Videos

youngmagicians:

Witchcraft and Magic

Early Modern England: Politics, Religion, and Society under the Tudors and Stuarts (HIST 251)

In this lecture, Professor Wrightson discusses witchcraft and magic. He begins with the context of magic beliefs in this period, introducing the ‘cunning folk’ who had reputations as healers and were often consulted. He then considers the specific problem of witchcraft, the use of magic to do harm, and its identification by the late medieval church as a form of anti-Christian cult. He examines the distinctive nature of both witchcraft beliefs and the history of witchcraft prosecution in England (as compared with both Scotland and continental Europe), outlining the typical circumstances of a witchcraft accusation and what these might suggest about the rise and fall of concern with witchcraft. Finally he considers a number of unresolved problems in the history of witchcraft in England: the nature of the links between gender and witchcraft; the reasons behind the passage of the statutes defining witchcraft as a crime; and the exceptionally large number of trials conducted in the county of Essex.

00:00 – Chapter 1. Magic
08:56 – Chapter 2. Differences between Witchcraft in England and in Europe
19:26 – Chapter 3. Trials in England
35:05 – Chapter 4. Witchraft Statutes in Essex

Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://open.yale.edu/courses

This course was recorded in Fall 2009.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

mylittleillumination:

Three Causes of Spiritual Illness

As we pass through life on the physical plane, things happen. We contract flus and colds and viruses, and we sustain physical injuries, like falling off our bikes as children or experiencing sports injuries. As adults, we may throw our back out or experience a serious car accident, in the process, acquiring bruises, cuts, sprains, infections, lacerations, and sometimes broken bones.

Some of us may also experience serious illnesses of an internal nature like cancer or hepatitis, heart disease or multiple sclerosis. Eventually we pass through old age and the progressive infirmity and death of the physical body. These are the givens—they are all to be expected as part of what it means to be an embodied, living being. But these are all effects, and what the shaman is primarily interested in is the cause.

Cause and Effect

In looking through the shamanic healer’s eyes, the ultimate causes of virtually all illness are to be found within the imaginal realms—in those same regions from which illness derives its initial power to affect us adversely. Because of this, it is not enough to simply suppress the effects of illness with medication on the physical plane and hope for the best. For true healing to occur, the causes of the illness must be addressed.

From the shaman’s perspective, there are three classic causes of illness, and interestingly, they are not microbes or bacteria or viruses. Rather, they are negative internal states that appear within us in response to negative or traumatic life experiences. The first among these is disharmony.

Disharmony

Disharmony is what we experience when life suddenly loses its meaning or when we have lost an important connection to life.

Let’s take the case of an elderly couple who have had a long marriage, and suddenly one of them dies. They may not have had a perfect relationship, yet there is a deep bond between them because of all they have shared together. The survivor may go into crisis upon the loss of their mate, and within a short time, he or she may come down with something medically challenging, like cancer. Suddenly, they’re gone too.

That’s disharmony.

The state of disharmony that we experience in response to such life situations causes a diminishment of our personal power. This can happen in a subtle manner on the one hand, or in a catastrophic, life-shaking way on the other like losing your job, and in the process losing your livelihood. When we experience disempowerment, or “power loss,” it affects our energetic matrix, rendering us vulnerable to illness.

Fear

The second classic cause of illness is fear. A person who is walking around with a chronic sense of fear gnawing away at them is doubly vulnerable to illness because their anxiety aggressively and progressively diminishes their sense of well-being, and this, in turn, affects their feeling of being safe in the world.

This sense of well-being is the base upon which our personal health system stands. When this foundation is affected negatively, it diminishes the ability of our immune system to function. And when our immune system goes down, we’re in trouble.

It’s not too difficult to see that there is a feedback mechanism at work here. Fear, and the anxiety it creates, produces disharmony. In the same breath, disharmony generates fear, and if the two of them are working together, it doubly affects the protective mantle of the body’s immune system, as well as the energetic matrix. Illness is the inevitable result.

It is no surprise to Western medical practitioners that disharmony and fear can manifest themselves in diseases that are recognizable to science. Almost 500 years ago, the Renaissance physician Paracelsus observed that “the fear of disease is more dangerous than the disease itself.”

This brings us to consider the third classic cause of illness—the phenomenon known to indigenous healers as soul loss.

Soul Loss

Among the traditionals, soul loss is regarded as the most serious diagnosis and the major cause of premature death and serious illness, yet curiously, it’s not even mentioned in our Western medical textbooks. The closest acknowledged context is “He/she has lost the will to live”.

