Introduction

Viewed like this from a spot on earth where the churches stand virtually empty (Center for Contemporary Analysis, 2009; Frisk & Åkerbäck, 2013, p. 31) and at the end of a university education that is largely about understanding something about the interior of man and how he sees his life, but where the subject of spirituality has largely not been touched upon, one could be led to believe that religion has really played its part. Much like Freud once predicted it would (Jones).

But that's just not true. On the one hand, a large majority of the world's population is still believers (NN,yyy?) and through immigration to Sweden it is reasonable to assume that religious beliefs will continue to play a role in consultation and therapy situations. On the one hand, the process of secularization that has been going on in our part of the world seems to have been replaced by something that is no more rational than existed before. Several dependent measurements show that the Swede still harbors a multitude of notions about existence, of a hinside's reality and of supernatural connections and phenomena, which science cannot prove. The acceptance or interest in things such as reincarnation, notice, telepathy, spirit contacts, etc., is great (Dagen, 2008b, Center for Contemporary Research, 2009).

The newspaper Dagen, in collaboration with Liselotte Frisk, professor of religious studies at dalarna University, conducted a survey of new-age sympathies among Swedes in 2008. On the editorial page, the newspaper summarizes the survey, which among other things showed that half (ref! emailed The Day) of the respondents agreed in whole or in part with the statement: "God is something within every person rather than outside" and that one in three fully or partially agreed with the statement: "I believe that man is reborn (reincarnation)":

"It was once an established truth that the process of modernization constituted the broom that would sweep away faith in a spiritual reality. In line with technological, scientific and economic developments, the religious imagination would be abolished. A modern, well-educated and reasonable man was necessarily a secular man. This is what the religion sociologists thought. Peter Berger, one of the world's leading authorities in the field, argued in the late 1960s that upon entering the twenty-first century, religiously believing people would constitute insignificant sects, small islands in a sea of secularization. God-is-dead theology is dead today. However, God lives, not just as a brand in Almedalen. Berger, like a number of other sociologists of religion, has had to rethink. The belief in reason has not outcompeted religious beliefs and beliefs. They have become more common. The reversed Berger even speaks of an explosive increase. However, the modernization process has meant a clear individualization of the spiritual life and religious beliefs. In many places, religious institutions have lost their previous dominant position. Monopolies have been replaced by diversity. The development did not necessarily lead to secularization — something that a few decades ago was an axiom — but rather to pluralization" (The Day, 2008a, July 16).

All in all, such notions are usually part of what is called the New Age and in some parts of the so-called newness. This study will focus on this type of spirituality.