Holy Spirit

Child Jesus with the virgin Mary, with the Holy Spirit (represented as a dove) and God the Father, with child john the Baptist and saint Elizabeth on the right, 1665-1670 Bartolomeo Esteban Murillo via Wikipedia

In Christian theology, The Holy Spirit is one of the three “persons” constituting the Holy Trinity of The Father, The Son and the Holy Spirit.

Each person is said to be eternal, equal, distinct and yet of the same substance. The term Holy Ghost is an old English version of the Latin Spiritus.

In the New Testament Jesus promises his disciples that the Paraclete or Spirit of Truth will return. However, the worldly and evil people of this world cannot and will not see it unless they repent (John 14:16-17).

Around 360 CE the early Christian Church opposed as heretical the idea of the pneumatomachi–-the teaching that Jesus Christ but not the Spirit is Divine.

In 381 the Council of Constantinople repudiated these heretics by declaring the dogma of the Holy Spirit. This was further elaborated in 589 by the Council of Toledo’s dogma of double procession, or the filioque, which stipulates that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.

This teaching became popular as the Nicene Creed spread throughout the empire of the Franks from the 9^th-century onward. But due to an apparent temporal paradox (How can the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father and the Son if the Holy Trinity is co-eternal?), the filioque has been controversial and, indeed, openly attacked by the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Many Christians tend to describe the Holy Spirit as an indwelling of the divine. That is, God is wholly-other but also immanent as a numinous experience. On the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, Karl Gross cites Evelyn Underhill:

As they know themselves to dwell in the world of time and yet to be capable of transcending it, so the Ultimate Reality, they think, inhabits yet inconceivably exceeds all that they know to be — as the soul of the musician controls and exceeds not merely each note of the flowing melody, but also the whole of the symphony in which these cadences must play their part. » Source

However, a philosophical problem arises with the idea of indwelling. It’s obvious that many religious groups (and individuals) claim to be guided by the Holy Spirit while promoting drastically different agendas. Perhaps a partial solution to this problem could be to say that some of these groups and individuals are closer to enacting God’s will than others.

Related Posts » Arius, Calvinism, Christianity, Confirmation, Joachim of Fiore, John the Baptist, Otto (Rudolf), Psychosis, Spirit, Swedenborg (Emanuel), Tradition, Wave

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Spiritual Attack

Spiritual Warfare: Chris and Laura

Spiritual Attack

The idea of spiritual attack is found in most religious and spiritual traditions where ridding oneself of negative behavior and attitudes is important to one’s sense of well being and salvation.

Spiritual attack is also found in traditions sharing the belief that evil may cause misfortune, distress and physical or psychological illness.

In Roman Catholicism, for instance, we find a lengthy exorcism prayer aimed to “repulse the attacks and deceits of the devil.” A shorter prayer to St. Michael illustrates this well:

St. Michael, the Archangel, defend us in battle; be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him we humbly pray; and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, thrust into Hell Satan and all the evil spirits that wander through the world seeking the ruin of souls.

Most religions and religious persons probably interpret the idea of spiritual attack through their own cultural filters, arriving at beliefs that are just as man-made as actual.

And some people go to great lengths to convince us that we’d do well to purchase certain beads or charms to ward off evil.

But the overall idea of spiritual attack remains important, especially when viewed scientifically instead of dogmatically. It’s important because it presents an alternative to the reductive notion, forwarded by the likes of Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene, 1976; The God Delusion, 2006), that living beings are nothing more than a bag of electrically charged chemicals.

By way of analogy, just because ancient astronomers got a lot of things wrong while viewing the night skies, those errors didn’t dissuade others from developing better observational techniques and making progress in categorizing and explaining various astronomical phenomena. And so it is, one could say, with observing and understanding the spiritual realm. For those able to feel, “discern” (a popular Christian buzzword) or perhaps see its reality, there’s likely much room left for improvement in terms of reducing the personal interpretive biases that can arise from prefabricated religious beliefs, worldviews, etc.

» Obsession, Occam’s Razor, Possession, Shaman, Shamanism, Spirit

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Spirit

spirit catcher: Rannie Turingan

Spirit

One definition of the word spirit points to an incorporeal being which may not be seen, as compared to a ‘ghost’ which allegedly is seen by a living person.

Spirit has several other meanings, such as an animating or vital force within life, the soul or some some kind of invisible force or presence that permeates the created universe.