In Western society, soul loss is most easily understood as damage to a person’s life essence, a phenomenon that usually occurs in response to trauma. When the trauma are severe, this may result in a fragmentation of that person’s soul cluster, with the shattered soul parts dissociating, fleeing an intolerable situation. In overwhelming circumstances, these soul parts may not return.

The causes of soul loss can be many and varied. There may be traumatic perinatal issues that happen around the child’s birth experience such as arriving into life only to discover that they are not wanted, or that they are the wrong gender—they’ve come in as a girl when everyone was hoping for a boy.

Soul loss can also occur when a child is mercilessly bullied or teased at home or at school, day after day, or when a young person is molested by the one who is supposed to be caring for them. When someone has been raped or assaulted, has suffered a shocking betrayal, a bitter divorce, a traumatic abortion, a terrible car accident, or even a serious surgery, soul loss is assured.

Many of the young men and women who were sent to war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Viet Nam, Korea and beyond, came home personally damaged because they had suffered terrible soul loss. Our medical specialists labeled their disorders as post-traumatic stress syndrome, but they had little to offer these “walking wounded” in terms of true healing, and many who survived are still deeply traumatized at the soul level by what happened to them in war.

Symptoms of Soul Loss

Soul loss is easily recognizable if you know what you’re looking for. Here’s a checklist of some of the classic symptoms:

* feelings of being fragmented, of not being all here.
* blocked memory—an inability to remember parts of one’s life.
* an inability to feel love or receive love from another.
* emotional remoteness.
* a sudden onset of apathy or listlessness.
* a lack of initiative or enthusiasm.
* a lack of joy.
* a failure to thrive.
* an inability to make decisions.
* an inability to discriminate.
* chronic negativity.
* addictions.
* suicidal tendencies.
* melancholy or despair.
* chronic depression.

Perhaps the most common symptom of soul loss is depression. In the early 1990s, Time magazine did a cover story on depression in America that revealed 60 million Americans were taking anti-depressant drugs on a daily basis, representing about 30% of our population.

Today that number is closer to 80 million, representing about 40% of society at large, and sometimes that number jumps in response to a national trauma. On the Friday following 9/11, a television newscast revealed that 7 out of 10 Americans polled were experiencing significant depression in response to the tragedy, an indicator of soul loss on a national scale.

Although the term “soul loss” is not familiar to most Westerners, examples of it are expressed daily in our language and descriptions of personal hardships. Media interviews and news reports include individuals’ comments such as “I lost a part of myself when that (trauma) happened” and “I have not been the same since.” When discussing soul loss with inquiring individuals, most everyone has a sense of having lost a “part” of themselves at some time in life, yet virtually no one has the awareness that the missing part(s) could be recovered.

They can.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

mylittleillumination:

Scientific Study Shows Meditators Collapsing Quantum Systems At A Distance

Numerous scientists over many years have studied the role of consciousness and how it can directly influence our physical material world. Large amounts of research have been published which clearly demonstrate that yes, consciousness and what we perceive to be our physical material world are directly intertwined. I will provide more examples of this towards the end of the article, but for now we are going to take a look at one.

We’ve written about it numerous times, it’s called the quantum double slit experiment, and it’s a great example of how consciousness can affect our physical material world. A paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Physics Essays explains how this experiment has been used multiple times to explore the role of consciousness in shaping the nature of physical reality.(1)

In this experiment, a double-slit optical system was used to test the possible role of consciousness  in the collapse of the quantum wave-function. The ratio of the interference pattern’s double slit spectral power to its single slit spectral power was predicted to decrease when attention was focused toward the double slit as compared to away from it. The study found that factors associated with consciousness significantly correlated in predicted ways with perturbations in the double slit interference pattern.

“Observation not only disturbs what has to be measured, they produce it. We compel the electron to assume a definite position. We ourselves produce the results of the measurement.” (1)

A number of experiments were conducted to measure perturbations in the wavefuntion. In the first experiment, participants were instructed to direct their attention toward the double-slit apparatus or to withdraw their attention-toward a task. At certain times, a computerized voice instructed them saying: “Please influence the beam now,” and for attention away it said “You may now relax.”  This first experiment was modestly in accordance with the consciousness collapse hypothesis (perturbations in the double slit interference pattern).

