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In this book the Dutch physicist and media-entrepreneur Luc Sala offers and amazing view on the efficacy of rituals. He argues rituals not only have 'magical'effect, but they played a crucial role in human evolution. Ritual behavior is something we inherited from the animals, but consciousness and self consciousness allow us to use ritual for psychological, social but also magical purposes. In the extensive study Luc Sala not only covers the roots of ritual in history and literature, but explains how rituals work. He uses a whole new model of the structure of our psyche, our ego and explains how all rituals basically aim at ego-dissolution. A crucial element in his model is the assumption there are two time dimension, one linear and the other magical, thus bridging determinism and free will. The book offers new views on ancestor veneration, circumcision, Bayesian quantum theory, thought-waves, the importance of gold, the dreamstate of trees, and much more. It is much more than an encyclopedic view on why and how ritual developed, it points at a new paradigm where science and religion are united. Even as the ideas in this study are highly controversial, they do offer answers to many philosophical and psychological questions. The relationship between ritual and conscience, cyberspace and otherworld contacts becomes clear. Sala shows that accepting that the future influences the present, as modern science is discovering, can explain evolution as a remembrance of the future, but also sheds new light on prophesy, psi-phenomena, synchronicity and miracles.
A book nobody interested in fundamental questions about our relationship with the otherworld can ignore!
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