new age movement:: pathway to hell??

[regnauld]

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but that's psychology. what about different religions?

BTW, TRANSPERSONAL PSYCHOLOGY is part of the NEW AGE MOVEMENT mr. Hell which has lots of scientific studies and research!

[regnauld]

most of its teachings contradicts the dogmas of the church, , to all those who like to practice, what are your reasons and why are you professing this??

You might want to read and study this great New Age book authored by a Catholic Priest!

A Return to Spirit: After the Mythic Church
Fr. Desmond Murphy

Year Published: 1997

In the past thirty years, many members of the Catholic Church have "resigned", others have become cynical, others again are confused by all the changes. Many are searching for new forms of spiritual expression. To all of these this book offers an understanding of what is going on, provides answers to questions like "What has happened to the Catholic Church since 1960? What went wrong? Why do we have traditionalists, conservatives and progressives? What is Rome doing about this situation?" and more of the like. 'A Return to Spirit' breaks new ground. It is not an exercise in "knocking" the Church or former Christians. Rather, it presents a new model of Church development, one that allows its members to choose its future direction in that it delineates salient aspects of the Church of the future. In a refreshing and helpful way, 'A Return to Spirit' develops a coherent and defensible basis for explanation and action in the Church. While futuristic, it is applicable now. A registered psychologist, Fr Desmond Murphy has practiced counseling for over twenty years, and for the past sixteen, has been responsible for training and supervising counselors.

[regnauld]

You might want to read and study this great New Age book authored by a Catholic Priest!

A Return to Spirit: After the Mythic Church
Fr. Murphy, Desmond

Year Published: 1997

In the past thirty years, many members of the Catholic Church have "resigned", others have become cynical, others again are confused by all the changes. Many are searching for new forms of spiritual expression. To all of these this book offers an understanding of what is going on, provides answers to questions like "What has happened to the Catholic Church since 1960? What went wrong? Why do we have traditionalists, conservatives and progressives? What is Rome doing about this situation?" and more of the like. 'A Return to Spirit' breaks new ground. It is not an exercise in "knocking" the Church or former Christians. Rather, it presents a new model of Church development, one that allows its members to choose its future direction in that it delineates salient aspects of the Church of the future. In a refreshing and helpful way, 'A Return to Spirit' develops a coherent and defensible basis for explanation and action in the Church. While futuristic, it is applicable now. A registered psychologist, Fr Desmond Murphy has practiced counseling for over twenty years, and for the past sixteen, has been responsible for training and supervising counselors.

Thoreau referred to this individual as "the marcher to a different drummer"; Ken Kesey as "the psychic outlaw"; and Nietzsche as "the extraordinary man." In some quarters these people are praised as visionaries; some societies revere them as prophets, while others revile them as kooks. Desmond Murphy calls them "the future and the hope of the church."

Employing the terminology of transpersonal psychology, these are the "translaw" individuals. "These are the only ones," maintains Murphy, who "in a religioUs crisis can be the means of its transformation to a higher lever." And the Catholic church he further maintains, finds itself in just such a crisis.

Desmond Murphy, a priest, and psychologist, in an earlier work (The Death and Rebirth of Religion) examined Chrism to according to the tenets of transpersonal psychology. He builds on those findings in this latest work. Transpersonal psychology, as opposed to more familiar psychologies, studies the psyche not in relation to self or others but to the paranormal, the mystical and the divine. Transpersonal psychology concerns itself with human capacities and potentialities that cannot satisfactorily be explained by classic psychoanalytic theories. It seeks to develop legitimate and reproducible means for differentiating between authentic spiritual experience, and the merely psychotic, hallucinatory ... or other abnormal pathological states."

In A Return To Spirit, Murphy argues that the current turmoil in the church is traceable to the fact that the church has not used its crises to propel it to a higher level. We look for and assign outside causes for a crisis, he says, but in truth, "crisis can come only from within, from the real cause, which is the intrinsic interest of spirit returning to Spirit."

To better explain the interest of "spirit returning to, Spirit," Murphy identifies several expressions of spirituality in religion. Most elementary is "magic" that "involves the use of repetitive rites and incantations to appease or win the favor of a God or Goddess, Force or Power much have efficacious results irrespective of the individuals performing them."

