Spiritual Snake Oil

"Spiritual Snake Oil" shows that the same fallacies that plague religious apologetics also infect virtually all "new age" and "spiritual" writing. Author Chris Edwards does this by dissecting the arguments and assertions of the most prominent "new age" icons and "spiritual" writers. They include Robert Pirsig ("Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"), James Redfield ("The Celestine Prophecy"), Deepak Chopra ("Life After Death"), Dinesh D'Souza ("Life After Death"), Francis Collins's ("The Language of God"), Rhonda Byrne ("The Secret"), and even Michael Crichton (a surprising defender of New Age thinking). As Edwards shows, the same fallacies, the same errors in argument, show up time after time in the writings of these--and virtually all other--"new age" and "spiritual" writers. In addition to explaining these fallacies in the chapters devoted to the individual authors, Edwards devotes a final chapter, "A Compendium of Fallacies," to outlining the tricks and deceptive practices common to illogical arguments.

"In the world of snake oils, you have to see the world a little differently. Where others see poverty, you see riches; where others see weeds, you see flowers; where others see sickness, you see openness." Becca Stevens calls herself a "snake oil seller": She takes natural oils, mixes them with a good story, sells them in an open market and believes they help to heal the world. Becca is the founder of Thistle Farms, one of the most successful examples in the US of a social enterprise whose mission is the work force. She is also the founder of its residential program, Magdalene. The women of Magdalene/Thistle Farms have survived prostitution, trafficking and addiction, and the natural body care products they manufacture-balms, soaps, and lotions-aid in their own healing as well as that of the people who buy them. The book weaves together the beginnings of the enterprise with individual stories from Becca's own journey as well as 20 women in the community. In Snake Oil, Becca tells how the women she began helping fifteen years ago have been the biggest source of her own healing from sexual abuse and her father's death as a child. Wise and reflective, Snake Oil offers an empowering narrative as well as a selection of recipes for healing remedies that readers can make themselves.

Using essential oils to influence your energetic make-up and karmic patterns • Details how to identify which tattvas--the Five Great Elements--are dominant in your energetic make-up • Explores the energetic signatures of the essential oils associated with each tattva and chakra, including their archetypes, sacred geometry, sacred sounds, and colors • Explains how to identify your personal vibrational signature, purify your energy body, impart vibrational properties to jewelry, and work with yantras and mantras The tattvas, the Five Great Elements--earth, water, fire, air/wind, and ether/space--create and sustain not only the universe but also all of its inhabitants. Each of us has a unique combination of these elemental energies behind our personal characteristics--everything from the color of our eyes to our behaviors and emotional temperament. What tattvas are dominant in your make-up can also be influenced by your surroundings and by karma. Essential oils, in addition to working biologically and chemically, also work at the energetic level, making them ideal for working with the tattvas. Teaching you how to use essential oils to affect the very fabric of your being, Candice Covington details how the Tattvas Method of essential oils allow you to access the deepest, most hidden aspects of Self, those beyond the reach of the mind, the very energetic causation patterns that set all behaviors and thoughts into motion. She reveals how the tattvas are the energy that animate each chakra and how we can use their archetypal energy to shape our inner life and align with our greater soul purpose. The author provides energetic profiles of each tattva, chakra, and essential oil, explains their relationships to one another, and details how to identify what tattva or chakra is dominant at any given time. Exploring the energetic signatures of the tattvic essential oils, she details their elemental make-up, animal and deity archetypes, sacred geometry symbols, sacred syllables, and colors. She reveals how to discover the energy patterns responsible for directing unhealthy life patterns and explains how to identify your personal vibrational signature, purify your energy body, and craft your own unique ritual practice with essential oils. Showing how essential oils are powerful vibrational tools for effecting change, the author reveals how they allow each of us to deliberately steer our own destiny, fulfill our personal dharma, and be all that our souls intended us to be.

Satan is always at work breeding sadness and anxiety while providing obstacles that prevent souls from making spiritual progress. In this concise yet powerful book, author Dan Burke presents the venerable, time-tested wisdom of Catholic mystics to help you understand the influence of the Enemy on your mind and heart, and the tactics you need to combat him. With St. Ignatius as his guide, Burke presents here an indispensable, authoritative manual for engaging in daily battle with the Adversary—combat that is both inevitable and winnable. Burke will help you recognize the ebbs and flows of consolation and desolation, and distinguish between the voices of God and of Satan. Best of all, you'll come to see the spiritual life not as a science to be learned, but as an intuitive art to be practiced as you move with increasing success from habitual sin to sanctity. The battle for our souls is unavoidable. The saints won theirs by learning how to be spiritual warrio

Spiritual Development the Hard Way carves a pragmatic map for those who seek answers to the oldest questions of humanity. Beginning with the basic foundations of our condition, which cause any intelligent person a sense of entrapment, it explains the mechanisms, the process, and the landscape of escape from this entrapment. Using both new and ancient methods and concepts, it presents countless insights into all aspects of this journey to freedom. The primary focus of this book is on a comprehensive, practical array of techniques to employ in every aspect of life, offering creative and visionary guidance with glimpses of the final purpose of spiritual attainment.

In God Is No Laughing Matter, bestselling author Julia Cameron takes a witty, powerfully honest, and irreverent look at the culture of "spirituality" today and offers insight to enable readers to determine their personal spiritual path. The important thing to remember, she says, is that God is both more humorous and more humane than we've been taught. With her trademark "sparkling prose" (Publishers Weekly), anecdotes, and helpful techniques, Cameron's thought-provoking essays paint the spiritual journey in a refreshingly clear light. Addressing the way in which spiritual "experts" have clouded the message, her book shows readers how to improve concentration and how to make conscious choices that heighten their individual autonomy as well as enrich their lives and their communities.

The decline of the Christian churches in the West is undeniable but commentators differ in their understanding of what this represents. For some it shows a decline in interest in religion as such; for others, religion has not declined, it has only changed its shape. Possible candidates for Christianity's replacement are the new religious movements of the late 1960s and what is variously called New Age, alternative or contemporary spirituality. Secular Beats Spiritual offers a detailed study of the religious and spiritual innovations of the last 50 years. It assesses their popularity in the UK and concludes that the 'not decline-just change' view cannot be sustained. Serious interest in spirituality has grown far less quickly than has the number of us who have no religious or spiritual interest. The most popular and enduring movements have been the least religious ones and those that have survived have done so by becoming more 'this-worldly' and less patently religious or spiritual. Yoga is popular but as a secular exercise programme; Transcendental Meditation now markets its meditational technique as a purely secular therapy; British Buddhists now offer the secular Mindfulness; and the Findhorn Foundation (Europe's oldest New Age centre) is no longer the germ of a counter-cultural communalism but sells its expertise to major corporations. Steve Bruce also demonstrates that, although eastern religious themes (such as reincarnation and karma) have become more popular as the power of the Christian churches to stigmatise them has declined, such themes have also been significantly altered so that what superficially looks like the easternization of the West might better be described as the westernization of the easternization of the West.

Book IV continues the journey east as we travel deeper into history to uncover the secret doctrines of the Architectonici, Mathematici, and Perfecti encoded in all mythoses and religions. In doing so, we will uncover the lost systems and similarities of language while exploring the history of an ancient empire that's been long forgotten, or more likely, hidden from us.