Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (Russian: Еле́на Петро́вна Блава́тская, Yelena Petrovna Blavatskaya; 12 August [O.S. 31 July] 1831 – 8 May 1891) was a Russian occultist, spirit medium, and author who co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. She gained an international following as the leading theoretician of Theosophy, the esoteric movement that the society promoted.

Born into an aristocratic Russian-German family in Yekaterinoslav, then in the Russian Empire (now Ukraine), Blavatsky traveled widely around the empire as a child. Largely self-educated, she developed an interest in Western esotericism during her teenage years. According to her later claims, in 1849 she embarked on a series of world travels, visiting Europe, the Americas, and India. She also claimed that during this period she encountered a group of spiritual adepts, the "Masters of the Ancient Wisdom", who sent her to Shigatse, Tibet, where they trained her to develop a deeper understanding of the synthesis of religion, philosophy and science. Both contemporary critics and later biographers have argued that some or all of these foreign visits were fictitious, and that she spent this period in Europe. By the early 1870s, Blavatsky was involved in the Spiritualist movement; although defending the genuine existence of Spiritualist phenomena, she argued against the mainstream Spiritualist idea that the entities contacted were the spirits of the dead. Relocating to the United States in 1873, she befriended Henry Steel Olcott and rose to public attention as a spirit medium, attention that included public accusations of fraudulence.

In 1875 New York City, Blavatsky co-founded the Theosophical Society with Olcott and William Quan Judge. In 1877, she published Isis Unveiled, a book outlining her Theosophical world-view. Associating it closely with the esoteric doctrines of Hermeticism and Neoplatonism, Blavatsky described Theosophy as "the synthesis of science, religion and philosophy", proclaiming that it was reviving an "Ancient Wisdom" which underlay all the world's religions. In 1880, she and Olcott moved to India, where the Society was allied to the Arya Samaj, a Hindu reform movement. That same year, while in Ceylon, she and Olcott became the first people from the United States to formally convert to Buddhism. Although opposed by the British administration, Theosophy spread rapidly in India but experienced internal problems after Blavatsky was accused of producing fraudulent paranormal phenomena. Amid ailing health, in 1885 she returned to Europe, there establishing the Blavatsky Lodge in London. Here she published The Secret Doctrine, a commentary on what she claimed were ancient Tibetan manuscripts, as well as two further books, The Key to Theosophy and The Voice of the Silence. She died of influenza.

Blavatsky was a controversial figure during her lifetime, championed by supporters as an enlightened guru and derided as a fraudulent charlatan and plagiarist by critics. Her Theosophical doctrines influenced the spread of Hindu and Buddhist ideas in the West as well as the development of Western esoteric currents like Ariosophy, Anthroposophy, and the New Age Movement.

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Joseph John Campbell (March 26, 1904 – October 30, 1987) was an American professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College who worked in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work covers many aspects of the human experience. Campbell's most well-known work is his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), in which he discusses his theory of the journey of the archetypal hero shared by world mythologies, termed the monomyth.

Since the publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell's theories have been applied by a wide variety of modern writers and artists. His philosophy has been summarized by his own often repeated phrase: "Follow your bliss."[6] He gained recognition in Hollywood when George Lucas credited Campbell's work as influencing his Star Wars saga.[7]

Campbell's approach to folklore topics such as myth and his influence on popular culture has been the subject of criticism, including from folklorists, academics in folklore studies.

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Mantak Chia (Chinese: 謝明德, Pinyin: Xiè Míngdé, born April 24, 1944 in Bangkok, Thailand) is a Taoist Master. He is best known for his teaching Taoist practices under the names of Healing Tao, Tao Yoga, Universal Healing Tao System and Qi Gong. He has run numerous workshops, written a series of books, and published a number of training videos. He views himself primarily as a teacher.[1]

Mantak Chia was born to a Chinese family in Thailand in 1944. He was raised in a Christian family; his father was a Baptist minister. He began studying the Buddhist method of "stilling the mind" at the age of six, and later he studied Muay Thai boxing, T'ai chi ch'uan, Kung Fu and Taoist and Buddhist meditation practices from several masters. Of all his masters, the most influential one was Yi Eng (White Cloud), an eremitic member of the Dragon's Gate sect of the Quanzhen (Complete Perfection) school of Taoism[2][3] (Chinese: 道家全眞龍門派), who taught Mantak Chia a complete Taoist training system and authorized him to teach and heal.

