Mesmer, Swedenborg and the Roots of the "New Age"

The “return of Queztalcoatl,” as in the “return of Christ,” or the “restoration of Eden,” has been a common apocryphal theme. Someone or Something that is wonderful, but that has been “lost,” will be reinstated, will appear again, and things will be different—such is that theme. I’ve been wanting to do some historical research on the origins of many of the themes we’ve been considering, in order to lengthen the “arc” of each story, farther back into time, to perhaps give us a better sighting into the future.

My wife, Janis, has been reading a book The Spiritual Science of the Stars:A Guide to the Architecture of the Spirit, by Pete Stewart. Its basic premise is that for early humans, the stars were gods. So they watched them closely. The myths we have inherited are the stories these early humans saw acted out in the sky. What is amazing, mysterious, is that they could somehow conceive of a cycle that took 26,000 years to complete. It’s one thing to watch the sun go up and down and predict the coming of dawn, or the cycles of the moon, or the cyclical position of the sun at sunrise, but to notice (intuit, see the pattern) a cycle that takes 26,000 years, well, one more amazement. But the reason I’m bringing it up is that by looking at longer arcs of time, new insights arose that were not noticed by viewing shorter arcs.

In my own research on the dissolving of boundaries, the psychology of intimacy has been a major focus of study, as it is so central to self-concept and interpersonal relations, although the boundaries that are dissolving are many, and not just related to psychology. Anyway, I began to look into when in history the concept of “intimacy” arose, when did Oxford dictionary say it was first used. How did we get from a place in human relations where we did not even recognize the existence of intimacy (never gave it a thought) to a place where we create psychological support to help folks who have a fear of intimacy? From cave person to tribal life, to serfs under kings, from home-based farming to the industrial revolution, the man in the grey flannel suit, to encounter groups, to streakers, to MySpace, we have gone on an interesting journey from oneness, to separateness, and now onto a global, individualized awareness of inter-connectedness. The sense of self has developed alongside this storyline.

Anyway, enough prologue. I came across a book tucked back in my library, Perspectives on the New Age, edited by J. R. Lewis and J. G. Melton. Although the “New Age” is no longer a popular term, as the concepts have gone commercial and “mainstream,” and thus shed itself of anything flaky sounding, nevertheless, for some time, New Age was a meaningful label for a movement. How did it get started? The book is a collection of essays on various aspects of the New Age movement, but the history is what I’ve been reading about and wanted to share with you.

There are many ways to trace the history. In chapter 3, “Roots of the New Age,” Kay Alexander traces the roots of two main themes of the New Age: 1) New Thought (Christian Science to Course in Miracles.. and, of course, Edgar Cayce) and 2) Theosophy, back to two men: Anton Mesmer (1733-1815) and Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772).

Swedenborg was a clairvoyant who psychically perceived levels of heavens and hells, described them, and re-introduced the Hermetic principle of "as above, so below," regarding the correspondences between different levels of reality. Mesmer is responsible for introducing a handle on a mystery we now call “hypnosis,” a primary manner of learning to follow in Swedenborg’s footsteps. How Mesmer made his “discovery” of “animal magnetism” remains unknown to me, but this “juice” was understood to be something important to healing, transformation, and spiritual realities. Today, would we call it the “force,” or the “matrix,” or maybe “spirt,” or “kundalini,” or some other supersensible power that runs through all of life.

Whereas dreams probably had a lot to do with the origins of religion, as well as the stars, being able to enter altered states for accessing special information and inspiration. Whether through meditation, self-hypnosis, my inspired heart method, or some other personal skill, we can explore those same realities that gave rise to much of the worldview that is coming into its heyday now.

The last term, “kundalini,” brings up the Hindu tradition, which of course pre-dates our two gentlemen. Theosophy, founded in New York by Blavatsky in 1875, and developing there at the same time that New Thought was spreading. Hinduism joined forces with this movement through Theosophy and also through the coming to America of such folks as Yogananda, and others. That’s not a line I’m going to explore here, but there are chapters on this particular branch of the history, for even the most ancient spiritual tradition talked about our contemporary time period. As John Major Jenkins demonstrates in his book, Galactic Alignment: The Transformation of Consciousness according to Mayan, Egyptian, and Vedic Traditions, it wasn’t just the Mayans who were aware of the 26,000 year cycle and who prophesied creative upheaval in the 2012 period.

