New Paganism

 The division of spirit and flesh isn’t so clearcut as may be considered within crude mental constructs, but anyway here to have a quick look at the general nature of paganism and how it involves worship and subservience to the elements, as in aspects of the natural world deified as spiritual entities. Thus one worships the sun, the wind, the spirit of the forest and so on. So here a sense of spirituality is coloured by one’s existence on the natural or biological plane and desire to survive and prosper within it; and so ultimately it is more a religion of a kind of materialism or the material world rather than the spiritual and God as spirit in the highest and unimaginable sense, which gives birth to the natural, which has no power to create itself.

In New Age spirituality, one of the most notable intellectual aspects is the replacement of God as the highest force with “the Universe”, and with the unspoken sense that nothing harmful is being done here, and if this was fleshed out, the underlying idea is that in fact we are freeing ourselves from an oppressive thought of God as a spiritual dictator, a thought that also depending on our particular belief system divides  us, and that “The Universe” is comparatively all-embracing and without such negative connotations. 

The Universe though is simply the world of elements, all now lumped together into a totality, and so that pagan, materialist  worldview is simply unified into one power rather than many individual spiritual powers - Sun, Moon, etc. So ultimately this is a descent from the spirit into this impure mix of spiritualism and materialism. And one could say this overthrow of God is an embedded desire or realised temptation within it. 

Remember to carry out scientific experiments involving say gases, one has to be very precise in the elements used, and one’s methods. Otherwise one gets impure and ultimately false results. The same applies with the spirit. Tarnished thoughts will push onwards onto impure results.