Later, he studied Western anatomy and medical science for two years to better understand the physiological mechanisms behind healing energy.

He established his first Universal Healing Tao school in Thailand in 1974 after systematizing his knowledge of Taoism. He founded the Universal Healing Tao Center (originally named the Taoist Esoteric Yoga Center) in New York in 1979. The center attracted a broad variety of European and American students, and some of them greatly helped him in teaching Taoist practices to western students. He returned to Thailand in 1994 and created the Universal Tao Training Center—Tao Garden—in Chiang Mai. He not only teaches at Tao Garden but also tours to other countries of the world to teach and promote the Healing Tao practices every year.

Rooted in traditional Taoist practices, Chia's teaching system develops integrated physical, mental and spiritual (energy) bodies internal to human beings. The focus is on developing human life energy — Qi — for self-healing and life transformation.

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Paulo Coelho de Souza (/ˈkwɛl.juː, kuˈɛl-, -joʊ/;[1] Portuguese: [ˈpawlu kuˈeʎu]; born 24 August 1947) is a Brazilian lyricist and novelist, best known for his novel The Alchemist. In 2014, he uploaded his personal papers online to create a virtual Paulo Coelho Foundation.

Paulo Coelho was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and attended a Jesuit school.[citation needed] As a teenager, Coelho wanted to become a writer.[citation needed] Upon telling his mother this, she responded, "My dear, your father is an engineer. He's a logical, reasonable man with a very clear vision of the world. Do you actually know what it means to be a writer?"[citation needed] At 17, Coelho's parents committed him to a mental institution from which he escaped three times before being released at the age of 20.[2][3] Coelho was born into a Catholic family, and his parents were strict about the religion and faith.[4] Coelho later remarked that "It wasn't that they wanted to hurt me, but they didn't know what to do... They did not do that to destroy me, they did that to save me."[5] At his parents' wishes,[citation needed] Coelho enrolled in law school and abandoned his dream of becoming a writer. One year later, he dropped out and lived life as a hippie, traveling through South America, North Africa, Mexico, and Europe and started using drugs in the 1960s.[6][7]

Upon his return to Brazil, Coelho worked as a songwriter, composing lyrics for Elis Regina,[citation needed] Rita Lee,[citation needed] and Brazilian icon Raul Seixas. Composing with Raul led to Coelho being associated with magic and occultism, due to the content of some songs.[8] He is often accused that these songs were rip-offs of foreign songs not well known in Brazil at the time.[9] In 1974, by his account, he was arrested for "subversive" activities and tortured[10][11] by the ruling military government, who had taken power ten years earlier and viewed his lyrics as left-wing and dangerous.[5] Coelho also worked as an actor, journalist and theatre director before pursuing his writing career.[8]

Coelho married artist Christina Oiticica in 1980. Together they had previously spent half the year in Rio de Janeiro and the other half in a country house in the Pyrenees Mountains of France, but now the pair reside permanently in Geneva, Switzerland.[12]

In 1986 Coelho walked the 500-plus mile Road of Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain.[6][13] On the path, he had a spiritual awakening, which he described autobiographically in The Pilgrimage.[14] In an interview, Coelho stated "[In 1986], I was very happy in the things I was doing. I was doing something that gave me food and water – to use the metaphor in The Alchemist, I was working, I had a person whom I loved, I had money, but I was not fulfilling my dream. My dream was, and still is, to be a writer."[15] Coelho would leave his lucrative[citation needed] career as a songwriter and pursue writing full-time.

