Spirituality for Living

How did Satan as a figure get into the Christian story? It stems from a schism in Semitic faiths, and the catholic or “universalist” agenda of early Christianity. This schism in Semitic faiths echoed even in Egyptian religion. This is why there was a conflict between them and the Egyptians. Set was a Semitic deity [...]

Satanism is more complex than people see it and it has had a long history. The Knights Templar were accused of it and many factions of Christianity were dismissed as Satanism including most if not all Gnostic Christianity. So there have been different nested groups that contribute their belief systems to modern Satanism. Even Catholicism [...]

Angels and demons are all the same, and humans just started dividing them all up with concepts of good and bad? Originally they were the powers that governed all aspects of life, literally all, even Nasragiel the keeper of the gate to hell. And it was heavily debated even in early Christianity what ones conduct [...]

To date, even in modern parapsychology, much of the old understanding of angelic powers is gone. There are still reported encounters or sightings of unknown beings that behave much like the “angels” of old. Though without any seeming divine agenda nor a malicious one. The Mothman might be the most readily apparent and the dialogue [...]

The Christ Consciousness movement is a technically heretical view of Christian dogma. It’s sort of neo-Gnosticism. It focuses on the Christ and the Holy Spirit rather than the person of Jesus the Christ as a phenomenon, and had a Greek emphasis. The word literally means christening or christened one. In a sense, it’s like the [...]

Christ was a living person? Well, this is where people get confused. Christ isn’t a name, and even old Gnostics saw the messiah as a spirit. Swedenborgian Christianity believes that the prophecy is already fulfilled, but Christ was socially a title. Even King Herod who was King of the Jews bore the title Christ. Though [...]

In respect to the Evangelicals that build fortified shelters and food storage, in the barren bad land in the western United States, the Scientologists also believe in an environmental doomsday. This is the same global event that the Mayans predicted would occur in 2012. Unlike the Evangelicals, the Scientologist doomsday plan is to use the [...]

The Kabbalah is Jewish esotericism. It’s a bit more widely known than people realize, and some of its arguments are arrived at and used by people who aren’t Kabbalists. The basic concept is that Gods essence is incomprehensible to us, and though Christians criticise this mysticism they still use that idea. The universe exists as [...]

One of the divisive points between Judaism and Christianity is Judaism is in a sense more Gnostic. Thus Rabbis did and still do write material that is treated as valid spiritual doctrine, and they question and break down their holy cannon to see the wisdom in it. Not because they don’t believe in it, not [...]

Judaism doesn’t have any concept of hell, but the emanations in some schools of Kabbalism have a shadow aspect. The tree of life and its shadow. It’s called the tree of life because it is seen as an outgrowth of the infinite God, and the emanations arose in stages. It’s shadow element isn’t much talked [...]

I would like to start by first saying Semitic and Indian beliefs are actually closely connected. The Aryan mountain people had their own sort of diaspora and encountered other cultures, but they were not of one mind as a people. Those who migrated to Iran were more militant, while those who migrated to the Indus river valley were [...]

The first discipline of language magic is listening, and at first you will be listening to yourself. This is necessary. As you listen to yourself, you will see the pattern, and how it impacts the world. At this point you can begin to make choices, but you can’t stop there. That’s just meditation, though that’s [...]

Sikhism is a religion that started at about the same time as the Protestant movement did in Catholicism. It takes influences both from Islam and Hinduism, and it’s original lineage was preserved by a short lineage of Gurus before it was encoded in their religious text.
Please forgive my lack of mastery of the language, but it [...]

Originally, Gnosticism was just seen as a heretical branch of Christianity, but other evidence points at it having had a different origin and a viral tendency. It infiltrated not only Christianity, but Judaism, Islam, and Zoroastrianism also. It was sort of a novel idea for the time. Sort of like the religious equivalent of the [...]

The Gnostic divinities are in the realm of the emanation. In the realm of self knowledge. Gnosis is a quality of the individual emanation, and not a body of knowledge that is fixed and must be accepted. Mandean and Manichean Gnosticism even reached China.
To know yourself is to know God, i.e. all divinities? Yes, exactly.
For [...]

An iconoclast is not necessarily faithless. As a matter of fact, Judaism has what could be considered a tradition of what could be called iconoclastic behaviour; formal debate of their law.
Islam as I understand it is iconoclastic? Islam is iconoclastic in the literal sense, but has many strictly orthodox sects though some that aren’t considered [...]