Do you have a soul? How can you know? Can science demonstrate its existence? What difference does it make? These are among the difficult and important questions at the heart of "Beyond Death". In the wake of the revolution of quantum physics, an increasing number of scientists have acknowledged the very real possibility of the existence of spirit or soul. The book sets out to prove the existence of spirit and its survival after death, not by appealing to some airy-fairy new age theory or religious dogma, but from empirical evidence gathered by qualified researchers from a number of scientific disciplines. Mind-matter interaction, research into healing and remote viewing, consciousness at the cellular level, near-death experiences and biological evidence of reincarnation are among the many perspectives from which this crucial subject is explored. What does this mean to you? Imagine it is after your 'death' and you are looking back on this, your past life. Ask yourself what kind of life from here onward would please you as a spirit? What personal challenges met, fears overcome, actions taken and deeds done would make you proud? By answering this question now and moving on through life with that answer always present in your heart, you will have unlocked the secret of spirit and the true purpose of your life.

The first serious attempt to illuminate, for English-language readers, the mystical roots of the ideas and teachings of the great thirteenth-century Jewish scholar Nachmanides.

How can we, or should we, talk about God? What concepts are involved in the idea of a Supreme Being? This book is about the search to reconcile modern metaphysics with traditional theism - focusing on the seminal work of Austin Farrer who was Warden of Keble College, Oxford, until his death in 1968, and one of the most original and important philosophers of religion of this century.

Drawing on medieval Chinese poetry, fiction, and religious scriptures, this book illuminates the greatest goddess of Taoism and her place in Chinese society.

The origin story of every culture contains a description of animism; humans in direct relationship with the land and, through the reciprocity of that connection, evolving together. The livelihood of humans and Nature is intertwined. If one ails, so does the other. History is littered with stories of losing that connection, and the toll this takes in the form of humans against each other, humans against Nature. Between colonization, conscription into the Church, imperialization, and industrialization, we have created systems of destruction that have decimated our relationship to the land, and to each other. From within these systems institutionalized racism, sexism, and all aspects of 'othering' became embedded in our political and social structures. As modern pagans, we recognize the need to tear down these structures and build supportive, inclusive new ones. Our spiritual paths are Nature-based and Ancestor-honoring, the rituals of which heal land wounds and ancestral trauma, to create sacred recovery and activism for all. This anthology presents modern pagan activists working through their spiritual lines to do better. Edited by Trevor Greenfield, publisher of Moon Books and editor of Naming the Goddess, with contributory essays from eleven pagan voices.

In the Upper Amazon, mestizos are the Spanish-speaking descendants of Hispanic colonizers and the indigenous peoples of the jungle. Some mestizos have migrated to Amazon towns and cities, such as Iquitos and Pucallpa; most remain in small villages. They have retained features of a folk Catholicism and traditional Hispanic medicine, and have incorporated much of the religious tradition of the Amazon, especially its healing, sorcery, shamanism, and the use of potent plant hallucinogens, including ayahuasca. The result is a uniquely eclectic shamanist culture that continues to fascinate outsiders with its brilliant visionary art. Ayahuasca shamanism is now part of global culture. Once the terrain of anthropologists, it is now the subject of novels and spiritual memoirs, while ayahuasca shamans perform their healing rituals in Ontario and Wisconsin. Singing to the Plants sets forth just what this shamanism is about--what happens at an ayahuasca healing ceremony, how the apprentice shaman forms a spiritual relationship with the healing plant spirits, how sorcerers inflict the harm that the shaman heals, and the ways that plants are used in healing, love magic, and sorcery.

The Theologia Indorum by Dominican friar Domingo de Vico was the first Christian theology written in the Americas. Made available in English translation for the first time, Americas' First Theologies presents a selection of exemplary sections from the Theologia Indorum that illustrate Friar Vico's doctrine of god, cosmogony, moral anthropology, understanding of natural law and biblical history, and constructive engagement with pre-Hispanic Maya religion. Rather than merely condemn the Maya religion, Vico appropriated local terms and images from Maya mythology and rituals that he thought could convey Christianity. His attempt at translating, if not reconfiguring, Christianity for a Maya readership required his mastery of not only numerous Mayan languages but also the highly poetic ceremonial rhetoric of many indigenous Mesoamerican peoples. This book also includes translations of two other pastoral texts and parts of a songbook and a catechism. These texts, written in Highland Mayan languages by fellow Dominicans, demonstrate the wider influence of Vico's ethnographic approach shared by a particular school of Dominicans. Altogether, The Americas' First Theologies provides a rich documentary case example of the translation, reception, and reaction to Christian thought in the indigenous Americas.

