David Spangler
Encyclopedia
David Spangler is an American spiritual philosopher
and self-described "practical mystic". He helped transform the Findhorn Foundation
in northern Scotland into a centre of residential spiritual education, and is a friend of William Irwin Thompson
. Spangler is considered one of the founding figures of the modern New Age
movement, although he is highly critical of what much of the movement has since become, especially its commercialistic and sensationalist elements.
in North Africa where his father was assigned as a counterintelligence agent for U.S. Army Intelligence. He lived there for six years, returning to the United States when he was twelve in 1957. He attended Deerfield Academy
in Massachusetts
, though his time there was interrupted when his family moved to Phoenix
, Arizona
, where he graduated from high school. He attended Arizona State University
where he was working for a Bachelor of Science
degree in biochemistry
but continued to pursue other subjects of interest.
aware of non-physical entities
. While in Morocco at age seven, he said he had a classical mystical experience of merging with a timeless presence of oneness within the cosmos and then remembering his existence prior to this life as well as the process by which he chose to become David Spangler and entered into his present incarnation
. Following that experience, he claims his awareness of and contact with various inner worlds of spirit
was heightened, though he believed throughout his childhood that everyone shared the kind of perception and experience that he had. This changed when he moved to Phoenix where he claims to have discovered other individuals who were clairvoyant or were acting as "channels
" for non-physical entities and realized that his own inner experiences were not common. In his late teens he was asked by members of metaphysical study groups to give talks on his own inner contacts, leading up to 1964 when he gave the keynote address at a national spiritual conference on "Youth and the New Age." This led to his receiving a number of invitations from around the United States to come and give lectures to various spiritual and metaphysical organizations. At the time he refused these invitations to concentrate on his scientific studies, but the following year, in 1965, he decided to leave college and begin sharing his own particular insights and inner perceptions.
This led to his going to Los Angeles
in the summer of 1965 where a series of lectures led to further invitations and resulted in the career that he has followed since then as a lecturer and teacher of spirituality. Some of this early history can be found in his books Blessing: The Art and the Practice and Pilgrim in Aquarius.
in northern Scotland. He claimed to have been told by non-physical, spiritual contacts that he would find his "next cycle of work" in Europe; he arrived at Findhorn and was told that one of the founders, Eileen Caddy
, had had a vision three years earlier that a David Spangler would be coming there to live and work in the community. Not knowing who David Spangler was, Eileen and her husband Peter Caddy
and their Canadian colleague, Dorothy Maclean
, the three founders of the Findhorn Community, had been waiting for someone with that name to arrive. Upon Spangler's arrival, he was offered and accepted joint directorship of the community along with Peter Caddy. He remained in the Findhorn Community until 1973. He then returned to the United States with a number of other Americans and Europeans, including Dorothy Maclean, where they founded the Lorian Association as a non-profit vehicle for the spiritual and educational work they wished to do together.
, the author of At the Edge of History, Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, and various other books on contemporary culture, science and spirit, to found the Lindisfarne Association
and became one of the first Lindisfarne Fellows, a group of scientists, artists, religious teachers, political activists, economists, and visionaries whose number included Gregory Bateson
, John and Nancy Todd, Elaine Pagels
, E. F. Schumacher
, Stewart Brand
, Paul Hawken
, James Lovelock
, and Paul Winter
, among others.
phenomenon, but early on he identified its shadow and rejected what he termed "its further outgrowth into a myriad of 'old age' pursuits (including spiritual pursuits) dressed in 'new age' garb". This devolution into commercially-driven fads, identity politics, mystical glamour, atavistic spiritualisms, and uncritical guru reverence was a main theme of his Reimagination of the World, co-authored with fellow-traveler and cultural historian William Irwin Thompson.
Spangler has often been miscast as a new-age channeler due in part to the "transmissions" received while living at the intentional community at Findhorn, Scotland in the 1970s, which became the core of his first book Revelation: The Birth of a New Age In hindsight it can be seen that Spangler's ideas were at that time transitional between the earlier theosophical esotericism
represented by Alice Bailey
and an emerging worldview that is more postmodern
, less obscure, and less metaphysical than theosophy
. Spangler himself reports that it took him some years to develop a language in which to communicate clearly the insights and experiences he had been having since childhood.
On 24 April 2008, Spangler gave a lecture called Ritual: Where the Particle Meets the Wave at the New York Open Center. The lecture explained how rituals are a way of connecting our individual selves to the larger world, whose vastness is sometimes overwhelming.
