The spirit world, according to Spiritualism, is the world or realm inhabited by spirits, both good or evil of various spiritual manifestations. This spirit world is regarded as an external environment for spirits. The Spiritualism religious movement in the nineteenth century espoused a belief in an afterlife where individual's awareness persists beyond death. Although independent from one another, both the spirit world and the physical world are in constant interaction. Through séances, trances, and other forms of mediumship these worlds can consciously communicate with each other.
According to the book Laws of Spirit World, the spirit world consists of seven realms, the lowest being Hell and the highest being Heaven. Each soul progresses from the lowest to higher realms based on what they learned from their karmic lessons.
By the mid-19th century most Spiritualist writers concurred that the spirit world was of "tangible substance" and a place consisting of "spheres" or "zones". Although specific details differed, the construct suggested organization and centralization. An 18th-century writer, Emanuel Swedenborg, influenced Spiritualist views of the spirit world. He described a series of concentric spheres each including a hierarchical organization of spirits in a setting more earth-like than theocentric. The spheres become gradually more illuminated and celestial. Spiritualists added a concept of limitlessness, or infinity to these spheres. Furthermore, it was defined that Laws initiated by God apply to earth as well as the spirit world.
Another common Spiritualist conception was that the spirit world is inherently good and is related to truth-seeking as opposed to things that are bad residing in a "spiritual darkness". This conception inferred as in the biblical parable Lazarus and Dives that there is considered a greater distance between good and bad spirits than between the dead and the living. Also, the spirit world is "The Home of the Soul" as described by C. W.
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
A spiritualist church is a church affiliated with the informal spiritualist movement which began in the United States in the 1840s. Spiritualist churches are now found around the world, but are most common in English-speaking countries, while in Latin America, Central America, Caribbean and Sub-Saharan Africa, where a form of spiritualism called spiritism is more popular, meetings are held in spiritist centres, most of which are non-profit organizations rather than ecclesiastical bodies.
Trance is a state of semi-consciousness in which a person is not self-aware and is either altogether unresponsive to external stimuli (but nevertheless capable of pursuing and realizing an aim) or is selectively responsive in following the directions of the person (if any) who has induced the trance. Trance states may occur involuntarily and unbidden. The term trance may be associated with hypnosis, meditation, magic, flow, prayer, and altered states of consciousness.
Originally, soul flight is a technique of ecstasy used by shamans with the purpose of entering into a state of trance. During the ecstatic trance it is believed that the shaman's soul has left the body and corporeal world, not unlike an out-of-body experience, which allows him or her to enter into a spiritual world and interact with its beings. As if going into another realm, shamans either descend into an underworld (cf. katabasis or nekyia) or ascend unto an upper world (cf.