scholarly journals Intimations of a Spiritual New Age: II. Wilhelm Reich as Transpersonal Psychologist. Part 2: The Futural Promise of Reich’s Naturalistic Bio-Energetic Spirituality

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New Age ◽  
Historical Jesus ◽  
Spiritual Emergency ◽  
Consciousness Studies ◽  
Simone Weil ◽  
Wilhelm Reich ◽  
Self Actualization ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
System Approaches

This is the second part of a consideration of the later Wilhelm Reich as anticipating a future planetary-wide “New Age” form of this-worldly spirituality in ways overlapping with figures from the same era of Western crisis from the 1930s through the 1950s, including Jung, Toynbee, Bergson, Heidegger, Teilhard de Chardin, and Simone Weil. Where the first part of this treatment of Reich as transpersonal psychologist traced his evolution from his bio-energetic psychotherapy to a Weberian this-worldly mysticism of a universal life energy, his cosmic orgone, with its attendant features of conflicted “spiritual emergency,” this second paper seeks to further develop some of its still largely unrealized implications. These include the relation of his later system to neo-shamanism; transpersonal psychologies of presence, Being-experience, and self actualization; essentializing reinterpretations of the historical Jesus; evolutionary continuities in contemporary consciousness studies; emergent system approaches in science; and the potential for a New Age planetary identity for humanity.

scholarly journals Intimations of a Spiritual New Age: II. Wilhelm Reich as Transpersonal Psychologist. Part I: Context, Development, and Crisis in Reich’s Bio-energetic Spiritual Psychology

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Personal Development ◽  
New Age ◽  
Traditional Religion ◽  
Distant Future ◽  
Spiritual Psychology ◽  
Consciousness Studies ◽  
Emergent Systems ◽  
Spiritual Nature ◽  
Wilhelm Reich ◽  
New Age Spirituality

Wilhelm Reich is the focus of this second in a series of papers on a group of independent figures from the 1930s into the 1950s—also including Jung, the later Heidegger, Toynbee, Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin, and Simone Weil—who in the context of those years of crisis articulated overlapping visions of a future “New Age” spirituality that might in some more distant future serve to balance and even transform a globalizing materialism and disenchantment with traditional religion. The later Reich developed a highly original version of a “vitalistic” transpersonal psychology, as his “religion for the children of the future,” which needs to be differentiated from its more doubtful supportive research in his orgone physics and biology. The spiritual nature of his larger intuitions of a transformative life energy is also reflected in the parallels between Reich’s personal development and the classical purgation/illumination phases of unitive mysticism, and the “spiritual emergency” of his final “dark night” crisis. A later paper will concentrate on largely unrealized implications of Reich’s work for still evolving directions in consciousness studies, neoshamanism, the historical Jesus, emergent systems approaches in science, and a future planetary identity.

The Miracles of an Eschatological Prophet

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 131-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Eve
Keyword(s):  
New Age ◽  
Historical Jesus ◽  
Minimal Impact ◽  
Central Aspect ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
The Temple ◽  
Holy Man

While it has not been a central aspect of his work on the historical Jesus, E.P. Sanders has contributed to the understanding of Jesus’ miracles. In Jesus and Judaism, Sanders argued that Jesus was an eschatological prophet and maintains that he certainly healed people in ways that his contemporaries regarded as miraculous, but that his miracles were not signs of the end, and cannot be used to determine what type of figure he was. The fuller treatment of miracles in the later The Historical Figure of Jesus emphasizes the exorcisms and dismisses the nature miracles as having made minimal impact, leading Sanders to conclude that Jesus’ miracles were not as spectacular as the Gospels suggest, and that they probably led his contemporaries to view Jesus as a holy man like Honi the Circle-Drawer, although Jesus himself probably understood his miracles as signs of the imminent arrival of the new age, and his disciples may have come to see them as a defeat of evil powers and as a legitimation of Jesus’ claims. After summarizing Sanders’s arguments this article goes on to suggest how some of their foundations may be secured while also suggesting that the case for associating Jesus’ miracles with his role as an eschatological prophet may be stronger than Sanders allowed. It then concludes by indicating how Sanders’s account of the role of Jesus’ miracles might be further rounded out first by exploring their possible symbolism (as Sanders does with the Temple incident) and second through various social-scientific approaches.

