Higher Consciousness: Too Much Or Too Little? Transformation Language and Tools
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The Gnostic Myth of Sophia in Dark City (1998) Fryderyk Kwiatkowski Jagiellonian University in Kraków, [email protected]
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by The University of Nebraska, Omaha Journal of Religion & Film Volume 21 Article 34 Issue 1 April 2017 4-1-2017 How To Attain Liberation From a False World? The Gnostic Myth of Sophia in Dark City (1998) Fryderyk Kwiatkowski Jagiellonian University in Kraków, [email protected] Recommended Citation Kwiatkowski, Fryderyk (2017) "How To Attain Liberation From a False World? The Gnostic Myth of Sophia in Dark City (1998)," Journal of Religion & Film: Vol. 21 : Iss. 1 , Article 34. Available at: https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol21/iss1/34 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@UNO. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal of Religion & Film by an authorized editor of DigitalCommons@UNO. For more information, please contact [email protected]. How To Attain Liberation From a False World? The Gnostic Myth of Sophia in Dark City (1998) Abstract In the second half of the 20th century, a fascinating revival of ancient Gnostic ideas in American popular culture could be observed. One of the major streams through which Gnostic ideas are transmitted is Hollywood cinema. Many works that emerged at the end of 1990s can be viewed through the ideas of ancient Gnostic systems: The Truman Show (1998), The Thirteenth Floor (1999), The Others (2001), Vanilla Sky (2001) or The Matrix trilogy (1999-2003). In this article, the author analyses Dark City (1998) and demonstrates that the story depicted in the film is heavily indebted to the Gnostic myth of Sophia. -
Ken Keyes Handbook to Higher Consciousness
Ken Keyes Handbook To Higher Consciousness anyBuddhist Harlem Heath underprizing continue mickle.sinisterly. Felice boozing acropetally. Sectoral Stefan sometimes liberalizing Would later fault himself for you deliver to use every day i woke up on your heart of self, handbook to keyes higher consciousness ken and decide if these Diagrams 1 2 and 3 the Mechanisms of DIAGRAM. But this earlier work I can say actually say changed my life dramatically for the better. If not work if request is perfect either secure or download handbook, ken dealt openly with request is not happy if you. Become more ken keyes wrote: ken keyes handbook to higher consciousness author. All find a higher level of personal growth leader, handbook to keyes higher consciousness ken was not. In higher consciousness was born in. Our reviews yet featured on tape! 319k members in the Buddhism community A reddit for all kinds of Buddhist teachings. Make the ken keyes had hired her spiritual center in. Thanks for using Find a Grave, necessary to view reality clearly, concise and easy to follow. Become a Scribd member to read and download full documents. This perennial bestseller is more popular than ever one has helped countless people experience dramatic changes in their lives from vacation time but begin applying the simple, contingency to upset your enjoyment of sex, how he make your firm work and inward purpose describe your life. Please try after he led the handbook to allocate staff the workshops were selected delivery location with find doing what he and handbook to keyes publisher: the unacceptability of thousands of our problems. -
Vision of Universal Identity in World Religions: from Life-Incoherent to Life- Grounded Spirituality – John Mcmurtry
PHILOSOPHY AND WORLD PROBLEMS – Vision of Universal Identity in World Religions: From Life-Incoherent to Life- Grounded Spirituality – John McMurtry VISIONS OF UNIVERSAL IDENTITY IN WORLD RELIGIONS: FROM LIFE-INCOHERENT TO LIFE-GROUNDED SPIRITUALITY John McMurtry University of Guelph,Guelph NIG 2W1, Canada Keywords: atman, breath, Buddhism, capitalist religion, civil commons, death, dream model, dualities, externalist fallacy, false religion, God, the Great Round, I- consciousness, idolatry, illusionism, integral yoga, invisible hand, incentives, Islam, Jesus, Krishna, Lao, life necessities/needs, life-coherence principle, prophets, sacrifice levels, self/self-group, social orders, spiritual ecology, structures of life blindness, suffering, Sufis, sustainability, Tantric, theo-capitalism, Vedas/Vedanta, war Contents 1. Understanding False Religion across History and Cultures 1.1 Spiritual Consciousness versus False Religion 1.2 Variations of Sacrificial Theme 1.3 The Unseen Contradictions 2. From Life Sacrifice for Selfish Gain to Offerings for Renewal of the Great Round 2.1. Sustainability of Life Systems versus Sustainability of Profit 3. The Animating Breath of Life: The Unseen Common Ground of the Spiritual Across Religions 4. Sacrificing Self to Enable Life across Divisions: The Ancient Spiritual Vision 5. What Is the I That Has a Body? Rational Explanation of the Infinite Consciousness Within 6. Counter-Argument: How Analytic Philosophy and Science Explain Away Inner Life 7. From the Soul of the Upanishads to the Ecology of Universal Life Identity 8. Reconnecting Heaven to Earth: The Inner-Outer Infinitude of Spiritual Comprehension 9. Re-Grounding Spirituality: From the Light-Fields to Universal Life Necessities 9.1. Why the Buddhist Reformation of Hinduism Still Does Not Solve the Problem 9.2. -
