What a tragedy that most 'modern' Westerners reject the supernatural, souls, and spirits in the name of science but unknowingly embrace evil spirits and their doctrines and devices in the ideas of extraterrestrials, mindfulness meditation, shamanism, and many other occult devices and philosophies.
So true.
Jesus and his disciples cast many spirits out of people. Do Christians believe that evil spirits are gone now?
I think that many people who entertain or even embrace New Age beliefs and practices for a time do so as searchers for spiritual meaning. Yet they are usually left unsatisfied and frequently turn to conventional religion. Some may do so after bad, even alarming or dangerous experiences with occult practices and beliefs.
Remarkably, the most recent Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to three researchers who spent their careers investigating and disproving the possibility that quantum entanglement can be explained by one or more "hidden variables." In essence, the phenomenon of quantum entanglement shows consciousness to be real, with a major, even superior role over matter.
Some decades ago, reflecting on quantum entanglement, the great German physicist Max Planck wrote that "I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as a derivative of consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing postulates consciousness." On balance, the idea of 'matter as a derivative of consciousness' can be taken as similar to the essential point of Genesis.
Sometimes, what seem to be New Age type beliefs and experiences collide with the materialism that is dogma in much of modern science. For example, the reality of the human soul is suggested by near death experiences and work in recent years using hypnosis. These point toward life after death, with reincarnation over a series of lives, supervised by advanced spirits as guides subject to the authority of a Supreme Being with universal consciousness.
This cannot be rejected in a genuine scientific sense because once one accepts the findings of modern physics that consciousness is real, the question becomes how consciousness is organized and how it manifests and progresses over time. Both universal consciousness and enduring individual spirits are logically plausible.
Barry Weiss, one of the most notable researchers of past life regression, was a well-regarded psychiatrist in Miami when he stumbled across accounts of past lives when using hypnotherapy to treat psychological disorders. Weiss found that he could achieve dramatic improvement for his patients by accepting their accounts of past lives while under hypnosis as real for purposes of therapy.
When Weiss shared his results in the local medical community, he was ostracized and his findings were rejected as absurd. Weiss then took up a post at Johns Hopkins and continued and expanded his work. Research now underway by Weiss and others aims to give greater scientific credibility to past life regression and its findings. It is hoped that consciousness will in time become more than a vague concept in physics and philosophy, but with consciousness seen as manifested in spirits -- human and otherwise -- that exist in an organized and coherent realm outside of our own.
Indeed, modern cosmology indicates that ordinary matter and energy are only a small fraction of the energy and matter that exist in the universe, with so-called dark matter and dark energy making up most of existence. Some physicists contend that what we may perceive as paranormal phenomena and spirits are intrusions into our lesser realm of forces and beings that mostly reside in dark matter and dark energy.
It may well be that twenty, thirty, or fifty years from now most New Age and shamanistic type beliefs and faiths outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition will be sorted out as false or explainable. Judaism and Christianity may then be widely recognized as true enough in a scientific sense to be worthy of belief in full. I am confident that as the falsehoods and follies of our day fall away, the God of Exodus who became flesh at Bethlehem will endure.