A better place to start an exploration of New Age is the chapter on occultism in my recently published treatise on utopianism and the Eden motif.

The two founding luminaries of New Age are a couple fruitcake women, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (particularly, with her Secret Doctrine), and Alice Bailey (often writing as "Djwahl Kuhl", claiming to be channeling a demon spirit by that name - her collected works are here). Bailey's most widely noted tract is The Externalization of the Hierarchy. Hannah Newman, in an essay included below ("Masters of the Blinding Light: What Jewish People Should Know About the New Age"), reminds us that ``Hitler kept a copy of Blavatsky's 'The Secret Doctrine' by his bedside, ever since being introduced to its teachings by Dietrich Eckart and Karl Haushofer.''

Luciferianism, in various incarnations, is a religious foil of Freemasonry and Illuminism (where it lacked the neo-Buddhism and neo-Cabalism), and the New World Order and the United Nations (as New Age, featuring neo-Buddhism and neo-Cabalism). In all forms, it hybridizes the union collective and the hierarchical collective, in a structure of absolute authority. This is the central organizational principle, developed centuries ago within Freemasonry and the Illuminist movement. Obedience is demanded, but conscious articulation or acknowledgement of the obedience or the command hierarchy as such is taboo, and disobedience is considered a mental illness, a failing showing one to be subhuman and suited to euthanasia. Society becomes completely regimented, and the compliance of all is compulsory, but one is expected to refrain from conscious contemplation or explanation of the regimentation, even to one's self. Its promulgators envision the power structure of society as a secret everybody knows, and a circumstance insusceptible to amendment. This rubbish doesn't work, of course, but this is their vision.

For an extant example of this authority structure, observe the topology of modern committees (Bilderberg and Bohemian Grove at the apex (though even they are just vehicles for the agenda of the nuclear establishment), and immediately below them the TLC, CFR, RIIA, COA, etc.) and the modern banking and boardroom topologies. These are in fact hierarchies of consensus-driven unions cryptically commanded from above - precisely the sort of hybridization described above. Note that committees are never actually blob-like, but in fact all have internal power structure in detail, so that in fact the command hierarchy still has an individual granularity, which is simply camouflaged by the committee organization.

Maitreyanism is the preeminent flavor of New Age, the modern form of Luciferianism. The explicit self-abnegation objective of the ``eastern'' religious tradition (in this case, Tibetan Buddhism) is hybridized with the unionism and hierarchicalism of Masonic/Illuminist Luciferianism, to produce a religion of uncanny evil. When organs and associates of the United Nations explicitly promulgate Luciferianism, it is usually of the Maitreyan variety.

Maitreyanism is theosophic authoritarian communism. Naziism is a historical example of Maitreyanism, except that the Nazis crushed unionism. Göbbels, the propaganda minister of the Nazi regime, observed that Nazi indoctrination produced militants who "obey a law they are not even consciously aware of but which they could recite in their dreams." (Q.V. Virilio, 1996, p.11). The current crop of Maitreyans (New Agers) are also Nazis, though with a fully unionized program.

from Scientific American, 2005-Jan, by Michael Shermer:

Quantum Quackery
A surprise-hit film has renewed interest in applying quantum mechanics to consciousness, spirituality and human potential

In spring 2004 I appeared on KATU TV's AM Northwest in Portland, Ore., with the producers of an improbably named film, What the #$*! Do We Know?! Artfully edited and featuring actress Marlee Matlin as a dreamy-eyed photographer trying to make sense of an apparently senseless universe, the film's central tenet is that we create our own reality through consciousness and quantum mechanics. I never imagined that such a film would succeed, but it has grossed millions.

The film's avatars are New Age scientists whose jargon-laden sound bites amount to little more than what California Institute of Technology physicist and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann once described as "quantum flapdoodle." University of Oregon quantum physicist Amit Goswami, for example, says in the film: "The material world around us is nothing but possible movements of consciousness. I am choosing moment by moment my experience. Heisenberg said atoms are not things, only tendencies." Okay, Amit, I challenge you to leap out of a 20-story building and consciously choose the experience of passing safely through the ground's tendencies.

