The Ten Commandments

While the first four commandments remind the believer of a kind of natural morality, that is, "honor the one who is honored should," the remaining commandments constitute a call to act ethically and morally.

Fifth to 10th Commandments:

5. You're not going to kill.

6. You should not commit adultery.

7. You're not going to steal.

8. You shall not testify falsely against your neighbor.

9. You should not ask for your neighbor's house.

10. You shall not ask for your neighbor's wife, nor his servants or his handmaiden, nor his ox or his donkey, nor anything that belongs to him.

Compassion, via erf in past lives

Several respondents testify about how they can live in situations, and feel compassion for people who experience something difficult, even though the respondents themselves have demonstrably not been close to experiencing something similar in this life. This is seen as confirmation that we have experience from past existences. A woman describes it this way:

Or like watching documentaries about things on TV. Sometimes you can feel… Oh, I'm really getting started on this. It could be something you've experienced yourself, right? Or that you think, yes, I know that. Like when you visit a city you've already seen, you think. Or that. But also that, yes, that… How the men are doing in the war, you know that. It's obvious what it feels like to be in the trenches. I know what it's like to be a man and be in jail and get fucking bullied for being weak, like. I know all about this (p8).

Sanner (1998) reflects on the fact that so much within the new spirituality is described in terms of love and comes to the conclusion that within this spirituality God and love are in some sense the same thing: "In the doctrine proclaimed within the New Age, love is regarded as something divine — well, perhaps one can even say that the god one worships within the New Age is love" (p. 116).

The commitment to animals probably exists on a scale, from sympathy, compassion and sound identification, to over-identification. On this scale, there is paranoia. The variant closest at hand is the one called "collective quarrel" (Ottoson, 1983), that is, when the individual "speaks for a minority group against society at large" (p. 214) in a self-righteous and unforgiving way. Which minority is subject to the individual's care is possibly also more or less arbitrary, or may shift, as it is the individual's personal struggle against an uncomprehending world that is the primary one.

A woman describes it this way:

Or like watching documentaries about things on TV. Sometimes you can feel… Oh, I'm really getting started on this. It could be something you've experienced yourself, right? Or that you think, yes, I know that. Like when you visit a city you've already seen, you think. Or that. But also that, yes, that… How the men are doing in the war, you know that. It's obvious what it feels like to be in the trenches. I know what it's like to be a man and be in jail and get fucking bullied for being weak, like. I know all about this (p8).

Here, perhaps, Werbart's formulation, that we are "doomed to be in-dividuals" (2000, p. 37), well in.

She was confirmed when they spoke a day later.

And I also feel that all the work she does, it generates positive for me. It was like a weekend so… It was like the divide or the moon… I just felt like, damn it, something huge has let me in. Just like you can feel if you've been on a good fucking course, or at a great healing session, when it's really let things go. Then you can feel this… Really this difference. Oh, damn, that's cool. I felt that. What the hell have I done for something? I haven't done anything, no. I haven't even meditated, what's it like… What's that? And then the same day, or the next day, I talked to my mom. And then she tells me that she's done the fucking thing on fredan, and let go of a giant thing. I just, well, okay. This is the first time I've really had it so proven that this is the case. The work she does it generates for me as well.

This can possibly be understood from the increased individualization that several researchers write about. Wikström (1998) believes that there has been a general shift towards the "inner psychological experience world" (p. 7) and that a focus on internal transformation is something that belongs to the late 20th century.