Spirit arguably becomes an ambiguous concept if assessed merely from a conceptual level of analysis.

Many New Age thinkers, for instance, equate the notion of spirit with that of matter/energy. This is a dubious analog when we consider Rudolf Otto and C. G. Jung‘s treatment of the term numinosity and, moreover, the Christian understanding of The Holy Spirit.

It almost seems as if those who haven’t experienced any difference between the perception of matter/energy and spirit tend to automatically equate the two, just as one might equate any seemingly similar variables without having had a significantly direct experience of them.

By way of analogy, if one had never drunk white wine they might look at its color, recognize it as a liquid and say white wine is equivalent to apple juice or perhaps urine. And so it is, many mystics content, with the experience of spirit. Those who know, they claim, realize that spirit’s character may vary significantly, not only because spirit is passing through psychological and cultural filters, but also because of the differences inherent to spirit itself.

serpent spirits: Jeremiah Ketner

Since the experience of ‘the spirit’ may be associated with a ‘particular spirit,’ as in the opening definition, we have the notion of ‘pure and impure,’ ‘holy and unholy,’ ‘good and evil’ spirits, along with their respective abilities to influence human beings for good or ill.

This tremendous diversity as to the meaning of spirit is not just found in Christianity but in most world religions. But again, some well-meaning but arguably unknowing individuals tend to simplify this diversity by making unsupportable claims, as did Sri Ramakrishna, that all paths involve the same type of spirit, lead to the same place, and so on.

This may have been Ramakrishna’s belief when dabbling in different religions from his master perspective of Hinduism but it certainly isn’t everyone’s.

» à Kempis (Thomas), Abyss, Active Imagination, Afterlife, Alchemy, Alice in Wonderland, Alien Possession Theory (APT), Ancestor Cults, Angels, Animism, Anselm (St.), Anthroposophy, Apollinarius, Aquinas (St. Thomas), Archangel, Arius, Ashram, Aurobindo (Sri), Avesta, Ba, Blake (William), Bowie (David), Brown (Michael), Castanada (Carlos), Celibacy, Chakras, Channeling, Clairaudience, Class, Collective Unconscious, Confirmation, Demons, Dionysius the Areopagite, Divination, Eleusinian Mysteries, Evil, Faeries, Fallen Angels, Fasting, Feng Shui, Grace, Hawking (Stephen), Heaven, Hegel, Hell, Henry of Ghent, Intercession, Jedi, Jinn, Kabbala, Karma Transfer, Kundalini, Lennox (Annie), Madness, Mana, Mental Illness, Michael (St.), Miracles, Mysticism, Near Death Experiences (NDE), Obsession, Paranormal, Pollution, Prayer, Psychosis, Quiddity, Randi (James), Roberts (Jane), Samkhya, Shaman, Shapeshifter, Siva, Soul Loss, Soul, Spiritual Attack, Swedenborg (Emanuel), Talbot (Michael), Tantra, Teresa of Ávila, (St.), Third Eye, Tibetan Book of the Dead, Totem, Totem Pole, Tradition, Tramp Souls, Transubstantiation, Trickster, Trinity (Holy Trinity), Underhill (Evelyn), Vampires, Virgin Mary, Voodoo, Wach (Joachim), Wave, Weber (Max), World Tree, Yoda, Yoni, Zombie

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Book of Isaiah

Isaiah’s Lips Anointed with Fire via Wikipedia

Book of Isaiah – Isaiah, son of Amoz, was a statesman, counselor to Kings and a prophet in the Old Testament around the 8^th-century BCE. He apparently lived in Jerusalem, having a profound influence in the Kingdom of Judah.

Like many other books in the Bible, scholars question the authorship of the Book of Isaiah. While some fundamentalists still believe that all of the books of the Bible were written by the authors ascribed to them, contemporary biblical scholars generally agree that the prophetic book written in Isaiah’s name contains material from at least two other unnamed prophets, known as Deutero-Isaiah and Trito-Isaiah.