More to come…

Dissolving the Boundary between Life and Death

If there’s one thing certain about our changing times, it is that boundaries are disappearing. Pollution, computer viruses, terrorism, AIDS, digital information, the world economy—isn’t oneness wonderful? Something is in process that is taking us, kicking and screaming, toward the interconnected world we’ve always preached about, but seem unready to handle. The dissolving boundary between the objective world “out there” and the subjective world “in here” is especially troublesome for our identities. Out-of-body experiences that prove clairvoyant and alien abductions that leave physical scars are two examples where the realm of the mind and the realm of the physical world seem to overlap or coalesce. We keep a tight distinction between what is only “imaginary,” and what is (physically) “real.” But with the birth of quantum mechanics that distinction was destined to be dissolved. What is happening to our world, to humanity? We might suggest that there’s something afoot whose aim seems to be to “shamanize humanity.” There’s a growing collection of bizarre experiences that threaten to transform our very notion of reality and our place in it. Near-death experiences and the enormous amount of research conducted on this phenomena is a case in point.

The Big Book of Near-Death Experiences: The Ultimate Guide to What Happens When We Die (Hampton Roads Publishing) is a big book alright, and it is as much about the nature of the life as it may truly be than it is simply about the journey from life to death and back again. The author, P.M.H. Atwater, has many books to her credit on this theme, many of which draw upon the work of Edgar Cayce. Her Big Book is certainly encyclopedic and comprehensive. We learn in it more than about the enormous body of research that is providing important information about the nature of these experiences. We also learn how NCEs fit into the more general class of all transformative experiences. We learn that there is a general pattern to transformative experiences and that they are becoming more and more common. So common that together they are inspiring a new concept of what is afoot: “the translucent revolution,” meaning more and more people are becoming less egotistically dense and more transparent to the transpersonal light of creation, or God. Humanity is undergoing a transformation, and Atwater sees evidence of it in the children, what some call the Indigo children. As the veil between life and death disappears, it reveals a greater reality. Truly, this Big Book is as much about this larger reality than it is about simply the phenomenon of being dead for awhile and coming back to life. If it were the case that NDEs were the only phenomenon to transform lives, the only phenomenon in which alternate realities were visited, the only phenomenon in which spirit beings were encountered, the only phenomenon in which people experienced their inherent divinity, then NDEs would certainly be anomalous. But by placing NDEs within the larger context of other transformative experiences, Atwater is able to make a credible case for an emerging evolutionary force at work within and around us.

We are moving, slowly but surely, away from being “grounded” in the physical world and becoming more and more beings in the world of consciousness itself. It is as if the physical world could disappear someday, but we would continue living in a “virtual” world of consciousness. Whether or not we experience this coming change as rapture or rupture may depend upon the attitude with which we regard the death of life as we know it

The Purpose of Prophecy

A Commentary by Henry Reed

Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it. Those who ignore the future, however, may be condemned to relenquish it.

Does prophecy help us meet the future, avoid it, or is it self-fulfilling? The purpose of prophecy, according to the Hopi, is to give us a role as a co-creator of the future. Thus concludes Rudolf Kaiser in his new book The Voice of the Great Spirit: Prophecies of the Hopi Indians (published by Shambhala).

The Hopi prophecy has an honored place among other sources, such as the Book of Revelation, Nostradamus, and Edgar Cayce. What they share is a vision of global transformation, dramatic and systemic changes in the nature of life on the planet. Kaiser's scholarly book details the history and development of the Hopi prophecy and its relation to other prophecies, including the less well-known Mayan and Oglala Sioux visions of the future.

According to their creation myth, the Hopi were the first ones to inhabit this planet, actually being survivors from a previous age of people who were annihilated by flood. Ours is the fourth world or age. The others were previously destroyed when the population had progressed, as if on a regular cycle, from innocence to ego-centrism, materialism and greed, and finally to destruction. This fourth world is in its final stage, ready for destruction.