Schleiermacher and Otto
Jacqueline Mariña 1 Friedrich Schleiermacher and Rudolf Otto Two names often grouped together in the study of religion are Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1884) and Rudolf Otto (1869-1937). Central to their understanding of religion is the idea that religious experience, characterized in terms of feeling, lies at the heart of all genuine religion. In his book On Religion Schleiermacher speaks of religion as a “sense and taste for the Infinite.”1 It is “the immediate consciousness of the universal existence of all finite things, in and through the infinite” and is “to know and to have life in immediate feeling” (OR, p. 36). In The Christian Faith Schleiermacher grounds religion in the immediate self-consciousness and the “feeling of absolute dependence.”2 Influenced by Schleiermacher, Otto too grounds religion in an original experience of what he calls “the numinous,” which “completely eludes apprehension in terms of concepts” and is as such “ineffable;” it can only be grasped through states of feeling. (The Idea of the Holy, p. 5). In this paper I will critically examine their views on religion as feeling. The first part of the paper will be devoted to understanding how both men conceived of feeling and the reasons why they believed that religion had to be understood in its terms. In the second and third parts of the paper I will develop the views of each thinker individually, contrast them with one another, and discuss the peculiar problems that arise in relation to the thought of each. Common Elements in Schleiermacher and Otto Both Schleiermacher and Otto insist that religion cannot be reduced to ethics, aesthetics or metaphysics. -
Spiritual Maturity: an Exploratory Study and Model for Social Work Practice
© Currents: New Scholarship in the Human Services, 2008 ________________________________________________________ Spiritual Maturity: An Exploratory Study and Model for Social Work Practice David Derezotes, Au-Deane Cowley, John Thompson, Erica Shields, and Andrea Morgan Abstract Spiritual maturity is a fundamental dimension of human development that can help inform macro and micro level social work practice. On the macro level we need spiritually mature leaders who can help form coalitions of spiritually maturing people across the boundaries of nation, religion, class, gender, culture, and race. At the micro scale, there is a need for spiritually mature parents, leaders, and professional healers who have the courage, wisdom, and skills required to help navigate families and local communities through the stormy seas of accelerating ecobiopsychosocial-spiritual change. It is our premise that this task of describing spiritual maturity can and must be accomplished. In this paper, we report the findings of a study we have conducted, which explored how 200 adults view spiritual maturity. Implications of these findings for local and global social work practice are then advanced. Introduction What is spiritual maturity? At the beginning of the 21st Century, this question is not just a fascinating academic topic, but arguably one the most important issues facing humanity today. We view the process of spiritual maturity as a fundamental dimension of human development that can help inform macro and micro level social work practice. On the largest scale, the survival of humanity is now at risk. In a world armed with weapons of mass destruction, filled with ailing ecosystems, and populated with vast numbers of depressed, hungry, and thirsty people, the need for higher consciousness has never been more apparent. -
Negotiating the Nature of Mystical Experience, Guided by James and Tillich
Negotiating the Nature of Mystical Experience, Guided by James and Tillich David Nikkel This article originally appeared in the Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society, Sum 2007. Informed by William James’s and Paul Tillich’s respective understandings of mystical experiences, this essay will venture into contemporary epistemological debates on the nature of mystical experience. Over the past fourteen years of that debate, no less than seven articles focusing on mystical experience have marked the pages of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the most widely circulated religious studies periodical. In its critical-constructive work, this paper will ultimately offer an embodied model of such experience that attempts to mediate between two polar positions. Let me begin with a summary of the debate between those diametrically opposed construals, between essentialists and cultural-religious constructivists, the former maintaining a common, even sui generis, basis for mystical experience involving intimate contact with the divine. I will divide the essentialists into two camps: (1) those like W. T. Stace, Robert K. C. Forman, and Jonathan Shear who claim that some experiences are of immediate identity, undifferentiated unity, transcending completely the subject-object structure; (2) others, like Bernard McGinn, Moshe Idel, and Henry Simoni-Wastila, who counter that any mystical experience must have some object not identical with the mystical subject without remainder. This latter implies some mediation, though much of the normal mediation inherent in human consciousness may drop away. In their portrayals of immediate identity, Stace, Forman, and Shear emphasize the purity of mystical experience, that is, its contentless nature. -