The Isaiah recorded in the Bible shows some hostility towards his political enemies, but this is tempered by his hope for a better future that he never sees… not in this world, anyhow. Wikipedia nicely sums up the bulk of Isaiah:

The first 39 chapters prophesy doom for a sinful Judah and for all the nations of the world that oppose God, while the last 27 prophesy the restoration of the nation of Israel and a new creation in God’s glorious future kingdom;^[1] this section includes the Songs of the Suffering Servant, four separate passages referring to the nation of Israel, interpreted by Christians as prefiguring the coming of Jesus Christ.¹

In Trito-Isaiah God reveals his total sovereignty over human life and thought:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
nor are my ways your ways, says the LORD.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways,
and my thoughts than your thoughts.²

After the Assyrian invasion of 701 BCE, it is generally believed that Isaiah was martyred.

—

¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Isaiah

² Isaiah 55 : 8-9 . This is one of my favorite Biblical passages and it was instrumental in my conversion to Catholicism. During a transitional stage in my life a non-Catholic Christian, quite out of the blue, suggested I read Isaiah 55 : 6-9. When I did, the power of the words hit me hard and I eventually converted to Catholicism. Interestingly, the numbers 55 and 69 had already been personally significant for several years prior, in a sort of ongoing synchronistic way. So hearing the Christian suggest I read that particular passage, and the effect it had on me, contained special significance. It seems that God usually works that way (MC).

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William Blake

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William Blake (1757-1827) was an English engraver, painter, poet and mystic born in London.

Like visionaries from most world religions, Blake believed that a spiritual light exists behind the world of appearances. His writings and art mostly refer to philosophical, mythological and biblical themes.

Unlike artists who use abstraction to hint at a perceived yet normally unseen reality, Blake’s imagery is quite direct as he attempts to portray his perception of inner light, according to his own vision.

He differs from mainstream Christianity by emphasizing the importance of spontaneous, unguided and unchecked spiritual experience. At times his work is reminiscent of Gnosticism, especially when saying the self and the Godhead may be one. Blake’s beliefs differ from both Catholicism and Gnosticism, however, in that he seems to imply that good and evil are relative ideas constructed by the regimented mind.

This relativistic view is especially apparent in his so-called ‘minor prophecy’, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1791), an arguably grandiose work of undisciplined introspection that leans towards a nebulous, incomplete kind of Buddhism. While not without its literary merit, and also containing a few worthwhile critiques of religious hypocrisy, Heaven and Hell seems to reflect Blake’s personal quest and, perhaps, limited degree of spiritual understanding. Whether it contains any universal, salvific value is a matter of debate. Some might say it’s a useful signpost along the road of spiritual formation while nonetheless incomplete. Others might say it’s misleading.

William Blake’s Newton (1795), colour print with pen & ink and watercolour. Blake’s picture of Newton as a divine geometer was one of a series he created whilst living in Lambeth in the late 1790s.

William Blake (1757-1827) was an English engraver, painter, poet and mystic born in London.

Blake’s best-known paintings are The Canterbury Pilgrims and Jacob’s Dream. He also illustrated Young’s Night Thoughts (1797), Linnell’s The Book of Job (1826), Dante’s Divine Comedy and did imaginative engravings for his own writing.

Other works include Poetical Sketches (1783), Songs of Innocence (1789), Songs of Experience (1794) which include ‘The Tyger’, and the prophetic poem ‘Jerusalem’ (1804-20).

Most of the notables around him thought he was a flake, and his work and ideas were largely unrecognized. Near the end of his life he lived in poverty, spurred on by a band of youthful admirers.

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Bhagavad-Gita

Krishna and Arjun on the chariot, Mahabharata, 18th-19th century, India. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Bhagavad-Gita [Sanskrit: The song of the Lord] is a central scripture holy to Hindus that belongs to book VI of the epic Mahabharata. Believed by many scholars to be a more recent insert within the Mahabharata, the Gita synthesizes different, previously existing forms of yoga.

The main plot line revolves around Krishna urging Arjuna to fulfil the dharma (sacred duty) appropriate to his warrior caste (kshatrya). Taken literally, in the Gita this means Arjuna must slay kith and kin in the battlefield.

Krishna outlines additional dharmas appropriate for other castes, but Arjuna’s sacred task is to kill. Krishna further instructs Arjuna that his relatives will not really perish because the soul (atman) is eternal.