Equanimity, good health, peace of mind, and long life are the goals of the ancient Taoist tradition known as "internal alchemy," of which "Cultivating Stillness " is a key text. Written between the second and fifth centuries, the book is attributed to T'ai Shang Lao-chun--the legendary figure more widely known as Lao-Tzu, author of the "Tao-te Ching ." The accompanying commentary, written in the nineteenth century by Shui-ch'ing Tzu, explains the alchemical symbolism of the text and the methods for cultivating internal stillness of body and mind. A principal part of the Taoist canon for many centuries, "Cultivating Stillness " is still the first book studied by Taoist initiates today.

Through in-depth analysis of musical theatre choreography and choreographers, Making Broadway Dance challenges long-held perceptions of Broadway dance as kitsch, disposable, a dance form created without artistic process. Setting out to demonstrate that musical theatre dance is not a monolith but rather multi-varied in terms of dance styles, aesthetics and methodologies, author Liza Gennaro provides insights into how Broadway dance is made. By examining choreography for musical theatre through the lens of dance studies, script analysis, movement research and dramaturgical inquiry, she treads in uncharted territory by offering a close examination of a dance form that has heretofore received only the most superficial interrogation. She also explores how musical theatre choreographers create within the parameters of librettos, enhance character development and build dance languages that inform and propel narrative. By considering influences from ballet, modern, postmodern, Jazz, social and global dance, she reveals a rich understanding of musical theatre dance. This book exposes the choreographic systems of some of Broadway's most influential dance-makers including George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, Jerome Robbins, Katherine Dunham, Bob Fosse, Savion Glover, Sergio Trujillo, Steven Hoggett and Camille Brown, and is essential reading for theatre and dance scholars, students, practitioners, and Broadway fans.

In this book you can discover the hidden and mystical secrets in Christianity. Few people realise that great mystical secrets lie hidden within the teachings of Christianity, secrets to the laws of the universe and their application to our lives. The Occult Christ reveals Christianity's origin in the tradition of the Ancient Mystery Schools from around the world. The true Christ Mysteries were a cosmic effort to restore the power and mysticism of the Divine on a personal level. One of its goals was to acknowledge and reaffirm the role of the Divine Feminine within the world and within us. They reveal how to access great power through the sacred festivals of the seasons - times in which the veils between the physical and the spiritual are thinnest. They show a way for greater self-realisation that will enhance all spiritual faiths and endeavours. The Occult Christ will breathe new life into your spiritual foundations and help you to walk the road of shadows where secret knowledge of the soul dwells. prosperity; discover the occult meaning of the cross and star; discover the 7 masculine and 7 feminine mysteries of spiritual initiation; discover the hidden significance of people and events in the life of the historical Jesus; work and commune with angelic hierarchies; and, gain insight into the psychic phenomena of scriptures, along with the Qabalistic teachings.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

The Blue Cliff Record is a translation of the Pi Yen Lu, a collection of one hundred Zen koans - the paradoxical teaching stories used by Zen teachers to go beneath rational thought - accompanied by commentaries and appreciatory verses from the teachings of the Chinese Zen masters. Compiled in the twelfth century, by the great Zen master and poet Hseh-tou Ch'ung-hsien it is considered to be one of the greatest treasures of Zen literature and an essential study manual for students of Zen.

In terms of public opinion, new religious movements are considered controversial for a variety of reasons. Their social organization often runs counter to popular expectations by experimenting with communal living, alternative leadership roles, unusual economic dispositions, and new political and ethical values. As a result the general public views new religions with a mixture of curiosity, amusement, and anxiety, sustained by lavish media emphasis on oddness and tragedy rather than familiarity and lived experience.
This updated and revised second edition of Controversial New Religions offers a scholarly, dispassionate look at those groups that have generated the most attention, including some very well-known classical groups like The Family, Unification Church, Scientology, and Jim Jones's People's Temple; some relative newcomers such as the Kabbalah Centre, the Order of the Solar Temple, Branch Davidians, Heaven's Gate, and the Falun Gong; and some interesting cases like contemporary Satanism, the Raelians, Black nationalism, and various Pagan groups. Each essay combines an overview of the history and beliefs of each organization or movement with original and insightful analysis. By presenting decades of scholarly work on new religious movements written in an accessible form by established scholars as well as younger experts in the field, this book will be an invaluable resource for all those who seek a view of new religions that is deeper than what can be found in sensationalistic media stories.