The work of Japanese researcher Masaru Emoto, author of The Hidden Messages in Water, is featured to show how thoughts change the structure of ice crystals--beautiful crystals form in a glass of water with the word "love" taped to it, whereas playing Elvis's "Heartbreak Hotel" causes other crystals to split in two. Would his "Burnin' Love" boil water?

The film's nadir is an interview with "Ramtha," a 35,000-year-old spirit channeled by a woman named JZ Knight. I wondered where humans spoke English with an Indian accent 35,000 years ago. Many of the films' participants are members of Ramtha's "School of Enlightenment," where New Age pabulum is dispensed in costly weekend retreats.

The attempt to link the weirdness of the quantum world to mysteries of the macro world (such as consciousness) is not new. The best candidate to connect the two comes from University of Oxford physicist Roger Penrose and physician Stuart Hameroff of the Arizona Health Sciences Center, whose theory of quantum consciousness has generated much heat but little light. Inside our neurons are tiny hollow microtubules that act like structural scaffolding. Their conjecture (and that's all it is) is that something inside the microtubules may initiate a wave-function collapse that results in the quantum coherence of atoms. The quantum coherence causes neurotransmitters to be released into the synapses between neurons, thus triggering them to fire in a uniform pattern that creates thought and consciousness. Because a wave-function collapse can come about only when an atom is "observed" (that is, affected in any way by something else), the late neuroscientist Sir John Eccles, another proponent of the idea, even suggested that "mind" may be the observer in a recursive loop from atoms to molecules to neurons to thought to consciousness to mind to atoms....

In reality, the gap between subatomic quantum effects and large-scale macro systems is too large to bridge. In his book The Unconscious Quantum (Prometheus Books, 1995), University of Colorado physicist Victor Stenger demonstrates that for a system to be described quantum-mechanically, its typical mass (m), speed (v) and distance (d) must be on the order of Planck's constant (h). "If mvd is much greater than h, then the system probably can be treated classically." Stenger computes that the mass of neural transmitter molecules and their speed across the distance of the synapse are about two orders of magnitude too large for quantum effects to be influential. There is no micro-macro connection. Then what the #$*! is going on here?

Physics envy. The lure of reducing complex problems to basic physical principles has dominated the philosophy of science since Descartes's failed attempt some four centuries ago to explain cognition by the actions of swirling vortices of atoms dancing their way to consciousness. Such Cartesian dreams provide a sense of certainty, but they quickly fade in the face of the complexities of biology. We should be exploring consciousness at the neural level and higher, where the arrow of causal analysis points up toward such principles as emergence and self-organization. Biology envy.

Michael Shermer is publisher of Skeptic (www.skeptic.com) and author of The Science of Good and Evil.

from Salon, 2007-Mar-5, by Peter Birkenhead:

Oprah's ugly secret

By continuing to hawk "The Secret," a mishmash of offensive self-help cliches, Oprah Winfrey is squandering her goodwill and influence, and preaching to the world that mammon is queen.

Steve Martin used to do a routine that went like this: "You too can be a millionaire! It's easy: First, get a million dollars. Now..."

If you put that routine between hard covers, you'd have "The Secret," the self-help manifesto and bottle of minty-fresh snake oil currently topping the bestseller lists. "The Secret" espouses a "philosophy" patched together by an Australian talk-show producer named Rhonda Byrne. Though "The Secret" unabashedly appropriates and mishmashes familiar self-help clichés, it was still the subject of two recent episodes of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" featuring a dream team of self-help gurus, all of whom contributed to the project.

The main idea of "The Secret" is that people need only visualize what they want in order to get it -- and the book certainly has created instant wealth, at least for Rhonda Byrne and her partners-in-con. And the marketing idea behind it -- the enlisting of that dream team, in what is essentially a massive, cross-promotional pyramid scheme -- is brilliant. But what really makes "The Secret" more than a variation on an old theme is the involvement of Oprah Winfrey, who lends the whole enterprise more prestige, and, because of that prestige, more venality, than any previous self-help scam. Oprah hasn't just endorsed "The Secret"; she's championed it, put herself at the apex of its pyramid, and helped create a symbiotic economy of New Age quacks that almost puts OPEC to shame.

