A guide to integrating indigenous thinking into modern life for a more interconnected and spiritual relationship with our fellow beings, Mother Earth, and the natural ways of the universe. There is a natural law-a spiritual intelligence that we are all born with that lies within our hearts. Lakota spiritual leader Doug Good Feather shares the authentic knowledge that has been handed down through the Lakota generations to help you make and recognize this divine connection, centered around the Seven Sacred Directions in the Hoop of Life: Wiyohinyanpata-East: New Beginnings Itokagata-South: The Breath of Life Wiyohpeyata-West: The Healing Powers Waziyata-North: Earth Medicine Wankatakab-Above: The Great Mystery Khuta-Below: The Source of Life Hochoka-Center: The Center of Life Once you begin to understand and recognize these strands, you can integrate them into modern life through the Threefold Path: The Way of the Seven Generations-Conscious living The Way of the Buffalo-Mindful consumption The Way of the Community-Collective impact

Drawing on a wealth of new evidence, pioneering research psychologist David DeSteno shows why religious practices and rituals are so beneficial to those who follow them-and to anyone, regardless of their faith (or lack thereof). Scientists are beginning to discover what believers have known for a long time: the rewards that a religious life can provide. For millennia, people have turned to priests, rabbis, imams, shamans, and others to help them deal with issues of grief and loss, birth and death, morality and meaning. In this absorbing work, DeSteno reveals how numerous religious practices from around the world improve emotional and physical well-being. With empathy and rigor, DeSteno chronicles religious rites and traditions from cradle to grave. He explains how the Japanese rituals surrounding childbirth help strengthen parental bonds with children. He describes how the Apache Sunrise Ceremony makes teenage girls better able to face the rigors of womanhood. He shows how Buddhist meditation reduces hostility and increases compassion. He demonstrates how the Jewish practice of sitting shiva comforts the bereaved. And much more. DeSteno details how belief itself enhances physical and mental health. But you don't need to be religious to benefit from the trove of wisdom that religion has to offer. Many items in religion's "toolbox" can help the body and mind whether or not one believes. How God Works offers advice on how to incorporate many of these practices to help all of us live more meaningful, successful, and satisfying lives.

Move beyond where you are right now to where you want to be-emotionally, financially, creatively-in all aspects of your life. Wouldn't you like to experience a lasting sense of wholeness and peace that is unshakeable, no matter what may be happening around you? Complete fulfillment is the promise of Remember Ye Are Gods. Within these pages, you'll learn how to look at and navigate through life in a whole new way. You will understand your purpose and how to receive the abundant gifts waiting for you. By making a critical transformation from a reactive to a spiritual being, you will increase your creative energy, get control of your life, and enjoy new spiritual levels of existence. Remember Ye Are Gods is rooted in the perfect union of the physical and spiritual laws already at work in your life. This is the power of the book Remember Ye Are Gods. It is the path from the momentary pleasure that most of us settle, for the lasting fulfillment that is yours to claim. Your deepest desires are waiting to be realized.

Many more philosophic minds than mine have thought over the religious side of this subject and many more scientific brains have turned their attention to its phenomenal aspect. So far as I know, however, there has been no former attempt to show the exact relation of the one to the other. I feel that if I should succeed in making this a little more clear I shall have helped in what I regard as far the most important question with which the human race is concerned. A celebrated Psychic, Mrs. Piper, uttered, in the year 1899 words which were recorded by Dr. Hodgson at the time. She was speaking in trance upon the future of spiritual religion, and she said: "In the next century this will be astonishingly perceptible to the minds of men. I will also make a statement which you will surely see verified. Before the clear revelation of spirit communication there will be a terrible war in different parts of the world. The entire world must be purified and cleansed before mortal can see, through his spiritual vision, his friends on this side and it will take just this line of action to bring about a state of perfection. Friend, kindly think of this." We have had "the terrible war in different parts of the world." The second half remains to be fulfilled.

