Category: Mysticism

By Payam Nabarz

An outline of Mithraism, the traditional Roman secret faith renowned within the Roman Legions

• presents a finished background of Mithraism, together with its impact on Christianity and Islam

• contains rituals, meditations, and instructing stories for readers who desire to keep on with the Mithraic path

• stories the evolution and divergence of the jap (Persian) and Western (Roman) types of Mithraism

The Mysteries of Mithras provides a revival of the mystical practices and initiatory approach of Mithraism, the traditional Roman secret faith that was once immensely renowned within the Roman Legions from the past due moment century B.C. till A.D. four hundred and used to be taken to each nook of the Roman Empire. because the final pagan kingdom faith in Europe, it used to be crucial competitor to early Christianity and seriously inspired Christian doctrine and symbolism. The parallels among Christianity and historic Mithraism are striking--for instance, the god Mithra was once born of a virgin in a cave on December 25.

Payam Nabarz finds the background, origins, and non secular and philosophical tenets of Mithraism and its connections to Christianity, Islam, and Freemasonry. He additionally describes the trendy neo-pagan perform of Mithraism in facts this present day and for readers who desire to undertake the Mithraic direction, he contains seven of its initiatory rituals and meditations, in addition to orations and educating stories, that open the door to the seven Mithraic grades of passage.

By Robert K. C. Forman

In an exploration of mystical texts from historical India and China to medieval Europe and modern-day the US, Robert ok. C. Forman, one of many major voices within the examine of mystical reports, argues that a number of the degrees of mysticism is probably not formed via tradition, language, and historical past wisdom, yet fairly are an instantaneous come across with our very wide awake middle itself. Mysticism, brain, awareness specializes in first-hand debts of 2 distinctive varieties of mystical studies. via exam of texts, recorded interviews, and brave autobiographical reviews, the writer describes not just the well known "pure realization occasion" but additionally a brand new, hitherto uncharted "dualistic mystical state." He presents a radical and readable depiction of simply what mysticism sounds like. those debts, and the reports to which they provide voice, come up from the center of dwelling practices and feature substance and element some distance past almost any others within the literature. The e-book additionally reexamines the philosophical concerns that swirl round mysticism. as well as interpreting modern-day constructivist perspectives, Forman argues that the doctrines of Kant, Husserl, and Brentano can't be utilized to mysticism. in its place he deals new philosophical insights, in accordance with the paintings of chinese language thinker of brain Paramartha. The booklet concludes with an exam of brain and cognizance, which exhibits that mysticism has greatly to inform us approximately human event and the character of human wisdom some distance past mysticism itself.

By Paul Brunton

By Patrick Harpur

In The mystery culture of the Soul, author Patrick Harpur argues that solutions to life’s so much tough questions—the that means of lifestyles, the character of self, and the life of an afterlife—can be met by way of a visionary culture that runs via Western tradition, from Greek philosophy and Renaissance alchemy to Romantic poetry and glossy intensity psychology. This hidden culture, in response to Harpur, locations our soul on the heart of the universe and emphasizes mind's eye, the collective subconscious, and an “otherworld” or afterlife; principally, it teaches us the way to be aware of ourselves and the way to get better a feeling of that means mostly misplaced this day. Harpur indicates how this custom drives the literature of otherworld trips, from the flights of shamans and the goals of psychoanalysis to the mystic mind's eye of Romantic poets and the visions of these having near-death stories. The mystery Tradition of the Soul is the 1st e-book to assemble jointly all of the threads of the soul culture and weave them right into a greater, clearer photo, providing a worldview right away historic and progressive.

By Anonymous, A. C. Spearing

Within the fourteenth century there has been a good flourishing of spiritual writings in English, either orthodox and heretical. a lot of those works considering Christ's ardour and humanity, while The Cloud of Unknowing describes an summary, transcendent God past human wisdom and human language. Drawing upon considerably varied traditions, it's a wealthy paintings filled with interesting contradictions that speaks to us with liveliness and wit even this present day. The unknown writer, considered a clergyman and Carthusian monk, is usually believed to have written the opposite 3 works during this quantity: The Mystical Theology of Saint Denis, The booklet of Privy Counselling, and An Epistle on Prayer, which, including The Cloud of Unknowing, are the 4 texts on the center of medieval mystical theology.