Why "venality"? Because, with survivors of Auschwitz still alive, Oprah writes this about "The Secret" on her Web site, "the energy you put into the world -- both good and bad -- is exactly what comes back to you. This means you create the circumstances of your life with the choices you make every day." "Venality," because Oprah, in the age of AIDS, is advertising a book that says, "You cannot 'catch' anything unless you think you can, and thinking you can is inviting it to you with your thought." "Venality," because Oprah, from a studio within walking distance of Chicago's notorious Cabrini Green Projects, pitches a book that says, "The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts."

Worse than "The Secret's" blame-the-victim idiocy is its baldfaced bullshitting. The titular "secret" of the book is something the authors call the Law of Attraction. They maintain that the universe is governed by the principle that "like attracts like" and that our thoughts are like magnets: Positive thoughts attract positive events and negative thoughts attract negative events. Of course, magnets do exactly the opposite -- positively charged magnets attract negatively charged particles -- and the rest of "The Secret" has a similar relationship to the truth. Here it is on biblical history: "Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, and Jesus were not only prosperity teachers, but also millionaires themselves, with more affluent lifestyles than many present-day millionaires could conceive of." And worse than the idiocy and the bullshitting is its anti-intellectualism, because that's at the root of the other two. Here's "The Secret" on reading and, um, electricity: "When I discovered 'The Secret' I made a decision that I would not watch the news or read newspapers anymore, because it did not make me feel good," and, "How does it work? Nobody knows. Just like nobody knows how electricity works. I don't, do you?" And worst of all is the craven consumerist worldview at the heart of "The Secret," because it's why the book exists: "[The Secret] is like having the Universe as your catalogue. You flip through it and say, 'I'd like to have this experience and I'd like to have that product and I'd like to have a person like that.' It is you placing your order with the Universe. It's really that easy." That's from Dr. Joe Vitale, former Amway executive and contributor to "The Secret," on Oprah.com.

Oprah Winfrey is one of the richest women in the world, and one of the most influential. Her imprimatur has helped the authors of "The Secret" sell 2 million books (and 1 million DVDs), putting it ahead of the new Harry Potter book on the Amazon bestseller list. In the time Oprah spent advertising the lies in "The Secret," she could have been exposing them to an audience that otherwise might have believed them. So why didn't she? If James Frey deserved to be raked over the coals for lying about how drunk he was, doesn't Oprah deserve some scrutiny for pitching the meretricious nonsense in "The Secret"?

Oprah has a reputation for doing good -- she probably has more perceived moral authority than anyone in this country -- and she has done a lot of good. But in light of her zealous support of a book that says, in this time of entrenched, systemic, institutionalized poverty, this time of no-bid contracts for war profiteers and heckuva-job governance, that "you can have, be, or do anything," isn't it reasonable to ask about why she does what she does, and the way she does it?

Oprah recently opened, with much fanfare, the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy in South Africa, and as I watched the network news stories about it, I couldn't get "The Secret" out of my mind. I kept wondering what would happen if professor Sam Mhlongo, South Africa's chief family practitioner who famously said that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, read about Oprah's connection to "The Secret" and found support there for his claim. I wondered if the students of the academy would read "The Secret" and start to believe that their parents deserved to be poor, or that the people of Darfur summoned the Janjaweed with "bad thoughts." Will the heavier girls be told, as readers of "The Secret" are, that food doesn't cause weight gain -- thinking about weight gain does? Will they be told to not even look at fat people, as "The Secret" advises? Oprah is already promoting these ideas to her television audience. Why wouldn't she espouse them to her students?

In many ways the Leadership Academy is a wonderful project, a school that will provide impoverished girls an education they otherwise might not have gotten. But it also seems to be the product, unavoidably, of the faux-spiritual, anti-intellectual, hyper-materialistic worldview expressed in "The Secret," the book that the school's founder has called "life changing."