Ecology and Environmental Awareness in 1960s–1970s Terraforming Stories

Terraforming ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 98-136
Author(s):  
Chris Pak
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Awareness ◽  
Ecological Impact ◽  
New Age ◽  
Indigenous Populations ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
To Receive

Terraforming and its destructive ecological impact began to receive greater attention in the light of environmentalism in the 1960s-1970s. This chapter draws attention to the links between the utopian imagination, the pastoral, and the notion of the communard, a concept that was re-voiced in “New Age” environmentalist discourse. The first section compares and contrasts several significant proto-Gaian works while the second explores terraforming narratives that re-work the 1950s tradition. Citing Val Plumwood’s analysis of dualistic operations in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, the conflict between colonising forces and indigenous populations is considered. This section argues that the popular ecological image of connection and the theme of love is a symbolic attempt to bridge the hyperseparation between dualised concepts; between coloniser and colonised, nature and culture.

“I Shall be Reckoned with the Gods”

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Simon J. Joseph
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
New Age ◽  
First Century ◽  
Historical Jesus ◽  
The Comparative Study

The categorical identification of the historical Jesus continues to be a central challenge in Jesus Research yet the identification of the historical Jesus as a first-century Jewish mystic has long been a popular topic among Western esotericists, Christian mystics, contemporary New Age authors, and some biblical scholars. Taking a critical look at the category and study of mysticism in Jesus Research in light of the ancient etymological origins of modern mysticism, the concept of ‘religious experience,’ and the epistemological problems associated with perennialism as a religionist discourse, this article argues that the comparative study of mysticism still proves to be an explanatorily powerful analytical, theoretical, and interpretative lens in Jesus Research.

Adjusting the Contrast

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Research ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
New Age ◽  
Doctor Who ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Uk

Through contextual and textual analyses, Adjusting the contrast: British television and constructs of race explores a range of texts and practices that address the ongoing phenomenon of television’s relationship with ‘race’. The collection brings together media scholars from the UK and US, who focus on a range of issues, from television scheduling to historical questions of representation. The collection also seeks to examine how television represents Britishness through whiteness, and continued constructs of racialised normativity. Included are analyses of programmes such as Doctor Who, Shoot the Messenger, Desi DNA andTop Boy, which explore the broadcast policies and cultural production in the 'new age' of television. Other chapters examine the reframing of the 1950s on contemporary television though the example of Call the Midwife; the continuing myth of a multicultural England on Luther, and how sitcoms such as Till Death Us Do Part and Mind Your Language framed racial tensions through comedy. Through a critical analysis of literature and new empirical research, cultures of production are deconstructed, and public service remits examined.

Tra esoterismo, New Age e mistica cristiana: le dottrine del « Cerchio Firenze 77 »

Aries ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-188
Author(s):  
Francesco Baroni
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
New Age ◽  
Scientific Concepts ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Physical Phenomena

AbstractOne of the most interesting features of the 20th-century esoteric revival in Italy is the rise of a lively spiritualist culture. Many spiritualist groups, while still paying attention to physical phenomena (levitation, apports, etc.), produced a rich doctrinal literature of increasingly sophisticated content. The 'Cerchio Firenze 77' is certainly the most famous among these groups. It emerged around the Florentine medium Roberto Setti (1930–1984) and was active throughout the 1950s, the 1960s and the 1970s. The doctrines exposed by the 'Masters' to the participants in the séances show a complex interweaving of esoteric themes, mystical ideas and scientific concepts that made the works of 'Cerchio' highly successful, and comparable to the great classics of 20th-century channeling, such as Jane Roberts's 'Seth books'.

