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New Spiritual Idea Collection and Chronology

MorpheusDeus

Mapping the paht back to the Source
In this new age of free and instant internet communication we are witnessing an explosion of new spiritual ideas. In old times it was not too difficult to follow the development of religions, because people were constrained by the difficulty of travel and speed of communication. However, since the internet greatly accelerated the spreading of information and new doctrines, a type of chaos rules at the cutting edge of spiritual ‘innovation’ and ‘enlightenment’.

Many people disillusioned with their own inherited religions are looking for a replacement, searching for the truth in other religions, often not finding what they would feel to be truth. These people are an easy pray to new spiritual movements and new age gurus who try to appeal to the needs of these seekers to get their money and/or to serve the disinformation agenda of the ruling elite.

The new fad is to read a bunch of new ‘spiritual’ websites, alternative news, collect some ideas that ‘feel good’ and then start to speculate, put one’s own spin to these scavenged ideas, and become a new internet guru. Common sense and sound reason or logic are rarely used, and most of the time proper discernment is completely ignored. The main problem with this reckless burgeoning of new spiritual ‘leaders’ and ideas is that almost nobody cares to give any credit to the source of ideas he/she scavenged from the internet or literature. They just simply claim to ‘know’ these things to be ‘true’ because they are either channelling, or told so by their ‘higher selves’, or have been told by the ‘Prime Creator’, or because everybody talks about it, etc. A new ‘guru’ steals the ideas of other ’gurus’ and tries to sell them as his/her own new discovery or wisdom. This leads to the obfuscation of sources of disinformation, and consequently to a total hodgepodge of nonsense masquerading as truth, and new age ‘enlightened’ spirituality.

I would like to propose a collective project to make order out of chaos, and enable us to clearly see what concepts came from which source. This will make it possible to easily recognize plagiarists; to properly estimate the credibility of such ideas based on their originators; and to give proper credit to the deserving source of spiritual ideas when using them in our own philosophies.

If you want to participate here is what to do:
  1. Choose a spiritual idea, concept, or doctrine that is part of a ‘new spiritual teaching’, movement, sect, or religion, and describe it as accurately and succinctly as you can. This is the ‘what?’. Please always mark to which spiritual movement it belongs.
  2. Do a research and try to find the originator of that idea who first published it publicly. This is the ‘who?’
  3. Try to find out when that idea was first published. The ‘when?’
  4. And finally where it was published the first time. The ‘where?’
I and/or other volunteers will try to collect the suggestions posted here and elsewhere and organize them into an easily searchable table, or document that will be regularly updated and freely shared (like in .doc, pdf or excel format etc.). It is not necessary that your suggestion and research should be complete, and find the definite originator of an idea right at the start; it is only required that it should be closer to the origin in time and accuracy than the previous suggestions. So we can start out with a vague idea who published what for the first time, and then others (or you) may refine it later with newly found data.

We don’t care whether the chosen idea is true or not, valuable of useless, based on facts or a total hoax. Such discussions can be done on other threads. Our sole purpose with this project is to create a collection of new spiritual ideas and find their originators. Of course the more of accurate data can be collected the better, but basic facts are only required. In fact the shorter the record of an idea can be made the better, because this way the resulting collection will be more manageable in size and usability. A succinct description is preferred, rather than writing long and vague stories full of personal opinions not supported by documents or references.

When I have mentioned ‘new spiritual ideas’, then the purpose was to limit this collection to the spiritual ideas and concepts that recently spread as part of relatively new spiritual movements, sects, or new religions. The major world religions are excluded from this collection. This limitation is necessary to limit the size of the collection and make it manageable. What can we consider as a ‘new spiritual movement’? Well this is a vague and arbitrary decision. I would suggest limiting this to the movements that were newly established in the last 200 years or so. The New Age religion or movement is one of these - just to give an idea.

If an idea of the new movement is not really new, like that of reincarnation, then it is still useful to point this out and find the origin of the idea as far back as possible. Often a search engine like Google will not find old data because some websites don’t exist anymore. In such cases the way back machine at https://archive.org may be of use to dig up lost information. Libraries may also help.

Thanks for any contributions.

Morpheus
 
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MorpheusDeus

Mapping the paht back to the Source
#1 The spirit voluntarily chooses his human incarnation.

Here is an example tracing of a spiritual idea that demonstrates the technique used to arrive to the result:

The Idea belongs to New Age spirituality:
The spirit voluntarily chooses his human incarnation. (Some claim: the spirit signs a certain contract, or agreement to get born into a certain human body.)

Using Google to search for voluntary incarnation related pages found this one:
Reincarnation of our soul - rebirth | Time for change

Quote from the page:
“An incarnation must not be looked at as punishment for mistakes or vile actions in earlier incarnations. From the view of the soul, each incarnation is a new chance to get closer to its return back to the divine state of origin. The soul always incarnates voluntarily (in the text about the human development, we have compared individual rebirths with taking semesters at a university). Souls who heavily surrendered to striving for power, greed and selfishness may indeed decide to reincarnate in a real trouble spot and to live under worst conditions. This is solely to physically and emotionally sense the effects of power, greed and selfishness from other beings. It happens of the soul's free will and hoping that the impression of these bad experiences will finally lead to developing the desired traits in successive incarnations.”

To find out the date when this page first appeared on the internet I have searched for the archived versions of the above link on archive.org, and found that the earliest version was archived on 29 Jun 07.
###

Continuing the search found many more pages with similar claims but all of them were younger, therefore it was meaningless to record them.

Finally found one page that was even older than the above here:
Reincarnation | Selecting a family to reincarnate into | AfterlifeData.com

Quote from the page:
The idea that each of us voluntarily agreed to be the children of a given set of parents before we came into this life is a difficult concept for some people to accept. Although the average person has experienced love from his or her parents, many of us have unresolved, hurtful memories of those near to us who should have offered protection and did not. We grow up thinking of ourselves as victims of biological parents and family members who we inherited without any choice in the matter. This assumption is wrong.”

Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives, Michael Newton
pg. 246, 1996

Since the date of the book’s issue is given under the quote there was no need to search for the oldest version of the www.afterlifedata.com page. Instead I searched for all issues of the book “Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives” by Michael Newton on the website http://www.bookfinder4u.com.

The earliest issue was found at the link:
BookFinder4u - Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives by Michael Newton, ISBN: B00854DPPK

Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives by Michael Newton
By: PhD Michael Newton
ISBN: B00854DPPK ISBN-13: N/A
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide - 1905-07-15
Format: Paperback

I suppose it will be quite difficult to find earlier mentions of this idea, so stopped this research for the time being. To summarize the find:
  1. What: The Idea belongs to New Age spirituality
    The spirit voluntarily chooses his human incarnation. (Some claim: the spirit signs a certain contract, or agreement to get born into a certain human body.)
  2. Who: PhD Michael Newton
  3. When: 1905-07-15
  4. Where: Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives by Michael Newton
By: PhD Michael Newton
ISBN: B00854DPPK ISBN-13: N/A
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide - 1905-07-15
Format: Paperback
BookFinder4u - Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives by Michael Newton, ISBN: B00854DPPK
 
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