Spiritualism - what next?

Left Behind wrote:

mac wrote:

hiorta wrote:mac, Didn't the entire (industry?) begin with DIY? Local folk with gaslight or firelight, tangible Spirit contact and an unshakeable urge to continue to seek? The very real threat of arrest was never a deterrent to these folk.
Perhaps something was lost in trying to make it 'respectable'?
The Home Circle was and is indispensable.

Re 'DIY' members may be interested in: http://afterlifeforums.com/threads/self-guided-afterlife-connection-experiences.2133/

Take a look?

I will.

But if it's about "trying to have an NDE or an OBE": I'll pass on having the experience. I love getting messages FROM mediums. I would love to BE a medium. but as far as my spirit leaving my body: unless it happens spontaneously (as when asleep, many believe), I'll stay inside this carcass until it's time to vacate it permanently!

It's definitely not about the things you've mentioned in your first sentence.

Mav I do not think teh discarnates have stopped trying, that is not my experience at our centre or with my own mediumship and inspirational speaking, nor that of a number of others. I think we humans have developed such a small attention span it would be hard to reach us at the best of times. Add the massive change in the way life is lived now, even compared to the 1980's let alone when the movement formed and its hardly a surprise things have fallen back. Life is very full, the number of people who would willingly join circles just as battery power to trance or physical mediums week after week, not to develop themselves, woudl be minimal. The same could easily be said for weekly closed groups that drove the movements success in producing mediums, how many will attend is questionable and who are the experienced, good mediums who would have teh time to run them.

Yes other means of communication grab attention but, in reality, none of these reach many people either except for similarly small and committed groups.

Scarily there appears to be only one mainstream religion growing steadily and they think contact with the dead is with Djinns (well in Bible Belt USA I believe we may be seen to consort with evil Spirits).

Admin wrote:Mav I do not think teh discarnates have stopped trying, that is not my experience at our centre or with my own mediumship and inspirational speaking, nor that of a number of others. I think we humans have developed such a small attention span it would be hard to reach us at the best of times. Add the massive change in the way life is lived now, even compared to the 1980's let alone when the movement formed and its hardly a surprise things have fallen back. Life is very full, the number of people who would willingly join circles just as battery power to trance or physical mediums week after week, not to develop themselves, woudl be minimal. The same could easily be said for weekly closed groups that drove the movements success in producing mediums, how many will attend is questionable and who are the experienced, good mediums who would have teh time to run them.

Yes other means of communication grab attention but, in reality, none of these reach many people either except for similarly small and committed groups.

Scarily there appears to be only one mainstream religion growing steadily and they think contact with the dead is with Djinns (well in Bible Belt USA I believe we may be seen to consort with evil Spirits).

If the busy-ness of our modern-day lives is a significant reason for our unseen friends being unable to reach us as once they could then it doesn't bode well for tdc in the future - it looks highly unlikely that life in the near future will be any less hectic than it presently is. But that's assuming future communication will be via mediumship in the way it used to be and that may be an erroneous assumption.

Whatever happens I'm unlikely to be around to see it!

I'm always amused at the automatic assumption that spirits are 'evil', while their guys are 'Saintly'.

If this is the standard of earthly understanding of matters spiritual it's hardly surprising that intelligent contact is declining.

hiorta wrote:I'm always amused at the automatic assumption that spirits are 'evil', while their guys are 'Saintly'.

If this is the standard of earthly understanding of matters spiritual it's hardly surprising that intelligent contact is declining.

hear, hear to that....

mac wrote:quote:  If young people don't get some proper education in religious and spiritual matters when they ARE young, they are less like to turn to it as their own demise approaches.

Yes I agree with this but unless that happens in primary/elementary school, and unless it includes ideas from our own religion/philosophy, then mainstream religious nonsense is all they're likely to hear.  I use the last word deliberately because I've listened to the nonsense taught in UK primary schools and I cringed.  I was thankful that in delivering Special Needs support I was little involved with religious teaching.

I was comforted, though, that the children appeared as bored as the teachers, paid little attention to what they heard in the main and all were glad to get the prescribed sessions behind them.  

Perhaps it's better elsewhere in the world?

Left Behind wrote:Mac, this touches on something else I read, just a few days ago. Someone was quoting Jurgen Ziewe (I've never read his works, but I intend to. He supposedly has had 40 years of out-of-body contacts with the spirit world, much like Swedenborg or AJ Davis).

Anyway, Ziewe was quoted to the effect that traditional religions serve an invaluable purpose by preparing their adherents for the expectation that there will be an afterlife. This causes the believer -- depending on his level of intensity of belief, I'd assume -- to enter a spirit world of his own expectations. From there, enlightened spirit entities can gradually guide him out of his illusions and into the truths about life in the world to come.

