Many contemporary spiritual people make statements about how people have thought in the past or statements about the history of ideas.  Way too often these statements are extremely inaccurate.  So the authors of The Secret say the law of attraction has been around throughout all of history when it  was first  developed in the 1850s.  Or James Redfield in the Celestine Prophecy says that Newton had a totally mechanical view of the world with no room for God.  Redfield says knowing the story of our cultural past is very important, but he spends no effort to learn about it.   It is commonly known among people who study the history of ideas that  Newton was the world’s last great alchemist; he spent more time on alchemy than physics.  Newton’s God was also very active in the world.   The teachings of many other prominent spiritual teachers are full of wildly inaccurate statements about the history of ideas.  This severely hurts the New Age movement.  First, it damages their reputation as they come across as people who do not have to be taken seriously by the mainstream.  No one would take your opinion about sports seriously if you said Lebron James was the world’s best soccer player.  And no one would take your opinion about music seriously if you said Picasso was the lead singer of the Beatles.  New Agers, however, continually say things about the history of ideas or science  or basic facts that seem incredibly shallow and stupid to mainstream people and then the New Agers wonder why the mainstream is “resistant” to their spiritual ideas.  If  New Agers want respect from the mainstream, we have to earn it.  Secondly, and more importantly, many New Agers say that our civilization is in trouble and we have to change how we live.  I think that is true.  But we can only help our culture  change if we really understand how our culture got to where it is now.  That means we have to really understand our culture’s past.  We cannot do that if our community encourages a shallow understanding of the past.  Too many spiritual people latch onto extremely simplistic views of the past because it supports their biases.   New Agers need to get more sophisticated about our cultural past and we need to develop a community spirit of encouraging this kind of knowledge.  The New Age community is very good at encouraging people to meditate and to listen to their intuition; it has to become mature enough to encourage deep level knowledge about the history of ideas instead of falling for simplistic views that support their emotional biases and make them feel superior to the mainstream.

This section of the website has research I have done into the history of ideas.  I have concentrated on areas that I find the most important to our culture and the most misunderstood.

Copyrighted 2009

My name is  Joseph Waligore.   I currently have a part-time job teaching philosophy and religious studies at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.   More information about me can be found at my MySpace profile or my Facebook profile.

This website is one of four websites I have.   At makingyourconnections.com I have a posted a significant portion of a self-help book  I am currently writing.  This book helps people succeed in the world by making their connections, the special people in their lives.  Another website, www.followingtheflow.com is for spiritually oriented people and discusses very similar ideas from a more spiritually oriented perspective.  Another one, www.josephwaligore.com is for academically or intellectually oriented people.  It has my writings about spiritual philosophies such as Stoicism, Socrates, the Deists, the Enlightenment period, and the rise of modern science.

There is a Facebook group called Flowing.  People interested in meeting other people who are interested in these ideas and/or participating in discussions about these ideas are invited to join the group.

Many people reach this site through keyword advertisements. It might be of interest that Joseph got the money for these ads through his daytrading profits.