Design and Spirituality examines the philosophical context of our current situation and argues for a re-establishment and re-affirmation of self-transcending priorities, together with an ethos of moderation and sufficiency. It covers a wide range of topics broadly related to the main theme, including material culture and spiritual teachings; sustainability and the spiritual perspective; traditional and indigenous knowledge; technology and spirituality; notions of meaningful design; and the deeper, symbolic significance of (some) material things. The author is a leading thinker in the field and he presents his arguments in a manner that invites the reader to reflect and to think about where we are going, why we are going there and what really matters.

Spirited Histories combines ethnography with critical theory to provide a sophisticated exploration of the intersection of haunting and the paranormal with technology, media, and history. Retrieving the past in places of trauma and death can take on many facets. One of these is an attention to hauntings, ghosts, and absences that go with the collective experience of loss and disappearance. People memorialize the dead and their stories in myriad ways. But what about the untold stories, or the forgotten, unnamed? This book explores the ways groups of Chilean paranormal investigators and ghost tour operators produce alternate histories using paranormal machinery, rather than simply theatricalizing pain. It offers a look at technologies, machines, and apparatuses - themselves imbued with a long history of supernatural and scientific expectations - and a social analysis of how certain groups of people marshal the voices of the dead to generate particular micro-histories. This fascinating volume will be of interest to a range of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, history, religious studies, and scholars of technology and new media.

Originally published in 1968 The Founders of Psychical Research is centred upon the lives and work of Henry Sidgwick, Edmund Gurney and Frederic Myers - prominent in the Society for Psychical Research (S.P.R) - during its early years: it is not a history of the Society. It passes over important aspects of the S.P.R.'s story and deals at some length with matters quite outside it. The book frequently gives accounts of 'paranormal' phenomena which if indeed they occurred, would not be explainable through any recognisable hypothesis, but are treated throughout as unexplained.

Using a wide range of unexplored archival material, this book examines the 'spectral' influence of Victorian spiritualism and Psychical Research on women's writing, analysing the ways in which modern writers have both subverted and mimicked nineteenth century sources in their evocation of the seance.

Originally published in 1982, The Shaman and the Magician draws on the author's wide experience of occultism, western magic and anthropological knowledge of shamanism, to explore the interesting parallels between traditional shamanism and the more visionary aspects of magic in modern western society. In both cases, as the author shows, the magician encounters profound god-energies of the spirit, and it is up to the individual to interpret these experiences in psychological or mythological terms. The book demonstrates that both shamanism and magic offer techniques of approaching the visionary sources of our culture.

Originally published in 1978, The Occult Sourcebook has been compiled primarily for the many people who are for the first time becoming engrossed by the numerous and often confusing possibilities underlying the occult sciences. It consists of a series of articles on key areas, providing the reader with easy access to basic facts, together with a carefully planned guide to further reading. Critical comments on the recommended books allow the reader to select those which best suit their interests. The authors have also included a 'Who's Who of the occult' to provide short biographies of some of the more amazing figures who have already travelled down the mystic path. The book offers a programmed system of exploration into the realms of the unknown. It will be invaluable to the increasing number of people who are concerned with the exploration of enlarging human consciousness.

Originally published in 1974 Intimacy and Ritual is a sympathetic study of spiritualist activities and their relation to the practitioners' secular lives. The book, in particular, looks at the therapeutic function of spiritualism. Based on the author's fieldwork as a 'participant observer' among spiritualists in a South Wales town, the research covers spiritualists services and meetings as well as interviews with spiritualists in their own homes. The book gives an accurate account of spiritualist doctrines and beliefs about the spirit world. The book postulates that spirit possession always relates to illness and shows how this is often the physical counterpart of social malaise. Throughout the study, spiritualism is seen in terms of the coping techniques and the rewards which it offers its members. The book shows that spiritualism is more highly regarded as a problem-solving source than the formal care-giving organizations, such as psychiatrist hospitals and the social work agencies. Healing activities are interpreted as a symbolic enactment of male and female roles ideally conceived, and spiritualist messages offer symbols and explanations of illness and misfortune.