Spiritual philosophy
Spiritual philosophy is a generic term for any philosophy or teaching that pertains to spirituality and spiritual realities. It may incorporate religious or esoteric themes, especially those from Theosophy or Neo-Theosophy, New Age thought, mysticism, and Eastern philosophy...
and self-described "practical mystic". He helped transform the Findhorn Foundation
Findhorn Foundation
The Findhorn Foundation is a Scottish charitable trust registered in 1972, formed by the spiritual community at the Findhorn Ecovillage, one of the largest intentional communities in Britain....
in northern Scotland into a centre of residential spiritual education, and is a friend of William Irwin Thompson
William Irwin Thompson
William Irwin Thompson is known primarily as a social philosopher and cultural critic, but he has also been writing and publishing poetry throughout his career and received the Oslo International Poetry Festival Award in 1986. He describes his writing and speaking style as "mind-jazz on ancient...
. Spangler is considered one of the founding figures of the modern New Age
New Age
The New Age movement is a Western spiritual movement that developed in the second half of the 20th century. Its central precepts have been described as "drawing on both Eastern and Western spiritual and metaphysical traditions and then infusing them with influences from self-help and motivational...
movement, although he is highly critical of what much of the movement has since become, especially its commercialistic and sensationalist elements.
Childhood and education
Spangler was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1945. At the age of six, he moved to MoroccoMorocco
Morocco , officially the Kingdom of Morocco , is a country located in North Africa. It has a population of more than 32 million and an area of 710,850 km², and also primarily administers the disputed region of the Western Sahara...
in North Africa where his father was assigned as a counterintelligence agent for U.S. Army Intelligence. He lived there for six years, returning to the United States when he was twelve in 1957. He attended Deerfield Academy
Deerfield Academy
Deerfield Academy is an independent, coeducational boarding school in Deerfield, Massachusetts, United States. It is a four-year college-preparatory school with approximately 600 students and about 100 faculty, all of whom live on or near campus....
in Massachusetts
Massachusetts
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...
, though his time there was interrupted when his family moved to Phoenix
Phoenix, Arizona
Phoenix is the capital, and largest city, of the U.S. state of Arizona, as well as the sixth most populated city in the United States. Phoenix is home to 1,445,632 people according to the official 2010 U.S. Census Bureau data...
, Arizona
Arizona
Arizona ; is a state located in the southwestern region of the United States. It is also part of the western United States and the mountain west. The capital and largest city is Phoenix...
, where he graduated from high school. He attended Arizona State University
Arizona State University
Arizona State University is a public research university located in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area of the State of Arizona...
where he was working for a Bachelor of Science
Bachelor of Science
A Bachelor of Science is an undergraduate academic degree awarded for completed courses that generally last three to five years .-Australia:In Australia, the BSc is a 3 year degree, offered from 1st year on...
degree in biochemistry
Biochemistry
Biochemistry, sometimes called biological chemistry, is the study of chemical processes in living organisms, including, but not limited to, living matter. Biochemistry governs all living organisms and living processes...
but continued to pursue other subjects of interest.
Clairvoyant development
From his earliest years, Spangler claims to be clairvoyantlyClairvoyance
The term clairvoyance is used to refer to the ability to gain information about an object, person, location or physical event through means other than the known human senses, a form of extra-sensory perception...
aware of non-physical entities
Non-physical entity
A non-physical entity is an entity that lacks a physical or material body or material or physical characteristics. Non-physical entities may be considered hypothetical, e.g...
. While in Morocco at age seven, he said he had a classical mystical experience of merging with a timeless presence of oneness within the cosmos and then remembering his existence prior to this life as well as the process by which he chose to become David Spangler and entered into his present incarnation
Reincarnation
Reincarnation best describes the concept where the soul or spirit, after the death of the body, is believed to return to live in a new human body, or, in some traditions, either as a human being, animal or plant...
. Following that experience, he claims his awareness of and contact with various inner worlds of spirit
Esoteric cosmology
Esoteric cosmology is cosmology that is an intrinsic part of an esoteric or occult system of thought. It almost always deals with at least some of the following themes: emanation, involution, spiritual evolution, epigenesis, planes of existence or higher worlds , hierarchies of spiritual beings,...
was heightened, though he believed throughout his childhood that everyone shared the kind of perception and experience that he had. This changed when he moved to Phoenix where he claims to have discovered other individuals who were clairvoyant or were acting as "channels
Channelling (mediumistic)
In spirituality, channelling or channeling is the belief that communication of information occurs by or through a person , from a deity, spirit or other paranormal entity outside the mind of the channel...
" for non-physical entities and realized that his own inner experiences were not common. In his late teens he was asked by members of metaphysical study groups to give talks on his own inner contacts, leading up to 1964 when he gave the keynote address at a national spiritual conference on "Youth and the New Age." This led to his receiving a number of invitations from around the United States to come and give lectures to various spiritual and metaphysical organizations. At the time he refused these invitations to concentrate on his scientific studies, but the following year, in 1965, he decided to leave college and begin sharing his own particular insights and inner perceptions.
