Neo-shamanism is a phenomenon that has been mainly developing in recent societies of Europe and of North America since the second half of the 20th century.
The practice mostly draws its influences from Amazonian, Mesoamerican, and North American traditions. It is comprised of many modalities, and is the marriage of spiritual and psychotherapeutic practices applied to a modern context above all else.
I have discussed at length about the importance of rituals in traditional societies, however our modern perspective highlights several sociological and anthropological complexities that ought to be discussed, and which I will be presenting here. The first are the semantics on which modern anthropologists and sociologists rely on to define …
The film blends with subtlety reality and fiction, especially through scenes that sometimes resemble the quest of Thomas, sometimes the one of the characters in the novel by Izzi. This allows the themes to appear as existing outside of time. The tree of life, which is the common theme of the three eras helps us to understand that there is more than one interpretation for the movie. Basically, it does not matter in detail what the movie is about, perhaps because the unified themes provide a coherence that illuminates our understanding of life a little better.
What can be understood as an odyssey through time and through the cycles of life and death is above all an odyssey through an inner journey, a real and salutary quest for the mysteries that haunt our existence. The richness and emotional depth allow us to understand how the death anxieties affect us at any level of existence.
We have the expression of an agony which animates a man lost in his pain, that of the realization of finitude and death, but above all, that of the nostalgia for a love too early gone, which is a true affliction. Thus, Thomas in the future solidifies and crystallizes the theme of death. The fight takes place between his desire to conquer death, and its manifestations, as if to remind him with a greater strength that it is not possible to defeat it fully…
The four noble Buddhist truths are revealed here as an escape from the illusory world created by The Matrix. Neo, as an ascetic, thus manages to realize himself by escaping the inevitability of the cyclical worlds that engender only misfortune and suffering. Buddhist philosophy offers a soteriology that allows human responsibility to rise to an absolute, and to evacuate the weight of a theological instinct that was thought to be irreducible. The fainting of any supreme being (God) facilitates a Buddhist appreciation of The Matrix, and a world free for any divinity to emerge. The Buddha, as well as Neo, reject the existence of a God, thus making the deliverance a purely spiritual act. If such a perspective confers on humans the responsibility for their own enslavement, it also allows a salutary optimism to transcend the cycles of Saṃsāra.
I offer in this book, as a result, a transpersonal experience. More than my simple autobiography, the book is the story of an entire generation of people whose parents emigrated from various countries, with the hope of a better future for their progeny.
I think in a way that the sense of loneliness related to this grief is, at any rate for me, a feeling of inner disconnect, as if there were a gaping hole in the centre of who I am. This feeling was one that I had been carrying around for most of my life, but had come to the centre of my experience as a result of such grief. I see this feeling of inner disconnect as a need to feel like I belong somewhere. As the process of grief was taking place, it amplified a need to deconstruct my place and role in society, the ideological structures that pervade cultures, and the nature of the relationships between people.
Further in History, the descent of the Christ to save the fallen world is a single event. This return is a final regeneration towards the future, thereby opposing the archaic mode of thought with the late Judeo-Christian ontology. This is a transition from a cyclical time to a linear time, then a historical time, which gradually allows modern religions to be realized and justified in history. As for the creation of the world, it became by the same token a phenomenon detached from the individual. The latter is a being endowed with speech, that was able to revoke the immanence that once existed between him and Nature. This delineates Nature as the eternal reservoir for hierophanies and the temporary life of beings, waiting a redeemer figure.
Therein lies the religious dilemna: God is conceived on the one hand as the incarnation of absolute freedom, whereas individuals, on the other hand, cannot save themselves as they depend on the grace of God.
For some time now, I have been interested in the evolution of religions in modern societies. This is a question that I consider of the utmost importance, and for which there is no straightforward path. What will the religious landscape look like in the coming years in modern societies? I …
This letter is an attempt to offer my deepest and most sincere apology to everyone. It includes the dear friends, the family, and the enemies I made down the road. There is in me a deep sense of loss and grief, as I realize some of the truest and humblest …
Missed immortality, death is an inevitable consequence of life, and one cannot be conceived without the other. Both constitute the basis of religious feeling, and the basis of metaphysical reflection. It is a drama which is played out in the theatre of life and which torments human consciousness since the …