"This is a new and scholarly study of William Michael Rossetti's seance diary, which is a fascinating first-hand source for the Rossetti brothers in the 1860s and offers a new perspective on the relationship between the Pre-Raphaelite circle and the spiritualist world." (Jan Marsh) "As quirky and unsettling as the table-turnings it documents, this meticulously edited and annotated seance diary features guest-appearances from the spirits of John Polidori, Elizabeth Siddal and Gabriele Rossetti, among many notable others. Essential reading for anyone interested in the Pre-Raphaelites, Spiritualism, and the Victorian paranormal." (Dinah Roe, Reader in Nineteenth Century Literature, Oxford Brookes University) William Michael Rossetti's seance diary is a remarkable document in both the history of Pre-Raphaelitism and nineteenth-century spiritualism. In this previously unpublished manuscript, Rossetti meticulously recorded twenty seances between 1865 and 1868. The original motive was the death, in 1862, of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's wife, Elizabeth Siddal. He felt a profound sense of guilt about her and began these seances to reassure himself that she was happy in the afterlife. Messages came from many spirits within the Pre-Raphaelite circle and provide an unprecedented record of spiritualist activity in the late nineteenth century. Questions and answers fill the pages of the diary, many of them communicating uncannily accurate information or details that could be known only to the participants. This book also includes another unpublished document showing spiritualism in action. It comprises a long letter to Dante Gabriel Rossetti written in 1856 from the artist and spiritualist medium Anna Mary Howitt recounting her interactions with the spirit world and her (sometimes violent) experiences as she became aware of the extent of her psychic powers. Both sections of this book provide an original insight into the cult of spiritualism and throw considerable light on the interactions between members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle and beyond.

Exploring religious and spiritual changes which have been taking place among Indigenous populations in Australia and New Zealand, this book focuses on important changes in religious affiliation in census data over the last 15 years. Drawing on both local social and political debates, while contextualising the discussion in wider global debates about changing religious identities, especially the growth of Islam, the authors present a critical analysis of the persistent images and discourses on Aboriginal religions and spirituality. This book takes a comparative approach to other Indigenous and minority groups to explore contemporary changes in religious affiliation which have raised questions about resistance to modernity, challenges to the nation state and/or rejection of Christianity or Islam. Helena Onnudottir, Adam Posssamai and Bryan Turner offer a critical analysis to on-going public, political and sociological debates about religious conversion (especially to Islam) and changing religious affiliations (including an increase in the number of people who claim 'no religion') among Indigenous populations. This book also offers a major contribution to the growing debate about conversion to Islam among Australian Aborigines, Maoris and Pacific peoples.

Su-un and His World of Symbols explores the image which Choe Che-u (Su-un), the founder of Donghak (Eastern Learning) Korea's first indigenous religion, had of himself as a religious leader and human being. Su-un gave his life so that he could share his symbols, his scriptures and the foundational principals of his religion with all people, regardless of their status, gender, age or education. His egalitarian creed challenged the major religious traditions in Korea, and Korean society as a whole, to reflect on the innate dignity of each individual, and to reform their social, ethical and religious practices to accord with the reality of the Divine presence in the 'sacred refuge' that lies within. Exploring the two symbols which Su-un created and used to disseminate his religion, and the two books of Scripture which he composed, this book breaks new ground by presenting the only major work in English which attempts to ascertain the image Su-un had of himself as the prototype of a new kind of religious leader in Korea, and by extension, East Asia.

This book provides a new sociological account of contemporary religious phenomena such as channelling, holistic healing, meditation and divination, which are usually classed as part of a New Age Movement. Drawing on his extensive ethnography carried out in the UK, alongside comparative studies in America and Europe, Matthew Wood criticises the view that such phenomena represent spirituality in which self-authority is paramount. Instead, he emphasises the role of social authority and the centrality of spirit possession, linking these to participants' class positions and experiences of secularisation. Informed by sociological and anthropological approaches to social power and practice, especially the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, Wood's study explores what he calls the nonformative regions of the religious field, and charts similarities and differences with pagan, spiritualist and Theosophical traditions.