By Mandy Makanui Waldenström, available on Substack

There are thousands of branches within each religion and spiritual tradition, which have grown out of it’s own unique epistemology, and therefor needs to be understood as such. Certain core values remain, and out of these, millions of individual and collective understandings of our existence build up a collective body of wisdom from which we can learn. Rather than relating to the existence of God, the soul or not, from absolute truths, we can explore the richness in which humans throughout history have created meaning. We can learn how we arrived to these conclusions and beliefs around God and spirit, while  understanding the structures in which we were born into. 

A majority, 75%, of the Swedish population does not believe in God, yet more than half of the population is registered as belonging to a religious institution. How did we come to this, from having a history of rich norse mythology to Christianity embedded in our lives, to within a few generations, turning away from spirituality and the existence of God? What are the consequences of whole heartedly turning to science and technology, and disconnecting from our animistic and abrahamic heritage? 

To quantify or rationalise the God question altogether, is perhaps a symptom of the anthropocentric separation between god, humans and nature, something that scholar Lynn White argued, is the leading cause of our ecological decline. In the creation story from the Bible we can read in Genesis 1:28, how god separated himself from man and created a hiearchy in which man ruled over animals. The theological debate has been heated among scholars, around the verse and its fundamental impact on the western world’s epistemology.  

There are a few events that have brought such ontological flips in our culture as the western marriage between science and technology. This merge of theoretical and empirical approaches to our natural environment was quickly accepted as a normal pattern of action, and may have marked the greatest event in human history since the invention of agriculture. From this point, the split between man, god and nature grew even further, until it was normalized and accepted as a collective truth (White, 1967).

Not believing in God, perfectly lines up with the internal split that occurred in the history of our western civilisation. Lynn White argued that this split caused by the abrahamic religions is the main reason as to why we are experiencing an increase of alienation, polarity and separation, foreseeing the climate crisis and our inability to resolve it from our current post-modern world view. Anthroprcentrism gave humans carte blanche on seizing to feel ourselves as one with nature, earth, each other—and ourselves for that matter. These individual splits, multiplied by generational and cultural transmission, exponentially increased due to technological advancement, and has made us more disembodied than ever.

We are experiencing the result of what was written down in the biblical scriptures thousands of years ago. The focus on transcendence without including the body, making worldly, earthly and bodily matters areas to measure, control, observe or worse, torment. 

We need a collective soul reclamation.

This split we now experience comes as crisis in climate change, democracy collapse and epidemic decline of mental health. 

These challenging times needs to be addressed at the root cause—and if there is any truth to White’s theory, then spiritual trauma needs spiritual intervention. Psychology alone is not enough. By becoming aware of how these historical constructs have contributed to an internalised separation that informs our every day life and decisions, we have the power to heal this inner and outer divide. With more balance in the world as a result.

With this historical backdrop, along with a deeper understanding of the systemic underpinnings of religious and spiritual beliefs, it becomes clear that the internalised athroprocentric split needs to be adressed. The over dependence of science and technology is useful att times but cannot address the imbalance we see in the world.

Trans disciplinary hypnotherapy

The work we do in hypnotherapy sessions addresses this split on an individual level, and is sourced in the wisdom of a broader systemic change that is needed. The Hypnospace method by CTISAB is specifically designed to engage in both vertical transformation (transcendence, transpersonal healing including ancestral, celestial and spiritual healing) and horizontal transformation: the worldly, impact in our day to day life , relationships, childhood trauma and more. We appreciate and honor conventional psychology, however, this work touches beyond what evidence based methods offer.

We enter into states of consciousness that allows us to presence long lost energetic imprints that affect us today, and integrate them. From this place we start relating to and engaging with the world, not from the partial place, but from a whole, integrated place. The ripple effects in our lives become tremendous. What felt impossible now feels possible. And dare I to suggest, we will be able to bend time and space, thus healing the initial God-Nature split, should we reach a collective tipping point in doing transformative work.

It is my hope that by addressing our split from nature, we can heal the past and presence a new emerging future that is built on balance and spiritual wholeness.

Source: White, Lynn. 1974. "The historical roots of our ecologic crisis [with discussion of St Francis; reprint, 1967]," Ecology and religion in history, (New York :Harper and Row, 1974).