This led to his going to Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
in the summer of 1965 where a series of lectures led to further invitations and resulted in the career that he has followed since then as a lecturer and teacher of spirituality. Some of this early history can be found in his books Blessing: The Art and the Practice and Pilgrim in Aquarius.
The Findhorn Foundation
In 1970, Spangler went to Britain where he visited the spiritual community of FindhornFindhorn Foundation
The Findhorn Foundation is a Scottish charitable trust registered in 1972, formed by the spiritual community at the Findhorn Ecovillage, one of the largest intentional communities in Britain....
in northern Scotland. He claimed to have been told by non-physical, spiritual contacts that he would find his "next cycle of work" in Europe; he arrived at Findhorn and was told that one of the founders, Eileen Caddy
Eileen Caddy
Eileen Caddy MBE was a spiritual teacher and new age author, best known as one of the founders of the Findhorn Foundation community at the Findhorn Ecovillage, near the village of Findhorn, Moray Firth, in northeast Scotland...
, had had a vision three years earlier that a David Spangler would be coming there to live and work in the community. Not knowing who David Spangler was, Eileen and her husband Peter Caddy
Peter Caddy
Peter Caddy was a British caterer, hotelier, and founder of the Findhorn Foundation community.Educated at Harrow, he apprenticed as a director with J. Lyons and Company, and was a member of the Rosicrucian Order Crotona Fellowship...
and their Canadian colleague, Dorothy Maclean
Dorothy Maclean
Dorothy Maclean is a writer and educator on spiritual subjects who was one of the original three adults at what is now the Findhorn Foundation in northeast Scotland....
, the three founders of the Findhorn Community, had been waiting for someone with that name to arrive. Upon Spangler's arrival, he was offered and accepted joint directorship of the community along with Peter Caddy. He remained in the Findhorn Community until 1973. He then returned to the United States with a number of other Americans and Europeans, including Dorothy Maclean, where they founded the Lorian Association as a non-profit vehicle for the spiritual and educational work they wished to do together.
Lindisfarne Association
Also in 1974 Spangler helped William Irwin ThompsonWilliam Irwin Thompson
William Irwin Thompson is known primarily as a social philosopher and cultural critic, but he has also been writing and publishing poetry throughout his career and received the Oslo International Poetry Festival Award in 1986. He describes his writing and speaking style as "mind-jazz on ancient...
, the author of At the Edge of History, Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, and various other books on contemporary culture, science and spirit, to found the Lindisfarne Association
Lindisfarne Association
The Lindisfarne Association is a group of intellectuals of diverse interests organized by cultural historian William Irwin Thompson for the "study and realization of a new planetary culture"...
and became one of the first Lindisfarne Fellows, a group of scientists, artists, religious teachers, political activists, economists, and visionaries whose number included Gregory Bateson
Gregory Bateson
Gregory Bateson was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. He had a natural ability to recognize order and pattern in the universe...
, John and Nancy Todd, Elaine Pagels
Elaine Pagels
Elaine Pagels, née Hiesey , is the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she is best known for her studies and writing on the Gnostic Gospels...
, E. F. Schumacher
E. F. Schumacher
Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher was an internationally influential economic thinker, statistician and economist in Britain, serving as Chief Economic Advisor to the UK National Coal Board for two decades. His ideas became popularized in much of the English-speaking world during the 1970s...
, Stewart Brand
Stewart Brand
Stewart Brand is an American writer, best known as editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He founded a number of organizations including The WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation...
, Paul Hawken
Paul Hawken
Paul Hawken is an environmentalist, entrepreneur, and author.-Life:Paul Hawken had a Swedish grandmother and a Scottish grandfather with a farm. His father worked at UC Berkeley...
, James Lovelock
James Lovelock
James Lovelock, CH, CBE, FRS is an independent scientist, environmentalist and futurologist who lives in Devon, England. He is best known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the biosphere is a self-regulating entity with the capacity to keep our planet healthy by controlling...
, and Paul Winter
Paul Winter
Paul Winter is an American saxophonist , and is a six-time Grammy Award nominee.- Biography :Paul Winter attended Altoona Area High School and graduated in 1957...
, among others.
