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Books > Religion & Spirituality > Alternative belief systems > Contemporary non-Christian & para-Christian cults & sects > Spiritualism
Buckland's Book of Spirit Communications is for anyone who
wishes to communicate with spirits, as well as for the less
adventurous who simply want to satisfy their curiosity about the
subject. Explore the nature of the physical body and learn how to
prepare yourself to become a medium. Experience for yourself the
trance state, clairvoyance, psychometry, table tipping, levitation,
talking boards, automatic writing, spiritual photography, spiritual
healing, distant healing, channeling, and development circles. Also
learn how to avoid spiritual fraud. This revised and expanded
edition of Buckland's popular Doors to Other Worlds has over one
hundred new pages, including a completely new chapter on electronic
spirit contact. It features additional photographs and
illustrations, an index, a new preface, and a workbook format with
study questions and answers for each chapter.
Book Four of the Law of One is the last of the books in the Law of
One series. Book Four explores in great detail the archetypical
mind which is the framework provided by our Logos or sun body to
aid each of us in the evolution of mind, body, and spirit. Tarot,
astrology, and ritual magic are three paths offering the study of
the archetypical mind, and in Book Four a study of that rich
resource is undertaken using the tarot, also uncovered on the
nature and purpose of the veil that we experience between the
conscious and the unconscious minds and the process of "forgetting"
that occurs during each incarnation in our third-density
experience. In Book Four the path of the adept becomes more clear
as Ra elucidates the adept's use of experience to balance its
energy centres and penetrate the veil of forgetting.
James Van Praagh is a spiritual medium--someone who is able to
bridge the physical and spiritual worlds. Unaware of his spiritual
gifts until he was in his twenties, he slowly came to terms with
his unique abilities. In addition, many of his sessions with
grieving people who came to him looking to contact the spirits of
deceased loved ones are explored. From a devastated mother
recieving a message of hope from her deceased little girl to
communicating with a young man, killed in Vietnam, who doesn't
realize he's dead, the theme of hope and peace in the afterlife is
affirmed. Van Praagh also helps the reader recognize and positively
deal with the pain of grief in a healthy, honest manner. Part
spiritual memoir, part case study, part instrumental guide, Talking
to Heaven will change the way you perceive death...and life.
In classical antiquity, there was much interest in
necromancy--the consultation of the dead for divination. People
could seek knowledge from the dead by sleeping on tombs, visiting
oracles, and attempting to reanimate corpses and skulls. Ranging
over many of the lands in which Greek and Roman civilizations
flourished, including Egypt, from the Greek archaic period through
the late Roman empire, this book is the first comprehensive survey
of the subject ever published in any language.
Daniel Ogden surveys the places, performers, and techniques of
necromancy as well as the reasons for turning to it. He
investigates the cave-based sites of oracles of the dead at
Heracleia Pontica and Tainaron, as well as the oracles at the
Acheron and Avernus, which probably consisted of lakeside
precincts. He argues that the Acheron oracle has been long
misidentified, and considers in detail the traditions attached to
each site. Readers meet the personnel--real or imagined--of ancient
necromancy: ghosts, zombies, the earliest vampires, evocators,
sorcerers, shamans, Persian magi, Chaldaeans, Egyptians, Roman
emperors, and witches from Circe to Medea. Ogden explains the
technologies used to evocate or reanimate the dead and to compel
them to disgorge their secrets. He concludes by examining ancient
beliefs about ghosts and their wisdom--beliefs that underpinned and
justified the practice of necromancy.
The first of its kind and filled with information, this volume
will be of central importance to those interested in the rapidly
expanding, inherently fascinating, and intellectually exciting
subjects of ghosts and magic in antiquity.