The first encounter with the Hopi's prophecy occurred when the Mormons attempted to convert them in the 1850s. It was then that they learned that the Hopis regarded the Mormons as the "Elder White Brothers," referred to in their prophecy as the returning savior. Some Hopi later changed their assessment of the Mormons and of the Europeans generally, for the white man was clearly not a savior. To this day, the Hopi argue the role of the European in fulfilling their prophecy of the "Elder White Brother," much as Christians argue whether a given influence is of the Christ or of the Anti-Christ.

The Hopi went more public with their prophecy in 1947, revealing the mention of a "gourd of ashes," which they interpreted to be the atomic bomb. Just as many Westerners believed that the atomic era put us on the edge of destruction, so the Hopi connected the bomb with the advance of their prophecy--especially in its apocalyptic aspects.

The Hopi prophecy has changed over the years. Kaiser traces these changes and explains them. According to myth, when the fourth world came into being, God created some writings on four stone tablets to give humankind a sense of its origins and destiny. The iconoglyphs on the stone tablets notwithstanding, the Hopi prophecy was an oral tradition, enabling the people to interact with it. Rather than making the prophecy invalid, this malleability makes it more alive to the Hopi. It lives within the people and grows with them. It is a means by which they find they can participate in the shaping of the future.

By living with the Hopi and interacting with them concerning their prophecy, Kaiser learned that it functions to remind them that they have choices and that those choices affect the future. Prophecy doesn't take away our free will, he learned from the Hopi, but gives us an opportunity to participate in the future by helping us envision the long-term consequences of our attitudes. Without prophecy, there is no future to contemplate; there is only fate. Humans who have no prophecy have thus surrendered their future to helplessness and unknowingness. To the Hopi, prophecy is God's way of giving us the opportunity to be team players in the future.

Jesus and UFOs: Riders of the New Wave of Imagination

Jesus and UFOs:
Riders of the New Wave of Imagination

They can appear to us coming out of the sky, at the foot of the bed, or even inside our heads. They may seem subjective as a dream yet leave a physical trace of their visit. They may feel real to the touch yet abruptly dissolve through a wall. However they appear our lives are never the same. As momentous the encounter may be we hesitate to mention it to anyone less our credibility be questioned.

Jesus and UFOs have a lot in common. Their appearances in people's lives actually share similar traits with apparitions of Mary, and angels as well as demons. All such visions are occuring more frequently than before. There is a foreboding feeling that in this "age between gods," there is a hole in the ozone layer of the psyche leaving us vulnerable to alien thoughts and images which, like awesome asteroids from the far flung corners of mindspace, threaten to collide with our worldview.

There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. What if the idea is something that spells the end of the world as we've known it and the end of the future as we've imagined it? One definition of the millenium may be that it is the time in the crack between the worlds when all that is imaginable becomes real and all that was real becomes imaginary. Maybe "New Age" means the world is undergoing a visionary siege accompanying a near-death experience.

It is perhaps no coincidence then that it is Raymond Moody, author Life after Life, who writes the introduction to the new book by Gregory Scott Sparrow, Witness to his return: Personal encounters with Christ (A.R.E. press). Sparrow, who's previous work, Lucid Dreaming: Dawning of the Clear Light, is generally regarded as a contemporary classic, now brings us accounts of people who have had personal experiences of Jesus, face to face meetings with the Messiah returned. These stories of encounters with special beings of light who inspire awe, who perform physical healings, and who transform lives carries the same sort of potential impact as Dr. Moody's groundbreaking book about near-death experiences.

Sparrow's book should stimulate excitement and debate on many fronts. Think of Sophy Burham's surprising bestseller, A Book of Angels (Ballantine). It spawned an immediate sequel, Angel Letters, because there were so many more people who had had these encounters than the author had originally realized. Sparrow's book is so convincing that a sequel feels inevitable.

Was the encounter real or was the person just imagining it? This question may be the hallmark of the mentality of the rational age. By giving the first name, "Just" to imagination, the rational mind clearly puts the experience in its place, a spot inferior to "reality."