A gentler, psychological interpretation of the Gita sees the ‘killing’ in terms of the destruction of bad karma accumulated over past lives. These attributes manifest as outward aspects of the personality in the present life, not unlike that which Carl Jung terms the persona. Thus the ‘killing’ could be seen as the elimination or, perhaps, redirection of superficial and negative personality components that obscure awareness of the immortal soul (atman)

Lord Krishna instructing the Bhagavad Gita to Arjuna in Kurukshetra. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Because God’s grace is said to be central in overcoming negative past karma, some scholars believe that the Gita was written as late as 2nd-century CE, influenced by the teachings of Jesus Christ. Regardless of the precise date, Arjuna’s dharma seems to lie somewhere between Old Testament ideas concerning the problem of social justice (“an eye for an eye”) and the New Testament emphasis on spiritual salvation (“turn the other cheek”).

While some Christians may argue that the Gita’s message is clearly inferior to the New Testament’s prescription to love one’s enemies, this claim is complicated by the additional teaching of the so-called “Just War,” a teaching which is explicit or, perhaps, implicit to many Christian belief systems.

Having said that, it seems that a valid distinction may be made between what Jesus of the New Testament says we ought to do vs. what will happen.

English: The Pandava prince Arjuna chooses to have the unarmed Krishna as his charioteer rather than the reinforcement of Krishna’s large army. The Krishna’s large army is chosen by the Kaurava prince Duryodhana. As the sky turns from gray to azure, and the army begins to wake, Arjuna confirms his decision by a solemn vow and water is poured over his hands as ritual witness. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Jesus of the New Testament says his followers ought not to be violent, nor to even think violently, even though conflict and war will inevitably break out among some members of the population. By way of contrast, the Krishna of the Gita essentially says killing is okay in certain circumstances. And this is something that Christ never advocates in the New Testament.

As intimated above, however, the discussion need not end here. For more on this see The Bhagavad Gita in a Complicated World and comments.

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Annie Besant

Henry Steel Olcott (1832-1907, links), Annie Besant (1847-1933, mitte), Charles Webster Leadbeater (1847-1934, rechts) in Adyar (Chennai) im Dezember 1905 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Annie Besant (née Wood, 1847-1933) was born in London. In her early adult life she was a critic of Capitalism and a colleague of Charles Bradlaugh, advocating birth control.

At age 26 she married the Anglican evangelical Reverend Frank Besant. In 1873 they were separated, and she became Vice-President for the National Secular Society in 1874. After meeting Madame Blavatsky in 1889 Besant, became fascinated with and an expert on the teachings of Theosophy. Following Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, Besant became the head of the International Theosophy Movement.

Later, she supported Indian nationalism and a grass roots educational movement in the sub-continent. And from 1917-23 she sat as President of the Indian National Congress. She was also active in promoting women’s rights, birth control, a non-revolutionary type of socialism (Fabianism) and worker’s rights.

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Behaviorism

B.F. Skinner playing tic-tac-toe against a trained chicken (not pictured). It is noted that despite playing numerous games, Skinner was never able to defeat the bird. – Via Tumblr

Behaviorism is a psychological theory that sees mankind as operating more like a machine than as a free agent. Its modern form arose in reaction to so-called armchair philosophers, depth psychologists and alleged mystics who tried to understand human motivation in terms of what went on inside the mind or soul. For behaviorists, what really counts is what we can directly observe—in a word, behavior.

This approach is traceable to thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke David Hume, George Berkeley and David Hartley. Hobbes viewed man as a natural and social creature, while the others stressed the importance of the association of ideas.

In 1739, the so-called British empiricist philosopher David Hume wrote in A Treatise of Human Nature:

The qualities, from which…association arises, and by which the mind is after this manner conveyed from one idea to another, are three, viz. resemblance, contiguity in time or place, and cause and effect.¹

Most will say that the scientific study of behaviorism begins with the Russian, Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936), who conditioned dogs to salivate not just at the sight of food but also at the sound of a bell that preceded feeding.

The American psychologist J. B. Watson (1878-1958) generalized these findings to human beings, emphasizing the importance of recency and frequency. This means that if we’ve smiled every time we’ve seen a child for the past ten years, we’re very likely to smile if we see a child today. The American B. F. Skinner (1904-1990) extended this system to include the idea of positive and negative reinforcement.

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Pavlov’s type of learning is usually called classical conditioning, while Skinner’s is called operant conditioning. Skinner soon became the most popular advocate of behaviorism. He argues that past reinforcements determine behavior. We learn to repeat or decline behaviors based on their consequences. This is called the Stimulus-Response-Reinforcement (S-R-R) model.

Skinner also formulated the idea of shaping. By controlling the environmental rewards and punishments for behaviors, one is able to shape behavior. Psychologist also call this behavior modification.

