About the study
Viewed in this way from a spot on the earth where the churches are empty and at the end of a university education which was largely about understanding something about the inside of man and how he views his life, but where the subject of religion was largely untouched, one could is tempted to believe that the latter has really played out its role. Much like Sigmund Freud almost a hundred years ago predicted would happen. But that's just not true. In part, a majority of the world's population is still religious, and via migration to Sweden and our surrounding area, it is reasonable to assume that religious or spiritual worlds of imagination will continue to play a role in consultation and therapy situations. For one thing, the secularization process that has been going on in our part of the world seems to have been replaced by something that is no more rational than what existed here before.
Independent measurements show that the Swede harbors a multitude of ideas about existence, about a beyond reality and about metaphysical connections and phenomena, which science cannot substantiate. The results are similar in other Western countries, such as the United States and Great Britain. The acceptance or interest in such things as reincarnation, premonition, telepathy, communication with deceased relatives, etc., is great. While several of the beliefs and phenomena addressed in these investigations overlap with what is usually called superstition and could have coexisted with the long-dominant religion, reincarnation, for example, is a comparatively exotic notion in a Christian cultural circle. In the surveys mentioned above, the idea that the individual should be reborn in a new physical body is supported by about one in four respondents. Hammer (2004) writes that "[i]n just forty years, reincarnation has gone from being an idea spread among members of some theosophical and occultist circles to becoming one of the most widely held religious beliefs of our time".
All in all, such beliefs are usually attributed to what is called "new age" and to certain parts of the so-called "new spirituality". This study will focus on this type of spirituality.