posted January 18, 2009 03:06 PM
We've all heard of Paganism, of various forms of occultism belonging to the "Western Mystery Tradition",
but few of us are familiar with an equally dominant trend in the spirituality of ancient Greece and Rome.While the majority of people were uninitiated and deeply superstitious,
a select minority belonged to one of two classes of spiritual seekers/practitioners.
The first is the mystery tradition, which, thanks to the New Age movement, is no longer so much of a mystery.
But the second is a tradition of philosophers for whom theology, spirituality, psychology and philosophy were all one.
According to this tradition, sprituality is synonymous with reasonability, and philosophy (the act of reasoning) is the highest spiritual pursuit.
This is a far cry from the Christian world's demonization of free thinking, and dogmatic insistence on simple faith as the only path to realization.
Some ancient philosophers went so far as to suggest that no person could be truly spiritual, truly self-aware,
who had not undergone a lengthy process of self-dialogue, and arrived at convictions supported by complex and subtle reasoning.
This is something worth considering, in this day and age, when there is assumed to be a stark division between the life of the mind and the life of the soul.
To the ancients, such a division would have been absurd, and even tragic.
"I find that all my thoughts circle around God like the planets around the sun, and are as irresistibly attracted by Him.
I would feel it to be the grossest sin if I were to oppose any resistance to this force." ~ C.G. Jung
"Jung explicitly declared his allegiance to Christianity, and the most important of his works deal with the religious problems of the Christian.
He looked at these questions from the standpoint of psychology... [Jung] stressed the necessity of understanding and reflecting,
as against the Christian demand for faith. He took this necessity for granted, as one of the essential features of life." ~ Aniela Jaffe
Lindaland
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posted January 18, 2009 03:06 PM
posted January 18, 2009 03:36 PM
posted March 09, 2009 02:15 PM
