiation which describes
seven types of divine energies expressed through numbers
and their vibration or field of consciousness influencing everything
within us, in our life and environment.
This was a whole new category of ideas based on numenous and
non-materialistic concepts and Blavatsky is a controversial figure, even during during her lifetime. But she
was championed by supporters as an enlightened Sage and her Theosophical doctrines influenced the spread of Hindu and Buddhist ideas in the West as well as the development of Western esoteric currents of the New Age Movement. Her followers include Golden Dawn leaders, Dion Fortune, Rudolf Steiner, and Alice A. Bailey.
Alice
Ann Bailey (June 16, 1880 – December 15, 1949) was a writer of more than twenty-four books on theosophical
subjects, and was one of the first writers to use the term New
Age. Bailey's writings includes a detailed exposition of the
"seven rays" which are presented as the fundamental
energies that are behind and exist throughout all manifestation. In Theosophy,
the seven rays are said to be seven major types of Light-Substance
(spirit/matter) (waves/particles) that compose the created universes. Modern physics has also concluded that all is energy, and that every form resides within an essential network and pattern of energy.
As the old spiritual paradigm collapses
and the new one emerges, only a few people seem to be able to
describe what is actually happening. And one of these people is When it comes to having a good overview of the present paradigm shifts William Meader is one of the most interesting minds on the internet. Of his many presentation, his talk titled Answering the Spiritual Call
is brilliant and not to be missed. Here is a list of his free audio talks online.
Spiritualism is a metaphysical belief that the world is made up of at
least two fundamental substances, matter and spirit. This very broad
metaphysical distinction is further developed into many and various
forms by the inclusion of details about what spiritual entities exist
such as a soul, the afterlife, spirits of the dead, deities and
mediums; as well as details about the nature of the relationship
between spirit and matter
The Spiritualist movement thrived from around the 1840s to the 1920s,
and its members were mostly middle to upper class people in English
speaking countries. Spiritualism is important in the annals of occult
history because it was a HUGE movement, significant amounts of
Americans (and later Brits) would identify as spiritualists. The
American occult was a vehicle that helped popularize today' s
widespread ideals of religious universality.
The term occult can be problematic especially in Modern Pagan and Witch
circles. The “occult” includes a wide range of things, and many of them
seem to have no direct impact on what many of us do today. I’d argue
that’s probably not the case, anyone who goes against the mainstream
probably has influenced our community today, even if those influences
might not be readily apparent. Occultism refers to various theories and
practices involving a belief
in and knowledge or use of supernatural forces or beings. It is often
confused with the Spiritualism movement
Alexander Crowley, (1875 - 1947), was a British occultist, writer, and
mountaineer, who was a practitioner of “magick” (as he spelled it) and
called himself the Beast 666. He was heralded as a genius and an occult
lunatic, and the Wickedest Man in the World, supposedly dealing with
spirits, including powerful Demons. Flamboyant and controversial, he
practiced outrageous magic of sex, drugs, and sacrifice, paganism,
Voodoo,tricksters, witches, sorcerers and shamans, contact with ghosts,
and communication with the dead -- empowered by mystical rituals, unnatural
science, or otherworldly
forces, occultists are sometimes thought by most to be evil and to be
shunned and feared by society. Because of him and others like him, matters of the soul
suffered considerably for a while.
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