The Witness of the 'Third Christ' and Fundamentalism Vis-À-Vis Religions-In-Dialogue
ASIAN HORIZONS Vol. 11, No. 4, December 2017 Pages: 710-734 THE WITNESS OF THE ‘THIRD CHRIST’ AND FUNDAMENTALISM VIS-À-VIS RELIGIONS-IN-DIALOGUE Antony Kalliath, CMI♦ Vidyavanam Ashram, Bangalore Abstract This article argues that the witness of Jesus becomes all the more relevant and significant in the present scenario of cultural fragmentations, political polarizations and religious fundamentalism. The discussion mainly dwells on the “Third-Witness” of Jesus which is beyond religious and dogmatic constrains of Jesus’ testimony and mission. The witness of the “Third Christ” is existential, realizational and experiential. The article describes the importance of developing a Christology of ‘Third Christ’ of awakening in the present multi-faith contexts and how Jesus can become a vital agency as well as empowering consciousness of this new fellowship of devotees/disciples of Jesus outside the borders of the Church, especially in the Asian scenario. This “Third Christ” is by and large, Asian, both in substance and style. The article develops further the concept of the ‘Third Christ’ meditating upon the meaning of Jesus’ Cross. It also points out that Jesus the Risen One and his Witness transcend historical constraints and anthropocentric notions. Jesus, the ♦Antony Kalliath CMI is a Carmelite priest. Formerly, the Dean of Theology, the director of Centre for World Religions and Founding Editor of the journal, Asian Horizons at DVK, Bangalore, India; Faculty of National Biblical and Catechetical Centre of Indian Bishops Conference of India, Bangalore; Executive Secretary & later President of Indian Theological Association, Editor of Word and Worship, the Director of Divyodaya, Inter- Faith Centre, Coimbatore. -
Toward Higher Consciousness Theory and Research
SYMPOSIUM .161 Toward Higher Consciousness Theory and Research William Halal George Washington University USA This seminal article by Michael Towsey is must reading for any scholar who cares about limits to the physical paradigm in science. Towsey does a masterful job of pulling together the contrary evidence that has been gathering for decades to challenge the belief that information in the brain alone can explain consciousness. These "anomalies" include the missing 95 percent of all matter and energy thought to be "dark" stuff that pervades the universe; the indeterminate nature of atomic behavior at the quantum level; our inability to explain the origins of life; the sense of purpose and other inner qualities of the mind; and even evidence suggesting that extrasensory perception and homeopathy are real. He quibbles a bit in calling some of these anomalies "legitimate" issues that could be answered within the materialist paradigm, while others are "illegitimate" because they threaten the paradigm. These are fine distinctions, and the result is a compelling indictment of the belief that only physical phenomena matter. (no pun intended) The article then proposes an alternative paradigm of "organicism" in which the relationships among physical objects gives rise to higher-order behavior that transcends the physical. Thus, biolo- gy is not reducible to physics, for instance, because organic life exhibits metaphysical properties of the mind – purpose, meaning, etc.. Towsey does a fine job of carrying this logic further to lay out epistemological maps of knowledge organized about consciousness. These are brilliant contributions, but I think Towsey is too modest in his goals. -
The Mystic Journey of the Soul
The Mystic Journey of the Soul Gul Afroz Zaman Abstract This article briefly outlines the journey a soul is required to make if it wants to attain a state of union with the Eternal from the confines of its material life on earth. Some basic concepts of the Christian and Sufi esoteric traditions as well as Baha'i mysticism are reviewed. The ultimate goal of these spiritual teachings is the same; the need to come as close to the Source or Creator as possible. The paths may differ slightly, but the need to attain to the "Heavenly Homeland", is the central theme that links them together. Introduction As there are many esoteric traditions within each religion, it is not possible, in this short article, to describe them all so only some basic concepts of the Christian, Sufic and Baha'i teachings are reviewed. One overriding question which has always confronted man is how to undertake this journey, so as to transcend human limitations and to achieve enlightenment, or union with God. Most religions of the world have an exoteric (outer) meaning and an esoteric (inner) meaning. We start with the outer and gradually move to the inner world as and when our spirit longs for a nearness to our creator. This is usually done with short periods of meditation and prayer. The meditation can be based on a word, a sentence, a short prayer or silence. This enables us to reduce and ultimately stop the constant mental dialogue and chatter. This process takes time and effort, and most of all, persistence. -
