Zeitgeist

The term Zeitgeist dates back to mid 18th century Germany. The term literally translates as "the spirit of the age." Geist translates as mind, spirit, or ghost - essentially the soul. Zeit translates as time.

The concept of Zeitgeist, in a nutshell, is that every era of time has a spirit or flavor to it, which is an amalgamation of all the thoughts, actions and philosophies taking place during that age. Some take this a step further to describe Zeitgeist as the amalgamation of ALL thoughts, actions and philosophies ever contrived by man - as a spiritual counterpart, as it were, to the visible world in which we live.

This concept is often aligned with the idea of a Universal Mind, or one source for all that is. Many call this being God. Many faiths teach that our soul returns to God when our body ceases to function.

The great Aristotle wrote, in his work "On the Soul" that the soul was not a separate item from the body, but in fact it was the very "being" of that body, or its life essence. He implies that while the body cannot live without the soul, some parts of human consciousness can survive, along with the soul, even if the body dies.

Some of the greatest thinkers of all time have written about these concepts and I certainly do not intend to add anything new, but only to simplify the concept, and relate it to what I have experienced.

I have a theory I am exploring currently, which is hard to express in normal language but here goes -

I believe that God is, in fact, the Zeitgeist of all time, and that God continues to expand, just as everything else in Nature expands. That within that expansion are the souls of the departed. That new beings are infused with the collective soul or universal mind and so they innately carry within them knowledge, patterns, and even memories, that have been developed before their birth.

Past lives are always an interesting subject and it is part of my theory, at least for now, that those experiencing past life memories are actually tapping into that part of the Zeitgeist of which they were most strongly infused. In other words, it is not necessarily their own real past life they are remembering, but rather a life  of memories that have been absorbed into the greater Soul, or Self, which is God, and re-infused into the new physical human life.

If we discount a greater universal mind or collective soul, then what we have left, sadly, is a history tied together by war – war often initiated in the name of God. From the Crusades to Northern Ireland, religion drove each side. The banner of the Spanish Armada was "Arise, Oh Lord, and vindicate thy cause." The old German chant of "Gott Mitt Uns" was echoed by the 17th century English warriors' insistence that, "Our God is a God of War."

All around us today, we see people divided by their version of God, which they put forth through their own brand of religion. The end result is often war. In fact, the driving force behind most famous political careers involves war. Eisenhower was the great WWII commander; Jack Kennedy, the PTO boat commander. Bush has his wars and Obama, his inherited wars. Think of Churchill, Lenin, Stalin, even Hitler, all made famous or infamous (but still powerful) by war. Think of George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, and it goes on and on – presidencies defined by war with other nations.

When the America Revolutionary hero Ethan Allen captured Ticonderoga, he did so "In the name of the Great Jehovah." When the latest suicide bomber sets off his payload, it is just as strongly claimed for the sake of his/her God.

Left to their own devices, without some unseen universal soul, humans can unfortunately do no better than to kill in the name of God, or at least to blow the limbs off innocent children with "smart bombs."

The real God, the God inside of us all, the Zeitgeist, or Universal Mind, or Collective Soul, is above all this bickering. The real God allows for miracles, and progress, and kindness, and love.

And so I am a spiritualist, rather than a religionist.