The Meaning of Denial

2021 ◽  
pp. 124-150
Author(s):  
Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi
Keyword(s):  
New Age ◽  
The Self ◽  
Eternal Life ◽  
Physical Body ◽  
Immortal Soul ◽  
Individual Consciousness ◽  
Early Manifestation

Could denial be a source of meaning? The meaning of denying death is clear, and most religions have been doing it for millennia. Claiming an immortal soul and thus denying the annihilation of our individual consciousness is something humans have embraced for more than 100,000 years. This chapter examines a group known as Physical Immortality, that many considered more bizarre than other belief minorities, because it promises its adherents eternal life in the same physical body they are inhabiting in this life. The author’s observations of the group and its members taught him that while the beliefs were indeed unusual, the members were ordinary and normal. It turned out to be an early manifestation of New Age activities in Israel. The group did not develop a distinct identity in its members, which was one reason for its decline. What characterized most followers was a playful openness to building up the self through support, belonging, and positivity, even if expressed in absurdities.

The Relationship between Seeker and Spiritual Guide as portrayed in contemporary Western Sufi Autobiographies

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-332
Author(s):  
Kate Zebiri
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
New Age ◽  
The Self ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Continuity And Discontinuity

This article aims to explore the Shaykh-mur?d (disciple) or teacher-pupil relationship as portrayed in Western Sufi life writing in recent decades, observing elements of continuity and discontinuity with classical Sufism. Additionally, it traces the influence on the texts of certain developments in religiosity in contemporary Western societies, especially New Age understandings of religious authority. Studying these works will provide an insight into the diversity of expressions of contemporary Sufism, while shedding light on a phenomenon which seems to fly in the face of contemporary social and religious trends which deemphasize external authority and promote the authority of the self or individual autonomy.

New age religion and the cult of the self

Society ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 46-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Tucker
Keyword(s):  
New Age ◽  
The Self ◽  
New Age Religion

Ontological Transformations in Hindu Tantric Ritualisms of Kathmandu Valley

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabio Armand
Keyword(s):  
Human Brain ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Kathmandu Valley ◽  
Ritual Practice ◽  
Form Versus ◽  
Physical Body ◽  
Single Form ◽  
Anthropological Approach ◽  
Ritual Practices

Rituals of incorporation (utarnu) of numinous ontologies in Himalayan Tantric ritualisms represent an interesting field for developing a reflection on different phenomenologies of the body. From the physical body of the tantrika (Tantric practitioner), the formal remains of an individual atman-Self, I investigate the experiences that make it a receptacle for a numinous Other. This article is an attempt to identify some distinctive Tantric features in a ritual practice of incorporation (chema puja) among the Newar communities of the Kathmandu Valley. Such incorporations are supported by an essential narrative link which describes the figure of Siva-Mahadeva as the transmitter of knowledge of tantra-mantra, generating a direct esoteric filiation with the ritual practitioner. Through these incorporation processes, the tantrika achieves a perpetual alternation of two morphologically stable manifestations where the two natures, human and divine, merge into a single form, versus a fragmentation where the two distinct natures remain visible under two Gestalts. By proposing a neurocognitive anthropological approach, I will address the notions of Self and Alien in Hindu Tantric rituals of incorporation, where tantrikas' physical bodies become the encounter spaces where the Self merges and dissolves into the 'numinous' Other, in a bistable mode. In this way, I will be able to reconstruct the neural foundations of these endogenous experiences, mainly localized in the left temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) of the human brain, representing the fundamental core basis of these ritual practices of visualization and merging with a deity in Newar Tantrism and shamanism.

scholarly journals A Matter of Heart and Soul: The Value of Positing a Personal Ontological Center for Developmental Psychology

2018 ◽  
pp. 90-119
Keyword(s):  
Reference Point ◽  
Developmental Psychology ◽  
The Self ◽  
Sri Aurobindo ◽  
New Synthesis ◽  
Integral Yoga ◽  
Whole Person ◽  
Individual Consciousness ◽  
Postconventional Development

A whole person understanding of postconventional development needs to offer a facilitative agent, what is here called a psychocentric dimension, with a unique and necessary role in the transformation of individual consciousness, that complements and completes the egocentric and cosmocentric domains. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s writings and praxis concerning what they called the psychic being may elucidate an alternative frame to current theoretical speculations, in a way that may offer a new synthesis and a more theoretically satisfying interpretation. More specifically, it is hoped that an integral yoga psychology framework for postconventional development can meaningfully account for the transformation of individual consciousness by rendering the psychic being as the definitive reference point, facilitative agent, basis, source, originating point of the self and-or cause for the process of self-individuation of postconventional consciousness.