This Penguin Classics version comprises complete explanatory notes, feedback for additional examining, an appendix that reproduces the center English textual content of a bit of the magical Theology of Saint Denis, and an advent that locations the texts in the context of medieval non secular writing.

By Robert K. C. Forman

This e-book is the sequel to Robert Forman's well-received assortment, The challenge of natural Consciousness (Oxford, 1990). The essays within the previous quantity argued that a few mystical stories don't appear to be shaped or formed via the language system--a thesis that stands in sharp contradistinction to deconstruction normally and to the "constructivist" institution of mysticism particularly, which holds that every one mysticism is the fabricated from a cultural and linguistic method. In The Innate Capacity, Forman and his colleagues recommend a speculation concerning the formative motives of those "pure realization" stories. the entire participants agree that mysticism is the results of an innate human skill, instead of a realized, socially conditioned and confident process.

The innate ability is known in numerous alternative ways. Many understand it as an expression of human cognizance consistent with se, knowledge itself. a few carry that awareness could be understood as a integrated hyperlink to a couple hidden, transcendent point of the realm, and mystical event is the event of that inherent connectedness. one other thesis that looks usually is that mystics discover this innate skill via a means of liberating the carry of the ego and the conceptual process. The participants the following examine mystical event because it is manifested in various non secular and cultural settings, together with Hindu Yoga, Buddhism, Sufism, and medieval Christianity. Taken jointly, the essays represent an incredible contribution to the continued debate concerning the nature of human attention and mystical adventure and its relation to the social and cultural contexts during which apparently.

By Alan W. Watts

By Ronney Mourad, Dianne Guenin-Lelle

This booklet provides the first-ever English translation of the felony Narratives written through the seventeenth-century French mystic and Quietist, Jeanne Guyon (1648-1717). even supposing she used to be marginalized and overlooked through French historians for 2 centuries after her dying, Guyon turned an important determine within the improvement of transatlantic Protestant spirituality within the eighteenth century, and her writings have remained popular between English-speaking audiences. Guyon's narrative describes her confinement among 1695 and 1703 in numerous prisons, together with the feared Bastille. It additionally maps, in relocating and. Read more...

By Wade Coleman

A sophisticated reference publication of Kabbalistic Gematria, directory Hebrew numerological and mystical meanings for each quantity from 1 to 1,000. A "must have" reference ebook for each severe pupil of the Western secret culture.

By John Lamb Lash

Basing a lot of Not in His Image at the Nag Hammadi and different Gnostic writings, John Lamb Lash explains how a little-known messianic sect propelled itself right into a dominant international energy, systematically wiping out the nice Gnostic non secular lecturers, the Druid monks, and the shamanistic healers of Europe and North Africa. They burned libraries and destroyed temples in an try and silence the traditional truth-tellers and retain their very own secrets and techniques. yet as Lash unearths, while in point of fact the planet Earth it can't be hidden or destroyed.

Not in His Image delves deeply into the shadows of historical Gnostic writings to reconstruct the tale early Christians attempted to clean from the pages of historical past, exploring the richness of the traditional ecu Pagan spirituality--the Pagan Mysteries, the good Goddess, Gnosis, the myths of Sophia and Gaia--and chronicles the annihilation of this Pagan ecu tradition by the hands of Christianity.

lengthy sooner than the delivery of Christianity, monotheism was once an anomaly; Europe and the close to East flourished lower than the divine suggestions of Sophia, the traditional goddess of knowledge. The Earth was once the embodiment of Sophia and hence sacred to the folk who sought achievement in her presence. This historical philosophy used to be threatening to the rising salvation-based creed of Christianity that used to be in accordance with patriarchal dominion over the Earth and lauded own anguish as a route to the afterlife. As Derrick Jensen issues out within the afterword, in Lash's arms Jesus Christ emerges because the agent provocateur of the ruling classes.