From Eranos to Esalen

2021 ◽  
pp. 192-208
Author(s):  
Simon Cox
Keyword(s):  
Martial Arts ◽  
American Culture ◽  
New Age ◽  
Subtle Body ◽  
Big Sur ◽  
Huge Impact ◽  
Body Concept ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter traces the subtle body concept from Jung’s Kundalini seminars to the early work of one of its attendees, Frederic Spiegelberg, who would wind up becoming a professor at Stanford in the 1950s after the Nazis purged German academia of Jewish faculty and staff. Spiegelberg would go on to have a huge impact on a whole generation of Stanford graduates at the very beginning of the counterculture. This chapter focuses on Michael Murphy, the founder of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, which would go on to become a countercultural and later New Age mecca during the 1960s and 1970s. The chapter focuses on the subtle body concept in the work of Spiegelberg and Murphy, zeroing in on the points of difference between the teacher and his student. It ends with the proliferation of subtle body discourses and forms of praxis that spin out of Esalen during and after the counterculture, laying the groundwork for the hyperpopularity of yoga and martial arts in 1990s American culture, which the author grew up in, leading to his interest in writing this book in the first place.

Sheila Watson as a Reader of Simone Weil: Decreation, Affliction, and Metaxu in the The Double Hook

2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (4) ◽  
pp. 669-690
Author(s):  
Kait Pinder
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Wyndham Lewis ◽  
Sheila Watson ◽  
Simone Weil ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Ethical Project

This article examines Sheila Watson’s interest in the notoriously difficult thought of the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil. Watson read Weil’s work in English and French throughout the 1950s, especially during the time she spent in Paris in 1955 and 1956. While critics have examined Watson’s Paris journals for her discussion of modernists such as Samuel Beckett and Wyndham Lewis, little attention has been paid to her synthesis of, and response to, Weil’s thought in the same pages. Contextualizing Watson’s revisions to The Double Hook in her sustained reading of Weil, this article argues that Weil’s thought informs Watson’s aesthetic and ethical project in the novel. The article analyses Watson’s understanding of three central concepts in Weil’s philosophy – decreation, affliction, and metaxu – and offers a Weilian reading of The Double Hook. By resituating Watson as a reader of Weil, the article also highlights the Canadian author’s belonging within a wider circle of women writers in the mid-century who, like Weil and Watson, also demanded unsentimental responses to violence and suffering.

scholarly journals Intimations of a spiritual New Age: III. Martin Heidegger's phenomenology of numinous/Being experience and the "Other Beginning" of a futural planetary spirituality

2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Transpersonal Psychology ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
New Age ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Consciousness Studies ◽  
Radical Critique ◽  
Pure Experience ◽  
New Age Spirituality ◽  
Preliminary Consideration

The phenomenology of numinous or Being-experience in the later Heidegger is the focus in this third in a series of papers on a group of independent figures— also including Jung, Reich, Toynbee, Teilhard de Chardin, and Simone Weil—who beginning in the crisis years of the 1930s envisioned versions of a futural “New Age” spirituality to address a globalizing materialism and its disenchantments—and so also creating a context for much of contemporary transpersonal and consciousness studies. A preliminary consideration of Heidegger in the contexts of transpersonal psychology, religious studies, the macro-histories of Toynbee and Sorokin, James on “pure experience,” and spirituality as intelligence must also lead to some reckoning with Heidegger’s disastrous initial involvement with National Socialism. Considered here in terms of a spiritual metapathology of narcissistic inflation/grandiosity, it was his way past this episode that led from the mid 1930s on into his radical critique of a globalizing technology of universal commodification and to an answering futural potential for a spiritual “Other Beginning” and “last god”—re-sacralizing humanity for the “guardianship” and “sheltering” of planet and life.

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