Going beyond the "New Age"
Over the years since then, Spangler has continued to lecture and teach and has written numerous books on spirituality. He is considered one of the founding figures of the modern New AgeNew Age
The New Age movement is a Western spiritual movement that developed in the second half of the 20th century. Its central precepts have been described as "drawing on both Eastern and Western spiritual and metaphysical traditions and then infusing them with influences from self-help and motivational...
phenomenon, but early on he identified its shadow and rejected what he termed "its further outgrowth into a myriad of 'old age' pursuits (including spiritual pursuits) dressed in 'new age' garb". This devolution into commercially-driven fads, identity politics, mystical glamour, atavistic spiritualisms, and uncritical guru reverence was a main theme of his Reimagination of the World, co-authored with fellow-traveler and cultural historian William Irwin Thompson.
Spangler has often been miscast as a new-age channeler due in part to the "transmissions" received while living at the intentional community at Findhorn, Scotland in the 1970s, which became the core of his first book Revelation: The Birth of a New Age In hindsight it can be seen that Spangler's ideas were at that time transitional between the earlier theosophical esotericism
Esotericism
Esotericism or Esoterism signifies the holding of esoteric opinions or beliefs, that is, ideas preserved or understood by a small group or those specially initiated, or of rare or unusual interest. The term derives from the Greek , a compound of : "within", thus "pertaining to the more inward",...
represented by Alice Bailey
Alice Bailey
Alice Ann Bailey , known as Alice A. Bailey or AAB to her followers, was an influential writer and theosophist in what she termed "Ageless Wisdom". This included occult teachings, "esoteric" psychology and healing, astrological and other philosophic and religious themes...
and an emerging worldview that is more postmodern
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
, less obscure, and less metaphysical than theosophy
Neo-Theosophy
The term Neo-Theosophy is a term, originally derogatory, used by the followers of Blavatsky to denominate the system of Theosophical ideas expounded by Annie Besant and Charles Webster Leadbeater following the death of Madame Blavatsky in 1891...
. Spangler himself reports that it took him some years to develop a language in which to communicate clearly the insights and experiences he had been having since childhood.
Recent Activities
In recent years he has emphasized a practical or incarnational spirituality in which our everyday lives—our physical, embodied, sometimes resplendent and sometimes shabby persons—can be experienced as spiritual or sacred, as opposed to a spirituality concerned solely with the transpersonal and transcendent.On 24 April 2008, Spangler gave a lecture called Ritual: Where the Particle Meets the Wave at the New York Open Center. The lecture explained how rituals are a way of connecting our individual selves to the larger world, whose vastness is sometimes overwhelming.
Partial bibliography
- David Spangler, 1976 (first version: 1971), Revelation: The Birth of a New Age, Rainbow BridgeRainbow BridgeRainbow Bridge may refer to:Bridges :* Rainbow Bridge National Monument, a natural rock formation located in Utah, USA* Rainbow Bridge , in Kansas* Rainbow Bridge , on the United States – Canada border...
. - David Spangler and William Irwin ThompsonWilliam Irwin ThompsonWilliam Irwin Thompson is known primarily as a social philosopher and cultural critic, but he has also been writing and publishing poetry throughout his career and received the Oslo International Poetry Festival Award in 1986. He describes his writing and speaking style as "mind-jazz on ancient...
, 1991, Reimagination of the World: A Critique of the New Age, Science, and Popular Culture, Bear & Company. - Martin Palmer, 1993, Coming of Age: An Exploration of Christianity and the New Age, Aquarian Press.
- David Spangler, 1996, Everyday Miracles, Bantam BooksBantam BooksBantam Books is an American publishing house owned entirely by Random House, the German media corporation subsidiary of Bertelsmann; it is an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group. It was formed in 1945 by Walter B. Pitkin, Jr., Sidney B. Kramer, and Ian and Betty Ballantine...
. - David Spangler, 1996, The Call, Riverhead BooksRiverhead BooksRiverhead Books is a division of Penguin Group .Notable books and major bestsellers published by Riverhead include Journals by Kurt Cobain; The Art of Happiness by His Holiness the Dalai Lama; The Color of Water by James McBride; Native Speaker, A Gesture Life, and Aloft by Chang-rae Lee; Fever...
. - David Spangler, 1998, Parent as Mystic, Mystic as Parent, Riverhead BooksRiverhead BooksRiverhead Books is a division of Penguin Group .Notable books and major bestsellers published by Riverhead include Journals by Kurt Cobain; The Art of Happiness by His Holiness the Dalai Lama; The Color of Water by James McBride; Native Speaker, A Gesture Life, and Aloft by Chang-rae Lee; Fever...
. - David Spangler, 2001, Blessing: The Art and the Practice, Riverhead BooksRiverhead BooksRiverhead Books is a division of Penguin Group .Notable books and major bestsellers published by Riverhead include Journals by Kurt Cobain; The Art of Happiness by His Holiness the Dalai Lama; The Color of Water by James McBride; Native Speaker, A Gesture Life, and Aloft by Chang-rae Lee; Fever...
.