In 1992, Paolo Coelho claimed to be able to become invisible.[16]

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Eckhart von Hochheim OP (c. 1260 – c. 1328),[1] commonly known as Meister Eckhart[a] or Eckehart, was a German theologian, philosopher and mystic, born near Gotha, in the Landgraviate of Thuringia (now central Germany) in the Holy Roman Empire.[b]

Eckhart came into prominence during the Avignon Papacy, at a time of increased tensions between monastic orders, diocesan clergy, the Franciscan Order, and Eckhart's Dominican Order of Preachers. In later life, he was accused of heresy and brought up before the local Franciscan-led Inquisition, and tried as a heretic by Pope John XXII.[c] He seems to have died before his verdict was received.[2][d]

He was well known for his work with pious lay groups such as the Friends of God and was succeeded by his more circumspect disciples John Tauler and Henry Suso.[citation needed] Since the 19th century, he has received renewed attention. He has acquired a status as a great mystic within contemporary popular spirituality, as well as considerable interest from scholars situating him within the medieval scholastic and philosophical tradition.[4]

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Manly Palmer Hall (March 18, 1901 – August 29, 1990) was a Canadian-born author, lecturer, astrologer and mystic. He is best known for his 1928 work The Secret Teachings of All Ages. Over his 70 year career, he gave thousands of lectures, including two at Carnegie Hall, and published over 150 volumes. In 1934, he founded The Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles, which he dedicated to the "Truth Seekers of All Time", with a research library, lecture hall and publishing house. Many of his lectures can be found online and his books are still in print.

Manly P. Hall was born in 1901[1] in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada,[2] to Louise Palmer Hall, a chiropractor and member of the Rosicrucian Fellowship, and William S. Hall, a dentist.[3] In 1919 Hall, who never knew his father, moved from Canada to Los Angeles, California, with his maternal grandmother to reunite with his birth mother, who was living in Santa Monica, and was almost immediately drawn to the arcane world of mysticism, esoteric philosophies, and their underlying principles. Hall delved deeply into "teachings of lost and hidden traditions, the golden verses of Hindu gods, Greek philosophers and Christian mystics, and the spiritual treasures waiting to be found within one's own soul." Less than a year later, Hall booked his first lecture, and the topic was reincarnation.[4]:15–18

He soon took over as preacher of the Church of the People in 1919, at Trinity Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles. Hall was ordained a minister in the Church of the People on May 17, 1923, and "a few days later, he was elected permanent pastor of the church."[4]:28

His first publications consisted of two small pamphlets, "The Breastplate of the High Priest" (1920), and "Wands and Serpents." Between 1921 and 1923 he wrote three books, The Initiates of the Flame published in October 1922, The Ways of the Lonely Ones published in 1922, and The Lost Keys of Freemasonry published in March 1923. Hall did not become a Freemason until 1954, more than thirty years after this book was published.[5]

During the early 1920s, Carolyn Lloyd and her daughter Estelle—members of a family that controlled a valuable oil field in Ventura County, California—began "sending a sizeable portion of their oil income to Hall," who used the money to travel and acquire a substantial personal library of ancient literature.[4]:38–43 Hall's "first trip around the world to study the lives, customs and religions of countries in Asia and Europe," which commenced December 5, 1923, was paid for by donations from Carolyn Lloyd and her congregation.[4]:41

Later in 1928, at the age of 27 years, he published An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy: Being an Interpretation of the Secret Teachings concealed within the Rituals, Allegories and Mysteries of all Ages, which is more commonly referred to as The Secret Teachings of All Ages.[6]:vi The major books which followed include The Dionysian Artificers (1936), Freemasonry of the Ancient Egyptians (1937), and Masonic Orders of Fraternity (1950).

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Carl Gustav Jung (/jʊŋ/ YUUNG,[6][7] German: [kaʁl ˈjʊŋ]; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work was influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, and religious studies. Jung worked as a research scientist at the famous Burghölzli hospital, under Eugen Bleuler. During this time, he came to the attention of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. The two men conducted a lengthy correspondence and collaborated, for a while, on a joint vision of human psychology.

Freud saw the younger Jung as the heir he had been seeking to take forward his "new science" of psychoanalysis and to this end secured his appointment as President of his newly founded International Psychoanalytical Association. Jung's research and personal vision, however, made it impossible for him to follow his older colleague's doctrine, and a schism became inevitable. This division was personally painful for Jung and resulted in the establishement of Jung's analytical psychology as a comprehensive system separate from psychoanalysis.