Magic religion usually evolves into a "mythic religion" in which the emphasis is on a personal relationship with God, wherein God is known through ritual and laws, and can step in and change the ordinary working of nature in response to prayer.

Next in the hierarchical spiritual order comes scientific religion followed by rational-individuated religion and finally transpersonal spirituality. In this progression, values such as truth, justice and peace, become more important than blind obedience; God becomes known through concepts, symbols and intuition and only thereafter by direct experience. The goal, of course, is to strive for ever more authentic religious encounters beyond polemics, laws or authoritarianism.
There is nothing intrinsically good or bad, right or wrong with any one of these levels of spirituality. What is incontrovertible is that each stage is a necessary precursor to the next. Murphy contends that there is a natural urge to move to higher and higher levels, thus initiating the crisis that would move us upward. These crises, when addressed by mere alterations to the surface while deep structures go untouched, never resolve themselves; they may seem to go away only to re-emerge at another time.

This is exactly what is going on now, Murphy asserts. No one will deny that before Vatican II the church was in crisis, but the "reform" enacted by the council affected only superficial changes so that now, some 30 years later, the crisis is back demanding deeper, more substantive redress.

Enter the trans-law individual as an agent of transformation, the "seed crystal" for change. Murphy identifies four groups or types of individuals: the "in-laws" amounting to the establishment who endeavors to hold on to the old; the "pre-laws" who do not actually break the law, they just live on its fringes; the "counter-laws" who claim to be independent thinkers, but in fact ape the values they claim to be opposing; and finally, the "trans-laws' who respect the law, but need to move beyond it to higher values, and who enable, engage and energize others, and who endeavor to "integrate the best of the old with the good in the new." Only when enough of these individuals populate a given religion can that religion be transformed to the next higher level.

Walter Brueggeman does in fact call these individuals "prophets." Murphy goes on to add that they also exhibit the characteristics of Kohlberg's post-conventional morality, Erickson's generativity and integrity stages and Maslow's self-actualization.

The entire book is much more heavily grounded in psychology than these paragraphs can adequately summarize. In fact, I found myself impatient a time or two to discover how Murphy was going to apply it all to the 1997 church. But at the same time, I sometimes questioned whether the employment of transpersonal psychology within an anthropomorphized church wasn't just too snug a fit. In other words, was the dog wagging the tail or was the tail wagging the dog? Still, there is much to ponder and one does not need to be steeped in psychology to appreciate what Murphy is trying to do here.


A Return to Spirit: After the Mythic Church. - book reviews | National Catholic Reporter | Find Articles at BNET

[handsoff241]

OT: Reg can you stop your habit of posting the whole content of the link? Just post the link and the summary, avoid or if possible stop posting the whole content as your post. Kapoy us scroll.

@miyay.. same here.

[munzter666]

OT: i wonder why i'm so annoyed when you write jesus' name that way...just thinking

its just spelling and pronunciation, holding that long eeee really. at least i'm not using it in vain.

[handsoff241]

Depends on what you felt(content of your heart and true intentions) when you wrote the "eeee".

[Hellblazer 2.1]

actually, scrolling requires a little or not much effort from your fingers. could it be that there's something in his post that you don't agree with?

[handsoff241]

^Sir hell trust me it is completely for laziness sake.

[regnauld]

OT: Reg can you stop your habit of posting the whole content of the link? Just post the link and the summary, avoid or if possible stop posting the whole content as your post. Kapoy us scroll.

@miyay.. same here.

OT: No you cannot stop me from posting it because it's very convenient in my part and to some Istoryans here! I have the right to post it what I want as long as it relates to the topic and besides this habit and style of mine is not all the time!

[handsoff241]

I was asking if you can, i'm not stopping you, lol how in hell could I?
The convenience you are presenting may not be felt by all people yet everyone is forced to scroll all the way down the last letter of your post, and most especially when that post is quoted. Be sensitive sad gud and maintain a delikadeza for the people who "might" not like the good idea you are presenting.

OT