The academy is a controversial enough project in South Africa that the government withdrew its support, because of the amount of money that's been spent on its well-reported, lavish design -- money that could have gone instead to creating perfectly fine schools that served many, many more students than the 350 who will be making use of spa facilities at the academy. But, when I watched Oprah's prime-time special about interviewing candidates for the school, it seemed to me that she wasn't nearly as excited about providing an education to the girls as she was about providing a "Secret"-like "transformative experience." (And not just for the girls, for herself; the first thing she said to the family members at the opening ceremony wasn't, "Welcome to a great moment in your daughters' lives," it was, "Welcome to the proudest moment of my life.")

On the special, Oprah talked far more about what the school would do for the girls' self-esteem and material lives than what it would do for their intellects -- sometimes sounding as if she was reading directly from "The Secret." And in discussing what she was looking for in prospective students, she didn't talk about finding the next Eleanor Roosevelt or Sally Ride or Jane Smiley. Instead she used "Entertainment Tonight" language like "It Girl" to describe her ideal candidate. She praised the girls for their spirit, for how much they "shined" and "glowed," but never for their ideas or insights. Oprah puts a lot of energy and money into aesthetics -- on her show, in her magazine, at her school. The publishers of "The Secret" have learned well from their sponsor and are just as visually savvy. They have created a look for their books, DVDs, CDs and marketing materials that conjures a "Da Vinci Code" aesthetic, full of pretty faux parchment, quill-and-ink fonts and wax seals.

Oprah's TV special about the Leadership Academy, essentially an hourlong infomercial, was just as well-coiffed and "visuals"-heavy. In fact, when Oprah was choosing her students, her important criteria must have included their television interview skills. On-camera interviews with the girls were the centerpiece of the special, but as one spunky, telegenic candidate after another beamed her smile at the camera, I couldn't help wondering how Joyce Carol Oates or Gertrude Stein or Madame Curie would have fared -- would they have "shined" and "glowed," or more likely talked in non-sound-bite-friendly paragraphs and maybe even, God forbid, the sometimes "dark" tones of authentic people, and been rejected. Sadly, the girls themselves (and who can blame them, desperate 12-year-olds trying to flatter their potential benefactor) parroted banal Oprah-isms, like "I want to be the best me I can be," and "Be a leader not a follower" and "Don't blend in, blend out," with smiley gusto.

When the special was over, I found myself equally impressed and queasy, one part hopeful, one part worried. I was happy the school was there, but disturbed by the way it created an instant upper class out of the students, in a country that doesn't exactly need any more segregation into haves and have-nots. I was hopeful for the students but nervous about what, exactly, they will be taught in a place called the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy. Will it be more "best me I can be" bromides? Will "The Secret" be on the syllabus? Oprah herself is going to teach "leadership classes" at the school, after all.

Has Oprah ever done anything that didn't leave people with mixed feelings?

And at what point do we stop feeling like we have to take the good with the craven when it comes to Oprah, and the culture she's helped to create? I get nauseated when I think of people in South Africa being taught they don't have enough money because they're "blocking it with their thoughts." I'm already sickened by an American culture that teaches people, as "The Secret" does, that they "create the circumstances of their lives with the choices they make every day," a culture that elected a president who cried tears of self-congratulation at his inauguration, rejects intellectualism, and believes he can intuit the trustworthiness of world leaders by looking into their eyes. I'm sickened by a culture in which the tenets of the Oprah philosophy have become conventional wisdom, in which genuine self-actualization has been confused with self-aggrandizement, reality is whatever you want it to be, and mammon is queen.

One of Oprah's signature gimmicks has been giving stuff away to her audience ("giving" here means announcing the passing of stuff from corporate sponsors to audience members), most notably in a popular segment called "My Favorite Things." These bits have revealed an Oprah who truly revels in consumer culture, and who can seem astonishingly oblivious to the way most people live and what they can afford. She seems to celebrate every event and milestone with extravagant stuff, indeed to not know how to celebrate without it. Oprah has explained the expensive appointments of her Leadership Academy by saying, "Beauty inspires." True enough. But hasn't the lack of beauty inspired some pretty great work? And aren't there are all kinds of beauty?