Critics of behaviorism say it depicts a soulless, mechanistic view of mankind. Instead of resembling a pleasure-seeking machine, critics say that human beings are uniquely free, replete with emotional, intuitive, intellectual and spiritual concerns extending well beyond the narrow confines of reward and punishment.

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Daniel Dennett contends that human beings are Skinnerian, Popperian and also Darwinian creatures. This means that we learn from stimulus, response and reinforcement but we also have the inner ability to test our hypotheses prior to enacting them in the real world.

This challenges Skinner’s anti-mentalism, as does Dennett’s Darwinian component. According to Dennett we act partially in accord with ancestrally acquired knowledge. A good example of this can be found in our capacity for language. Because of our language skills, many believe that human beings are hard-wired to learn languages. And we do, in fact, learn language if we’re raised in the right kind of environment, whereas a child parented by wolves in the wild won’t learn how to speak a language.²

—

¹ David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature London: Collins, 1962 [1739], p. 54.

² Wittgenstein’s notion of a private language might seem to challenge this idea. But Wittgenstein, himself, argues that any kind of representation that isn’t socially shared cannot truly be language. More recently, the postmodern notion of connotation complicates this claim. Some postmoderns ask:  If everyone understands signs differently, are we really communicating?

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Beatnik

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Beatnik is a slightly derogatory, superficial or amusing (depending on how one looks at it) term for those belonging to the 1950s youth subculture called the Beat Generation. In the 1960s the term also described listeners of rock and roll, hippies and those advocating anti-authoritarian lifestyles and social arrangements.

Wikipedia puts it this way:

Beatnik was a media stereotype of the 1950s to mid-1960s that displayed the more superficial aspects of the Beat Generation literary movement of the 1950s and violent film images, along with a cartoonish depiction of the real-life people and the spiritual quest in Jack Kerouac‘s autobiographical fiction.

The Beat Generation (Photo credit: N▲POLEON IN ▲QUAMARINE)

The beatniks wore unconventional dress, hairstyles, imbibed in psychotropic drugs and listened to jazz and bebop. Among Beat writers Jack Kerouac (On the Road, Dharma Bums), William S. Burroughs‘s Naked Lunch (1959) and poet Allen Ginsberg reigned supreme.

The first line from Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1955) epitomizes the dark side of the Beat Generation:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters, burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.

beatniks in the summer of 1969 (Photo credit: Martin Pulaski)

From this, it seems a bit simplistic to suggest the Beatnik culture was an entirely positive spiritual quest. From a Catholic perspective, illegal drug use rarely, if ever, culminates in genuine spirituality. It might represent a stage a seeker passes through before coming to a place where he or she can appreciate an experience of true grace and holiness later in life. But drug use, itself, arguably messes with the mind (and brain) and obscures the pure spirituality of the Holy Spirit.

On the other hand, it would be equally simplistic to entirely dismiss the insights and societal benefits that came out of the movement. Like anything, one has to sift through the entire phenomenon to discern the good from the bad.

I Feel Like Saying A Beatnik Poem 1950′s B Movie Style

On the World Wide Web:

• The Beatniks (video, 1960)

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Ba

English: Detail of the frieze of the wells in the tomb of Pharaoh Horemheb, showing the gods Osiris, Anubis, and Horus. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the ancient Egyptian religion of the New Kingdom the ba represents, generally speaking, the individual characteristics of a person, roughly analogous to the personality.

The ba was often understood in terms of the effect it had on others, not entirely unlike the New Age idea of the ‘past life review’ (where the recently departed soul allegedly sees how its good and bad actions in life impacted others).

In the vision of the afterlife described in the Pyramid Texts, the ba is said to return to the mummified body at night, essentially going to Osiris (as the god of the dead). Then it returns to the land of the living during the daytime, free to roam as a spiritual presence.¹

S. G. F. Brandon says that the ba originally connoted spiritual power.²

Depictions of the ba might be present in Old Kingdom funerary statues, although scholars debate this point. More commonly the ba is said to be represented in the New Kingdom as a bird with a human head.³

Related Posts » Ka

—

¹ Donald B. Redford ed., The Oxford Essential Guide to Egyptian Mythology, 2003.

² S. G. F. Brandon ed., A Dictionary of Comparative Religion, New York: Scribner, 1970.

³ Redford, 2003.

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