One of the paradoxes of these apparitions, however, is that they are challenging our views about the imagination and blurring the distinction between subjecive and objective, inner and outer. The rational age seems threatened with extinction. Nowhere is this threat more clear than in UFO sightings and abductions.

A new book, Angels and Aliens: UFOs and the Mythic Imagination is probably the most profound book on the UFO controversy yet to appear. That a respected academic press such as Addison Wesley published the book makes you take notice. The author, Keith Thompson, an independent scholar who, by first interviewing Robert Bly in New Age Journal, is credited with unleashing the Men's movement. Here Thompson chronicles the unfolding of the UFO story from flying saucer sightings in 1947 to the millenial mythologizing they've stimulated today. Rather than deciding whether UFOs are nuts-and-bolts flying machines or subjective, symbolic experiences, he allows that they are both and then some. Denizens of the mythic imagination, they are messengers from a deeper reality, he theorizes, who have come to help us let go of our old world and prepare for the new. Like Sparrow who writes that we tend to "create our identity by excluding aspects of ourselves rather than by embracing our wholeness," Thompson suggests that UFOs force us to grant reality status to the imagination, thus admiting into our world regions we've long excluded.

That it is the imagination indeed that is both the source and the target of what we call the "New Age," or millenium, is a subject treated with even broader historical perspective in another recent book, Reimagining the World: A critique of the New Age, Science and Popular culture (Bear and Company). A record of a public dialogue between two great metaphysical philosophers, David Spangler & William Irwin Thompson, it is an intellectual feast that provides a good context for digesting Sparrow's and Thompson's reports. The authors are both mystics who have "retired" from the "New Age." Spangler, once of Findhorn, and Irwin Thompson, once of Lindesfarne, identify the imagination as the creative spiritual force moving us into a completely new future. They condemn the "New Age," however, as vulgarized by the media serving our desire to "perpetuate the familiar in the guise of the new." Specific images of the New Age must die, THEY ARGUE, for the New Age to live. Worship no graven image. It's too easy to get stuck on a particular "image" of the future, they contend, rather than the force of imagination itself.

The new wave of the imagination sweeps upon our shores many travelers. What type of passport will help us discern the dark invaders from the bright avatars? The encounters Sparrow describes all have constructive side-effects--lives are changed for the better. There is no such consistent positive impact in the encounters Keith Thompson surveys, even when he places them in the politically correct context of shamanic initiations. This distinction readily suggests the ideal of "fruits of the spirit." God is love, Jesus is comforter. Yet if we assume we can always recognize the fruits, how do we know we might not exclude a new form of fruit never before encountered? Prepare to imagine the unimaginable.

To learn about Henry Reed’s upcoming School of the Prophets seminar on the future of consciousness, go to henryreed.com/futureconsciousness

The Shamanizing of Humanity

I hope you’ve had a chance to read the summary of Kenneth Ring’s The Omega Project, prepared by Quentin Benson, and appearing in the latest issue of intuitive-connections.net. You can find it at http://www.intuitive-connections.net/2008/b00k-omegaproject.htm

There are at least three important books that outline “the shamanizing of humanity,” as described in this book. The other two are Passport to the Cosmos, by John Mack, and The Final Choice, by Michael Grosso. There could be others. Ring’s and Mack’s books are the result of enormous scientific research. They all point in the same direction, that being labeled “the shamanizing of humanity.”

Ring studied both UFO encounters and Near Death Experiences. From the summary: “Despite the obvious differences between the UFOE and NDE, Dr. Ring declares that at a deeper level, there is a common link between these extraordinary encounters—the archetypal structure of both experiences. As the UFOE takes the general form of the Hero's Journey, so does the NDE. The domains of the two experiences are quite different, yet both NDE and CE4s appear to represent the Initiatory Journey.”

“Both NDErs and UFOrs enter a non-ordinary reality where they undergo an initiatory ordeal after which they return to their "real" life, but in some way transformed by their experience. Both NDEs and CE4s have the same structure and contain the same factors. The personal changes that occur after NDEs and UFOEs are permanent in other words. In Dr. Ring's own words, ‘Extraordinary encounters appear to be the gateway to a radical, biologically based transformation of the human personality.’"