scholarly journals Possédés par l’image de soi. Les identités, les identifications et l’inconscient collectif sur les réseaux sociaux

2021 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 313-321
Author(s):  
Ana Taís Martins ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
The Self ◽  
Collective Unconscious ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
Réseaux Sociaux ◽  
Individual Consciousness ◽  
Practices Of The Self ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Reseaux Sociaux

"The stable identity, an invention of modernity, seems today to be shaken, giving way to multiple and even ephemeral identifications of which social networks form a remarkable catalog. Are we living in a time when we no longer know who we are? This article proposes setting in relation the practices of the self with the questions of the construction of identity, assuming as a condition of possibility the dissociation of the individual consciousness from the collective unconscious. The intention is to examine the question in the light of the contributions of Jung on archetypes and the collective unconscious and Delory-Momberger on the construction of the ego through life stories."

The Feeling of Being a Body: Resurrection and Habitus in Vaughan’s Medical Writings

2021 ◽  
pp. 124-147
Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil
Keyword(s):  
Social Connectedness ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Eternal Life ◽  
Self Help ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Devotional Writings

Chapter 4 articulates more explicitly than the previous chapter the way resurrection beliefs in Vaughan’s poetry function as “critical theory” about selfhood, identity, and the social world. The chapter examines Vaughan’s devotional and religious “self-help” literature and Vaughan’s translation and expansion of a hermetic medical treatise. Vaughan’s immanent corporeal resurrectionist commitment to finding the “seeds” of resurrection leads him to posit an essential core of bodily life—the radical balsam—that seeks eternal life but that is sickened when it is penetrated and rewired by the social and historical world. The goal of Vaughan’s devotional writings and medicine alike is to rewire the self so that it reduces its investment in the historical and social world by having its life directed by the essential core, a move that is analogous to his poetic search for the seeds and signs of resurrection within himself his poetry (the subject of chapter 3). This vision anticipates Heidegger’s phenomenology and Bourdieu’s theory of habitus. Vaughan also describes a form of sexuality that anticipates Leo Bersani in imagining the body as socialized and yet as potentially unhinged from that social connectedness.

Dividual Vision of the Individual

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Gearin
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Action ◽  
New Age ◽  
The Self ◽  
Individualism And Collectivism ◽  
The Individual ◽  
New Age Spirituality ◽  
Ritual Practices

There has been ongoing scholarly debate concerning whether New Age spirituality may be defined by individualistic more than collectivistic values, beliefs and behaviours. Most scholars have answered in the positive and indicated how New Age beliefs and techniques emphasise the importance of the self and self-interests of the practitioner. This article contributes to debates on New Age individualism with an analysis of ayahuasca neoshamanism in Australia. I introduce thick ethnographic evidence of collectivist logics of social action in ritual practices of ecstatic purging and visions. I argue that these practices can be interpreted through anthropological notion of "dividualism" whereby the person is multiple, partible, and exchangeable along social relations of obligation (Strathern 1988, Mosko 2013). The article illustrates how ethnographic theory may contribute to debates about individualism and collectivism in New Age spirituality by creating space for "native" or emic theories of social action.

Resurrection of the Body: Continuity in Christ through Death in Christ

2021 ◽  
pp. 002114002110176
Author(s):  
David J. Norman
Keyword(s):  
Spiritual Transformation ◽  
The Body ◽  
Eternal Life ◽  
Physical Body ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
2 Corinthians ◽  
In Christ ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Spiritual Body ◽  
The Church

This article examines the question of when the resurrection of the body begins. Matthew 27:51–53 testifies to the resurrection of bodies on Good Friday; and 2 Corinthians 5:1 speaks of those who die in Christ receiving a building/body from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. Eternal life begins for Christians with baptism into Christ’s death; they become members of his Body, the Church. Through the presence of Christ’s Spirit, our bodies undergo a spiritual transformation up to the moment of death. Those who die in Christ pass from resurrected life in the physical body to the fullness of resurrected life at death in Christ’s spiritual body. Whether one is in the (physical) body and away from the Lord or with the Lord and away from the (physical) body, one remains in Christ.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document