For a long time people believed that they were being told the truth, and they didn’t question the dogma that the church was telling them. They never questioned whether they had to find an individual truth that was only true for themselves. They never questioned the need to look within their own heart for guidance and counsel because it was readily available through external authorities.
That was the Middle Ages and the common awareness or consciousness during the Middle Ages was heavily invested in physical reality and sensual perceptions. Most people living in the Middle Ages were not living in their heads but in their physical bodies. They didn’t have the ability of philosophical thought.
The only tools that they had for perception of the spirit world were physical tools, the five senses, and the five senses were not capable to perceive the spirit world. So they tortured themselves in countless ways trying to make the physical body perceive and sense things that the physical body simply could not perceive.
It was Martin Luther who brought the end of the Middle Ages by first understanding that one must develop the spiritual portion of themselves before they can perceive the spiritual world. Only a person with a spiritual body can perceive and exist within the spiritual realms. A person that is only capable of perceiving physical things can only discover truths that pertain to physical things.
Martin Luther understood that truth is a thought, and perceptible only to the person that thinks. Like can only perceive and interact with like.
What the Reformation really did was lift spirituality and religion completely out of the secular world and into the spiritual world. The old Catholic Church had secular power, possessed beautiful works of art and stirred the emotions deeply. The old Catholic Church was secular and belonged to the physical world. The old Catholic Church belonged to the rational atheists!
Luther created a spirituality and religion that no longer belonged in the secular world. It was divorced from worldly things, from art, government and science. He created a spirituality and religion that was completely in the head and in the spirit. What he did was for the first time make spirituality spiritual, perceivable only through the spirit that dwells inside us. Martin Luther created a spirituality and religion that belonged to the social enforcers!
Personal salvation was no longer granted by grace, by the Virgin Mary, by the intercession of saints, or by the church itself, but only through one’s personal relationship with God. And that relationship and bond was spiritual and did not participate or share in the physical, emotional or intellectual. It didn’t exist in the flesh, but only in the mind. It was nonphysical, it was spiritual and belonged to the spirit.
Anarchistbanjo's World 