You might expect a powerful person who thinks of herself as "deeply spiritual" to have a less worldly conception of it, and you might hope that she would encourage her followers to do the same, instead of urging them to buy books that call Jesus a "prosperity teacher."

But, far more than "spiritual growth" or "empowerment," Oprah and the authors of "The Secret" focus on imparting the message of getting rich. Even the biographies of the authors of "The Secret" on Oprah's Web site are revealingly fixated on their rags-to-riches stories. James Arthur Ray is described as someone who was "almost going bankrupt, [which] forced him to focus on the life he truly wanted. Now he runs a multimillion-dollar corporation dedicated to teaching people how to create wealth in all areas of their lives." The bio for Lisa Nichols says, "After hitting rock bottom at age 19, Lisa prayed for a better life. Now, she has made her fortune by motivating more than 60,000 teenagers to make better choices in their own lives." And the one for "Chicken Soup for the Soul" creator Jack Canfield reads, he "was deep in debt before he made it big. Now his best-selling books have sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, and Jack travels the country teaching 'The Secret' of his success."

There's no doubt that Oprah's doing a lot of good with her South African project, and with many other charitable works. And yeah, I know, her book club "gets people to read," and yadda yadda yadda. But there's also no doubt that a lot of us have been making forgiving disclaimers like that about Oprah for years. And that maybe they amount to trains-running-on-time arguments. Maybe it's time to stop. After reading "The Secret," it seemed to me that there were basically three possibilities: 1) Oprah really believes this stuff, and we should be very worried about her opening a school for anyone. 2) Oprah doesn't believe this stuff and we should be very, very worried about her opening a school for anyone. 3) Oprah doesn't know that any of this stuff is in the book or on her Web site and in a perfect world she wouldn't be allowed to open a school for anyone.

The things that Oprah does, like promoting "The Secret," can seem deceptively trivial, but it's precisely because they're silly that we should be concerned about their promotion by someone who is deadly earnest and deeply trusted by millions of people. It's important to start taking a look at Oprah because her philosophy has in many ways become the dominant one in our culture, even for people who would never consider themselves disciples. Somebody is buying enough copies of "The Secret" to make it No. 1 on the Amazon bestseller list. Those somebodies may be religious zealots or atheists, Republicans or Democrats, but they are all believers, to one degree or another, and, perhaps unwittingly, in aspects of the Oprah/"Secret" culture. And yes, sure, a lot of the believing they do is harmless fun -- everybody's got some kind of rabbit's foot in his pocket -- but we're not talking about rabbits' feet here, we're talking about whole, live rabbits pulled out of hats, and an audience that doesn't think it's being tricked.

"Secret"-style belief is a perfect product. Like Coca-Cola, it goes down easy and makes the consumer thirsty for more. It's unthreateningly simple, and a lot more facile, sentimental and, perhaps paradoxically, intractable than the old-fashioned kind of belief. Like Amway, it enlists its consumers as unofficial salespeople, and the people who constitute its market feel like they're part of a fold. It's indistinguishable from, and inextricably bound up in, the Oprah idea of self-esteem, the kind of confidence you get not from testing yourself, but from "believing" in yourself. This modern idea of faith isn't arrived at the old-fashioned way, by asking questions, but by getting answers. Instead of inquiry we have born-again epiphanies and cheesy self-help books -- we have excuses for not engaging in inquiry at all. Let other people schlep down the road to Damascus; we'll have Amazon send Damascus to us.

That "Secret"-style faith, whether it's in God, or in one's own preordained destiny to be an "American Idol," which takes all of a moment to achieve, is perhaps its most important selling point. Here's "The Secret" on arriving at faith: "Ask once, believe you have received, and all you have to do to receive is feel good." The kind of faith that couldn't be reached by shortcut, the confidence of the great doubters and worriers, of Moses and Abraham Lincoln and Jesus Christ, has been replaced by the insta-certainty and inflated "self-esteem" of "The Secret's" believers.