Ring’s book concludes by referencing the little known work on the “imagination” as a dimension of reality, a “supersensible” dimension known intuitively or psychically, rather than with the senses. He argues that the changes coming have to do with this dimension becoming more “real” in our lives. That idea echoes Terrance McKenna, who in his book, Archaic Revival, predicts, without any evidence from the research above, that we are moving into the realm of the imagination. What that might mean for life on our planet is a fascinating subject which I intend to explore more.

We have the books, Passport to the Cosmos scheduled for summarizing by Connie Livingston Dunn, and The Final Choice scheduled for summarizing by Andrea Rumpsza. I’m looking for someone to summarize McKenna’s Archaic Revival. There could be other books along this line, which I hope to find, and if you have any suggestions, let me know. The above books are very high quality, grounded material for such mind-blowing topics.

If you have any hopes of joining us at our School of the Prophets, September 14-20, please go register at http://tinyurl.com/ywzs7t

Henry

Mind Before Matter

I just received an email about a conference being held in San Francisco, related to the book, Mind Before Matter: Visions of a New Science of Consciousness. The book’s authors include John Mack, Amit Goswami, and Dean Radin, all authors of books we have on our study list.

The theme is a basic one to what lies ahead. I was thinking the other day that the Course in Miracles may be viewed as founded on that core reality that consciousness precedes matter. The way I sometimes say it is that you could blow up the world into nothing—no more brains!—and consciousness would still exist. There is this trend in thought to reject the philosophy of materialism and replace it with one that makes consciousness the ultimate reality, one label Goswami gave for it was “monistic idealism.”

Another trend that is related is the increase in interest in “non-dual awareness.” It seems as it was first introduced to the West via Douglas Harding’s book, On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious. His is a startling “look” at non-dual awareness. It can be a shock, that “you” are really consciousness, and all is “one,” and the state quickly disappears, but you always remember it, and looking back, it is kind of obvious, but yet hard, for me at least, to let go into it for long periods of time. Interesting that over in the What is Enlightenment website, Andrew Cohen claims that he’s been with his students where they’ve enjoyed a shared sense of this experience lasting for hours. I can recall years ago being with a group where we were doing “Dream Theater” and we experienced it for a few moments. In any event, more people must have been having this experience as there are now many books out on the subject, including one on how psychotherapy for such individuals needs to be different—The Sacred Mirror is the title of that book, and Diane Evans, of our consciousness group, has prepared a summary of it, which I hope to get edited soon and posted on our webazine.

But meanwhile, while the philosophers are discussing the data from the work of Mack, Radin, and a bunch of others, while the Course in Miracles, the Hicks’ work, and other groups teach that philosophy, and provide guidance into how to move it from being a philosophy only and into a direct experience, and while another group of folks have been exploring non-dual awareness, at the same time there seem to be things afoot that are pushing us off our material base where we have to jump off the cliff into consciousness itself, like a bird discovering that it can fly. And this is where prophecy, earth changes, and consciousness evolution come together. There are events in progress that are creating chaos in our world and which are stimulating an evolutionary transition or “jump.” We can sense that one aspect of this shift has to do with the theme, to borrow a phrase, “Mind before Matter.” Interconnectedness is another, oneness, beyond boundaries—these are some other themes that express ways of looking at what’s happening.

Someone on our list emailed me and asked if I thought the trend might be toward a hive consciousness. I would say yes, and given time to elaborate, I would point to my work with the Sundance Experiment and the work relating to “extra-terrestial intelligence, of which one of my favorites is Jacques Vallee’s The Invisible College. Does anyone have a copy of that book? I’m sure there are other books exploring that theme.

Terrence McKenna predicted some time ago that the trend seemed to be that folks were living more and more in their imagination, until we shifted into a totally virtual reality. Even literally, as a recent news report indicated that a study had shown that less and less human hours are being spent in outdoor recreation, and more and more time with indoor electronic devices. There was less demand upon public parks but more demand for electronic gaming emporiums…. “going virtual.”

More later...

Video on the Mayan Calendar

Google has its own videos, not limited to the ten minute span available on You Tube
Here's a link to a video on the Mayan Calendar
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8689261981090121097&hl=en