Among the central concepts of analytical psychology is individuation—the lifelong psychological process of differentiation of the self out of each individual's conscious and unconscious elements. Jung considered it to be the main task of human development. He created some of the best known psychological concepts, including synchronicity, archetypal phenomena, the collective unconscious, the psychological complex, and extraversion and introversion.

Jung was also an artist, craftsman and builder as well as a prolific writer. Many of his works were not published until after his death and some are still awaiting publication.

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Paracelsus (/ˌpærəˈsɛlsəs/; 1493/1494[1] – 24 September 1541), born Theophrastus von Hohenheim (full name Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim[10]), was a Swiss[11] physician, an alchemist, a lay theologian, and a philosopher of the German Renaissance.[12][13] He was not considered a cosmographer, a mathematician, or an astronomer.[14]

He was a pioneer in several aspects of the "medical revolution" of the Renaissance, emphasizing the value of observation in combination with received wisdom. He is credited as the "father of toxicology".[15] Paracelsus also had a substantial impact as a prophet or diviner, his "Prognostications" being studied by Rosicrucians in the 1600s. Paracelsianism is the early modern medical movement inspired by the study of his works.[16]

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Plato (/ˈpleɪtoʊ/ PLAY-toe;[2] Greek: Πλάτων Plátōn, pronounced [plá.tɔːn] in Classical Attic; 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) was an Athenian philosopher during the Classical period in Ancient Greece, founder of the Platonist school of thought, and the Academy, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world.

He is widely considered the pivotal figure in the history of Ancient Greek and Western philosophy, along with his teacher, Socrates, and his most famous student, Aristotle.[a] Plato has also often been cited as one of the founders of Western religion and spirituality.[4] The so-called Neoplatonism of philosophers like Plotinus and Porphyry influenced Saint Augustine and thus Christianity. Alfred North Whitehead once noted: "the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."[5]

Plato was the innovator of the written dialogue and dialectic forms in philosophy. Plato is also considered the founder of Western political philosophy. His most famous contribution is the theory of Forms known by pure reason, in which Plato presents a solution to the problem of universals known as Platonism (also ambiguously called either Platonic realism or Platonic idealism). He is also the namesake of Platonic love and the Platonic solids.

His own most decisive philosophical influences are usually thought to have been along with Socrates, the pre-Socratics Pythagoras, Heraclitus and Parmenides, although few of his predecessors' works remain extant and much of what we know about these figures today derives from Plato himself.[b] Unlike the work of nearly all of his contemporaries, Plato's entire body of work is believed to have survived intact for over 2,400 years.[7] Although their popularity has fluctuated over the years, the works of Plato have never been without readers since the time they were written.[8]

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Eckhart Tolle (/ˈɛkɑːrt ˈtɒlə/ EK-art TOL-ə; German: [ˈɛkhaʁt ˈtɔlə]; born Ulrich Leonard Tölle, February 16, 1948) is a spiritual teacher and best-selling author. He is a German-born resident of Canada[1][2] best known as the author of The Power of Now and A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose. In 2008, The New York Times called Tolle "the most popular spiritual author in the United States".[3] In 2011, he was listed by Watkins Review as the most spiritually influential person in the world.[4] Tolle is not identified with any particular religion, but he has been influenced by a wide range of spiritual works.[5]

Tolle said he was depressed for much of his life until age 29 when he underwent an "inner transformation". He then spent several years wandering "in a state of deep bliss" before becoming a spiritual teacher. He moved to Vancouver, British Columbia in 1995[6] and currently divides his time between Canada and California. He began writing his first book, The Power of Now, in 1997[7] and it reached The New York Times Best Seller list in 2000.[8]

The Power of Now and A New Earth sold an estimated three million and five million copies respectively in North America by 2009.[9] In 2008, Tolle joined television talk show host Oprah Winfrey for 10 live webinars, and by October 2009 they had been accessed 35 million times.[9] In 2016, Tolle was named in Oprah's SuperSoul 100 list of visionaries and influential leaders.[10]

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