The second experiment was conducted at a Zen Buddhist temple, which was a great place to recruit meditators for the experiment. This time:

“For audio feedback, during attention-away periods the computer played a soft, continuous drone tone, and during attention-toward periods it played a musical note that changed in pitch to reflect the real-time value of R (perturbations in wave function). Participants were instructed to direct their attention toward the double-slit device as in the initial experiment. If they were successful, then the double slit spectral power was predicted to decline, and in turn the pitch of the musical note would also decline.”

This test finished after 19 participants participated in 31 sessions. At the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) laboratory, three meditators contributed 11 sessions and four non-meditators contributed 7 sessions. At the Zen Buddhist temple, 12 meditators contributed 13 sessions. The tests were supervised, and a double-slit apparatus was presented.

This experiment provided more evidence, and in the IONS laboratory the meditators showed “superior performance” as compared to the non-meditators.

A third experiment was then conducted, using 33 sessions where six meditators contributed to 22 sessions and seven non-meditators contributed to 11 sessions. The 22 meditator sessions resulted in “a significant decline” in the ration of the interference pattern. The meditators here had “an especially strong statistical effect.” This experiment clearly supported the hypothesis.

In the fourth experiment, thirty one people contributed 51 sessions, and the experimental effect size observed in this study was 3 times greater than that observed in the first four experiments.

The study goes on, and consistently outlines a number of factors associated with consciousness (I focused on the ones using meditation, but there are more in the study) to collapse the quantum wave function, or interfere with its pattern.

“The study found that factors associated with consciousness significantly correlated in predicted ways with perturbations in the double slit interference pattern.”

This experiment is one out of many that prove consciousness and our physical material world are intertwined. We recently published a study titled “10 Scientific Studies That Prove Consciousness Can Alter Our Physical Material World.” You can read that HERE

A fundamental conclusion of new physics also acknowledges that the observer creates the reality. As observers, we are personally involved with the creation of our own reality. Physicists are being forced to admit that the universe is a “mental” construction. Pioneering physicist Sir James Jeans wrote: “The stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter, we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter. Get over it, and accept the inarguable conclusion. The universe is immaterial-mental and spiritual.” (R.C. Henry, “The Mental Universe” ; Nature 436:29,2005) (source)

Science is quickly catching up to ancient wisdom. Changing our world requires action, yes, but that action must come from a place of peace, love , cooperation and understanding. Who is to say that meditation, and directing intention towards what we would like to change is not the base of action? If you change within, manifestation without will begin to unfold, and that’s exactly what’s happening on our planet right now. If our hearts are in the right place, and our intentions are pure, we will be provided with the necessary opportunities using action to implement change. This is why the role of consciousness, and recognizing the role of consciousness is so important. It plays a large factor in creating global change on a mass scale.

“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” – Albert Einstein

Sources:

(1) http://media.noetic.org/uploads/files/PhysicsEssays-Radin-DoubleSlit-2012.pdf

This pretty much explains my magical paradigm.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

planetdoc:

Voodoo Mysteries, The Gods | Culture – Planet Doc

Documentary “Voodoo Mysteries. The Gods”
All the rituals of santeria start with the smoking of herbs such as basil or siempre viva (everlasting flower). Apart from the purification of the participants, the spirits of plants, animals and men must always be present in Santeria. They wear white and worship the same deities as in the Haitian voodoo.

The slave ships also arrived in Cuba, thereby creating another large African population. Here the rebel slaves were called “cimarrones” and they also had to win their freedom. Their dominant beliefs were Yoruba, which when syncretised created what is known today as santeria or “Regla de Ocha”. A religion, which to a greater or lesser degree, is practised by most of the population.

On these altars we can see the African Gods: OKUN, the warrior. SANGO the OREXA of thunder and lightning, or St. Barbara in syncretism. ORULA, intermediary of OLOFI, the sun, and above this, OBATAIA, the Lord of the minds, equivalent to Our Lady of Mercy.

The Yoruba IFA uses a very complicated prophecy technique. More than a thousand deities may appear in the form of mathematical combinations. The babalawo must interpret them correctly and identify the final answer to the consultation, which will be the decision and order of ORULA. The person  officiating the ceremony shakes the seeds and marks one or two lines of different length, depending on the number of seeds that are left in his left hand. When ORULA appears all get down on their knees. Now the Oracle can be consulted.

Voodoo Mysteries | https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_xnDE04X2MdpGYhyIIo5ghHSv9i4Q0up
Full Documentaries playlist | http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_xnDE04X2Mc5pnHfQg40LERYOfVzdZo4
Culture documentaries playlist; http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_xnDE04X2MefNJowWSK7lrjD8n-fx5g9

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)