Pantheism is the idea that God and the world are identical-that the creator, sustainer, destroyer, and transformer of all things is the universe itself. From a monotheistic perspective, this notion is irremediably heretical since it suggests divinity might be material, mutable, and multiple. Since the excommunication of Baruch Spinoza, Western thought has therefore demonized what it calls pantheism, accusing it of incoherence, absurdity, and-with striking regularity-monstrosity. In this book, Mary-Jane Rubenstein investigates this perennial repugnance through a conceptual genealogy of pantheisms. What makes pantheism "monstrous"-at once repellent and seductive-is that it scrambles the raced and gendered distinctions that Western philosophy and theology insist on drawing between activity and passivity, spirit and matter, animacy and inanimacy, and creator and created. By rejecting the fundamental difference between God and world, pantheism threatens all the other oppositions that stem from it: light versus darkness, male versus female, and humans versus every other organism. If the panic over pantheism has to do with a fear of crossed boundaries and demolished hierarchies, then the question becomes what a present-day pantheism might disrupt and what it might reconfigure. Cobbling together heterogeneous sources-medieval heresies, their pre- and anti-Socratic forebears, general relativity, quantum mechanics, nonlinear biologies, multiverse and indigenous cosmologies, ecofeminism, animal and vegetal studies, and new and old materialisms-Rubenstein assembles possible pluralist pantheisms. By mobilizing this monstrous mixture of unintentional God-worlds, Pantheologies gives an old heresy the chance to renew our thinking.

This is the extraordinary account of Donner-Grau's experiences with doña Mercedes, an aged healer in a remote Venezuelan town known for its spiritualists, sorcerers, and mediums.

In this transcription of the Medicine Rite, the most sacred ritual of the Winnebago Indians, anthropologist Paul Radin captured a poetic source of profound importance to the understanding of mystical experience. Performed by medicine men upon the initiation of a member to their cult, this secret rite recapitulated the mythic origins and heroes of the Winnebago while integrating those present with the ancestral forces.

In this definitive work-a product of more than half a century of research and close observation-the noted anthropologist Omer C. Stewart provides a sweeping reconstruction of the rise of peyotism and the Native American Church. Although it is commonly known that the modern peyote religion became formalized around 1880 in western Oklahoma, it had roots in precontact American Indian ritual. Today it is practiced by thousands upon thousands of American Indians throughout the West.

Long a subject of controversy, peyotism has become a unifying influence in Indian life, providing the basis for ceremonies, friendships, social gatherings, travel, marriage, and much more. As Stewart demonstrates, it has been a source of comfort and healing and a means of expression for a troubled people.

With widespread publicity concerning the near death experience, many people are now searching for a deeper understanding of death and the process of dying. Esoteric teachings on the subtle bodies and their interrelationship have much to offer to those pondering on and researching the mystery of death. Resurrection is the keynote of nature; death is not. Death is only the ante-chamber of resurrection.

How to find deeper meaning in magical workings with Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Spirit and connect with the Old Ways. Many contemporary pagan books rarely go further than describing the use of the elemental energies as markers in casting the Circle. In The Power of the Elements we consider drawing on the energy from the deepest levels of the ocean, the highest peaks of the mountains, the limits of outer space and the path of the hurricane. And why it is so important to return to the Classic Elements of the Greeks if we really want our magic to work.

Thor is an immensely popular God but also one of contradictions, whose complexity is sometimes underrated. Often depicted as oafish, he was clever enough to outwit the dwarf Alviss (All-wise). A god of storms and thunder, he brought fertility and blessed brides at weddings and although a defender of civilization and order, he usually travelled with a trickster deity. Pagan Portals - Thor is an introductory book that examines both history and mythology, untangling older beliefs from modern pop-culture.

The essential companion to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenom of Man, The Divine Milieu expands on the spiritual message so basic to his thought. He shows how man's spiritual life can become a participation in the destiny of the universe.

Teilhard de Chardin -- geologist, priest, and major voice in twentieth-century Christianity -- probes the ultimate meaning of all physical exploration and the fruit of his own inner life. The Divine Milieu is a spiritual treasure for every religion bookshelf.