Abstract
A positive vision of what such a form of non-dogmatic rationality might entail is presented. This is distinguished from New Age or esoteric spirituality. Factors which contribute to the taboo against spirituality other than the distance between science and religion as previously analyzed are discussed. These include Nazism and Spirituality, and interpretations of esoteric spirituality. The presence and dangers of narcissism in spirituality are discussed in detail.
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Notes
- 1.
This is dealt with well in Schwarze Sonne: Die Macht Der Mythen Und Ihr Missbrauch in Nationalsozialismus Und Rechter Esoterik (Sünner 2009). This book also contains a lot of references and insights that present the dire world of the Nazis. Good references and summaries about the enchantment of German scholarship with Indian mythology and spirituality around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century that formed the scholarly-ideological backdrop of the ideology of Aryan history and its reverberations in German scholarly and popular culture can be found in Learning in Depth: A Case Study in Twin 5 × 5 Matrices of Consciousness (MacPhail 2013).
- 2.
- 3.
See the highly instructive introduction to The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Lopez 2011). Here the author describes the emotionally laden atmosphere of the mid nineteenth century, with the foundation of the Mormon movement and the beginnings of the spiritist movement. This is also well described in the introduction by S. Shamdasani (1994) in his edited version of From India to the Planet Mars. A Case of Multiple Personality with Imaginary Languages.
- 4.
Women were often treated as witches because they had knowledge of old forms of healing or of medicinal plants and treatments. However, these trials of witchcraft were often limited regionally, and had other reasons, such as personal envy, as well. It is very interesting to see that the official Roman Catholic Church was very skeptical in most cases and it was the local Inquisitors who were eager and overzealous. Additionally, most of the persecutions happened relatively late in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and very often in Protestant areas (Decker 2005; Ginzburg 1991).
- 5.
This is beautifully translated into sound by Bach in his motet “Jesus, meine Freude” (Jesus, my Heart’s Desire). Here Bach stakes death against life and groups the piece around the central five part Fugue “You are not flesh but spirit”.
- 6.
Aristotle was the first to formally deal with the issues of logic and pointed out that in a frame of sentences, a sentence can either be true or false. It can only rain, or not rain, not both at the same time. Formally, this is expressed in the logical truisms such as the Sentence of the Excluded Middle: Something cannot be, at the same time, under the same circumstances, at the same place and not be. This is the basis for our common logic which is also called two-valued, because it only has two truth values: true and false. This is the basis of our algorithmically operating computing systems which are built on that logic. This is also the reason why it is sometimes called Aristotelian logic. There are other logical systems, for instance, for situations where there is more than one truth value, as pointed out by Putnam (1975) in his papers on quantum logic. However, this should not be misunderstood as a free ticket for sloppy thinking. Logic needs to be mastered, before it can be transcended.
- 7.
- 8.
We have tried to elucidate this process and postulated that this is the place in which spiritual experience becomes knowledge (Walach and Runehov 2010).
- 9.
It is known of Gustav Mahler that he wrote the incredibly complex score of the 8th Symphony in E flat major after having had a musical vision about it. We also know of Mozart that he heard his music in the mind and simply wrote it down. This “inner hearing” is clearly more than an algorithmic clarification of a structure, and is probably more akin to a holistic viewing of an inner enlightenment or what I have here called a spiritual experience.
- 10.
- 11.
Parents normally comment positively on the behavior of their children, especially if they have small successes and progressions. This allows the children to experience that they are loved and liked just the way they are. At this point the development in self-theory is in close alignment to the attachment research that has sprung from the work of Bowlby (Bowlby 1969; Fonagy et al. 1995).
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Walach, H. (2015). Distortions, Dangers, Further Considerations. In: Secular Spirituality. Studies in Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09345-1_6
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