In this unique and important book, now celebrating its 20th
anniversary, one of the world's great spiritual leaders offers his
practical wisdom and advice on how we can overcome everyday human
problems and achieve lasting happiness. The Art of Happiness is a
highly accessible guide for a western audience, combining the Dalai
Lama's eastern spiritual tradition with Dr Howard C. Cutler's
western perspective. Covering all key areas of human experience,
they apply the principles of Tibetan Buddhism to everyday problems
and reveal how one can find balance and complete spiritual and
mental freedom. For the many who wish to understand more about the
Dalai Lama's approach to living, there has never been a book which
brings his beliefs so vividly into the real world.
In its day, spiritualism brought hundreds of thousands of Americans
to seance tables and trance lectures. It has alternately been
ridiculed as the apogee of fatuous credulity and hailed as a
feminist movement. Its tricks have been exposed, its charlatans
unmasked, and its heroes' names lost to posterity. In its day,
however, its leaders were household names and politicians worried
about capturing the Spiritualist vote. Cathy Gutierrez places
Spiritualism in the context of the 19th-century American
Renaissance. Although this epithet usually signifies the sudden
blossoming of American letters, Gutierrez points to its original
meaning: a cultural imagination enraptured with the past and the
classics in particular, accompanied by a cultural efflorescence.
Spiritualism, she contends, was the religious articulation of the
American Renaissance, and the ramifications of looking backward for
advice about the present were far-reaching. The Spiritualist
movement, says Gutierrez, was a 'renaissance of the Renaissance, '
a culture in love with history as much as it trumpeted progress and
futurity, and an expression of what constituted religious hope
among burgeoning technology and colonialism. Rejecting Christian
ideas about salvation, Spiritualists embraced Platonic and
Neoplatonic ideas. Humans were shot through with the divine, rather
than seen as helpless and inexorably corrupt sinners in the hands
of a transcendent, angry God. Gutierrez's study of this fascinating
and important movement is organized thematically. She analyzes
Spiritualist conceptions of memory, marriage, medicine, and minds,
explores such phenomena as machines for contacting the dead,
spirit-photography, the idea of eternal spiritual affinity (which
implied the necessity for marriage reform), the connection between
health and spirituality, and mesmerism."
This is an exercise in love, an attempt at developing taste, a test
of how sweet a word can be, an ode to moments. This is a
manifestation of slowness and quiet and sunshine, early mornings
and late evenings, glad memories and slender times. This is
yearning and giving, an extended meditation on letters, what they
can and cannot do for one's being. Meia Geddes' debut LOVE LETTERS
TO THE WORLD -- a series of 120 lyrical prose poem missives --
addresses the world as body, concept, stranger. Ultimately, this
collection is a quiet celebration and exploration of life, love,
language, and one's place in the world.
A fascinating story of spirits and conjurors, skeptics and converts
in the second half of nineteenth century America viewed through the
lives of Kate and Maggie Fox, the sisters whose purported
communication with the dead gave rise to the Spiritualism movement
- and whose recanting forty years later is still shrouded in
mystery.
In March of 1848, Kate and Maggie Fox - sisters aged 11 and 14 -
anxiously reported to a neighbor that they had been hearing
strange, unidentified sounds in their house. From a sequence of
knocks and rattles translated by the young girls as a "voice from
beyond," the Modern Spiritualism movement was born.
"Talking to the Dead" follows the fascinating story of the two
girls who were catapulted into an odd limelight after communicating
with spirits that March night. Within a few years, tens of
thousands of Americans were flocking to seances. An international
movement followed. Yet thirty years after those first knocks, the
sisters shocked the country by denying they had ever contacted
spirits. Shortly after, the sisters once again changed their story
and reaffirmed their belief in the spirit world. Weisberg traces
not only the lives of the Fox sisters and their family (including
their mysterious Svengali-like sister Leah) but also the social,
religious, economic and political climates that provided the
breeding ground for the movement. While this is a thorough,
compelling overview of a potent time in US history, it is also an
incredible ghost story.
An entertaining read - a story of spirits and conjurors,
skeptics and converts - "Talking to the Dead" is full of emotion
and surprise. Yet it will also provoke questions that were being
asked in the 19thcentury, and are still being asked today - how do
we know what we know, and how secure are we in our knowledge?
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