Monsignor Benson alluded to the same thing in The World Unseen series.

I agree with this, Jim - even mainstream can sometimes be better than nothing and at one time I didn't see things that way at all.....

Left Behind wrote:Ziewe says that the spirit world -- the zones closest to the earth plane -- are becoming in effect a replica of the worst aspects of our actual earth: that materialism (in both senses of the word) is making it harder for the discarnate to break free of the earth plane. They are unable to ascend to higher planes after discarnation, simply because they never conceived of such planes of existence while they were incarnate.

Wasn't that always the case, though?

Left Behind wrote:I personally fear that the increasing belief in reincarnation (due both to population increases in the Eastern countries and to an increased belief in the doctrine here in the West) may have the same effect.

Maybe there's more to the old adage "it's better to have any religion than no religion at all" than we realize. Provided that religion teaches its adherents that they will ascend to a higher level of existence.

You could be right....

Left Behind wrote:The reincarnation crowd may be doing no more good than the philosophical materialists, and the eat, drink and be merry crowd.

I think they have little concept of the actual situation although having said that I don't know if I have either.  Won't be too long before I get to find out, though...

Admin wrote:Mav I do not think teh discarnates have stopped trying, that is not my experience at our centre or with my own mediumship and inspirational speaking, nor that of a number of others.

I didn't mean they've stopped completely but only that there's not a widespread effort going into tdc as it appears there used to be. In reality we have no idea of the number of discarnates involved say a century ago compared with more recently or the amount of effort they were devoting to the 'project'. But things have changed and that suggests to me there's now less 'time and effort' being given than there was over the past century and a half - at least to the stuff we've seen over that same time.

I think it's logical to assume that discarnates have always been communicating one way or another with humankind. We see the outcome of their most recent efforts in our movement and philosophy. If that movement is truly fading then I guess our unseen friends will return to a different activity level, perhaps one that favours personal contact more than a more widespread one.

Hi Mac
If it happens, you'll see it from one side or the other

Lots of things have changed since the heyday of mediumship I guess: People in developed countries certainly seem to be a lot busier that's true. I suspect organised religions have been something of a suppressant to mediumship in many respects but at least people had a spiritual dimension to their lives, I'm not sure that's true so much these days, even if folks are religious. Also, the world now seems to be in an electronic soup of communication: wifi, 3G, 4G, satellite links and goodness only knows what else - maybe that's a factor.

The brief glimpses of potential communication I seem to have received have been during rare moments when my mind has been still. I don't feel a lot of that during my own daily life.

I suspect you're right that communication, if it occurs is frequent but perhaps not in ways of which we are conscious.

I'm not sure that the earthly world 30-40-50 years from now is going to be as much like the present world as we might think. Those of us who share the blessed privilege of having been born into any of the Western democracies post WW2 are probably living at the height of earthly history, so far as freedom and material pleasures are concerned.

The population is skyrocketing, the planet is becoming thoroughly polluted, population increases and increased consumer demands not only in the more developed countries but in places like India, China and Brazil are putting increased demand on dwindling and finite natural resources, increasing the environmental damage and sending prices skyrocketing. Here in the US our infrastructure is wearing out, state and local governments are broke, and the federal government can't keep running deficits to bail everyone out.

Some scientists say a good sunspot could fry all our high-tech toys.

In the future, folk might well be gathering around a table in a darkened room and trying to reach the spirit world because the world around them may be so much less appealing than it appears to them now.

Also, the electricity may be down, and they might not be able to afford candles.

I share your thoughts.  Only this morning there was another radio report about Nigeria, Africa.  In the next three decades or so their population is slated to rise and overtake that of the USA.  The figures are breath-taking and if it happens as predicted we can only guess at how that country will support all its citizens.  And that's just one report about one country which happened to catch my ear.  There must be many, many others countries/nations that face similar population explosions.  

This world will have so many souls in the decades ahead it's hard for me to get my head around the numbers. I'll probably be dead before 2050 but I think I'll get a glimpse how things are going before I finally kick my clogs.  

I'm glad I'll be gone - I wouldn't want to be part of such a huge global population.  We baby-boomers are perhaps the most privileged generation ever, something I understand but probably take for granted most of the time.  I really do wonder, though, if the vast majority of humankind  will, in future years, care about survival beyond death in the way we're able to care about it.  

My own thoughts are that they'll be so preoccupied by worldly matters, including global population explosion, scarce resources, climate change plus humankind's effect on that and on the rest of the planet, few will be that interested in the philosophy connected with life, death and what follows.

Yes, that might prove to be the case, Mac. I can see it going either away. In practice it will probably go both ways: depending on how the particular individual reacts to the hell-hole he sees around him.