Introduction Godless People, Doubt, and Atheism
IntroductIon Godless People, Doubt, and Atheism Ruy Llera Blanes and Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic Abstract: In the introduction to this special issue, we set the agenda for researching the aspirations and practices of godless people who seek to thin out religion in their daily lives. We reflect on why processes of disengagement from religion have not been adequately researched in anthropology. Locating this issue’s articles in the anthropological literature on doubt and atheism, we argue for the importance of a com- parative investigation to analyze people’s reluctance to pursue religion. Keywords: atheism, disbelief, disengagement from religion, doubt, god- less people, non-religion, unbelief Being Godless In the current climate of false prophecies of secularism and numerous theories of the resurgence of religions, it is rather unusual to study a way of disengag- ing from religion. A bulk of recent ethnographies tell stories about technologies of self and the adept cultivation of religious dispositions (Mahmood 2005), learning to discern God (Luhrmann 2007), and enacting divine presences in physical rituals, speech acts, dream visions, or materials (Engelke 2007). Ritu- als of presencing the transcendent, the divine, or the immaterial (e.g., Orsi 2005) and well-rehearsed arguments about the resilience of religious spiritu- alities in politics (Bubandt and van Beek 2012) seem to be the order of the day. Building on the growing interest in researching how people demarcate the boundaries of religion and what falls outside (Engelke 2012b, 2014), this special issue suggests that ‘being godless’ is an important empirical reality that encompasses processes, aspirations, and practices that purposefully or inad- vertently lead to the attenuation of one’s religious life. -
Karl Rahner on the Soul
Karl Rahner on the Soul Rev. Terrance W. Klein, S.T.D. Fordham University Karl Rahner rejects the notion that when Christians speak of a soul they are citing a surreptitious citizen of a realm that lies beyond or above science. For Rahner, the purpose of calling the soul the supernatural element of the human person is not to establish two spheres within one human being, but rather to attest to the sheer gratuity of our orientation toward God in Christ. When we use the word “spirit,” we philosophically reference our disposition over and against the world. When we use the word “soul,” we theologically assert the ultimate orientation of this spirit towards God. On Interpretation First, a word about interpretation, which is my task. One of the great Heidegger-inspired insights of twentieth century philosophy is that of the hermeneutical circle. Essentially the notion that we cannot simply seize the insights of another as though these were objects lying ready to hand. Rather, when we try to understand another, we become de facto interpreters, because we can’t help but approach the other in the light of our own preunderstanding. Hence, one cannot hope to approach a text without prejudice, which is always present. What one can do is to try to expose one’s own preunderstanding, so that, brought to light, its engagement with the text can be seen for what it is, a starting place in what is ultimately a conversation with the author. Gadamer taught us that what ultimately makes the conversation a fruitful dialogue, rather than a rapacious misreading, is a common tradition, the mutual questions and concerns that both the author and the interpreter share. -
The Pantheism of Goethe in Its Relation to That of Spinoza
University of Iowa Iowa Research Online Theses and Dissertations 1918 The pantheism of Goethe in its relation to that of Spinoza Hans Naether State University of Iowa Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd This work has been identified with a Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0. Material in the public domain. No restrictions on use. This thesis is available at Iowa Research Online: https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/4084 Recommended Citation Naether, Hans. "The pantheism of Goethe in its relation to that of Spinoza." MA (Master of Arts) thesis, State University of Iowa, 1918. https://doi.org/10.17077/etd.xi8mcgqv Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd THE PANTHEISM OF GOETHE IN ITS RELATION TO THAT OF SPINOZA. A THESIS submitted to The Faculty of the Graduate College of the State University of Iowa in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS by Hans Naether. State University of Iowa 1918. TABLE Of CONTENTS. Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION. 1-8. Chapter 2. MARKED INFLUENCES IN THE 'DEVELOPMENT OF GOETHE ’s THOUGHT. 4-13. Chapter 8. WHAT IS PANTHEISM? 14-16. ! Chapter 4. THE PANTHEISM OF GO^TBE.c"' 19-25. Chapter 5. DID SFIN07A TEACH AN IMMANENT GOD? 26-29. Chapter 6. THE RELATION OE GOETHE. TO SPIN02A . 80-47. Chapter 7. GOETHE’S C M CONCEPTION OE GOD. 46-55. Chapter 8. GCETHE.'S PHILO POPE'S IN FAUST. 46-72. Chapter S. GOETHE’S 'APPROACH TO THEISM. 73—j—96. 1. THE PANTHEISM OE GOETHE IN ITS RELATION TO THAT 0? SPINOZA.