Books like "The Secret" have created, and are feeding, an enormously diverse market of disciples, and they're thriving in every corner of the culture, in megachurches and movies, politics and pop music, in sports arenas and state boards of education. Oprah has far more in common with George Bush than either would like to admit, and so do the psychics of Marin County, Calif., and the creationists of Kansas. The believers come from all walks of life, but they work the same way -- mostly by bastardizing and warping source materials, from the Bible to the Bhagavad Gita, to make them fit their worldview. On Page 23 of "The Secret" you'll find this revealing doozy: "Meditation quiets the mind, helps you control your thoughts." Of course, the goal of meditation is precisely the opposite -- it is to be conscious, to observe your thoughts honestly and clearly. But that's the last thing the believers want to encourage. The authors of "The Secret" sell "control" in the form of "empowerment" and "quiet" in the form of belief, not consciousness.

The promises of Oprah culture can seem irresistible, and its hallmarks are becoming ubiquitous. Believers may be separated into tribes according to what they believe, but they do it in pretty much the same way, relying on a "Secret"-style conception of "intuition" --- which seems to amount to the sneaking suspicion that they're always right -- to arrive at their tenets. Instead of the world as it is, constantly changing and full of contradiction, they see a fixed and fantastical place, where good things come to those who believe, whether it's belief in a diet, a God, or a Habit of Successful People. These believers may believe in the healing power of homeopathy, or Scripture or organizational skills -- in intelligent design, astrology or privatization. They all trust that their devotion will be rewarded with money and boyfriends and job promotions, with hockey championships and apartments. And most of all they believe -- they really, really believe -- in themselves.

For these believers, self-knowledge is much less important than self-"love." But the question they never seem to ask themselves is: If you wouldn't tell another person you loved her before you got to know her, why would you do that to yourself? Skipping the getting-to-know-you part has given us what we deserve: the Oprah culture. It's a culture where superstition is "spirituality," illiteracy is "authenticity," and schoolmarm moralism is "character." It's a culture where people apologize by saying, "I'm sorry you took offense at what I said," and forgive by saying, "I'm not angry at you anymore, I'm grateful to you for teaching me not to trust shitheads like you." And that's the part that should bother us most: the diminishing, even implicit mocking, of genuine goodness, and of authentic spiritual concerns and practices. Engagement, curiosity and active awe are in short supply these days, and it's sickening to see them devalued and misrepresented.

Not that any of this is new. Aimee Semple McPherson, "The Power of Positive Thinking," Father Coughlin, est, James Van Praagh -- pick your influential snake-oil salesman or snake oil. They were all cut from the same cloth as Oprah and "The Secret." The big, big difference is, well, the bigness. The infinitely bigger reach of the Oprah empire and its emissaries. They make their predecessors look like kids with lemonade stands. It would be stupidly dangerous to dismiss Oprah and "The Secret" as silly, or ultimately meaningless. They're reaching more people than Harry Potter, for God-force's sake. That's why what Oprah does matters, and stinks. If you reach more people than Bill O'Reilly, if you have better name recognition than Nelson Mandela, if the books you endorse sell more than Stephen King's, you should take some responsibility for your effect on the culture. The most powerful woman in the world is taking advantage of people who are desperate for meaning, by passionately championing a product that mocks the very idea of a meaningful life.

That means something.

from the Toronto Globe and Mail, 2008-Feb-1, by Marsha Lederman:

When Oprah came calling, the universe answered

VANCOUVER — If there's anyone who can be named to Oprah Winfrey's much-coveted book club and not have it go to his head, it's Eckhart Tolle.

Twenty-four hours after being called "one of the world's leading spiritual teachers" by the world's leading talk-show host, the author of the ego-rejecting manifesto A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose is sitting in his Vancouver living room, calmly explaining that he believes the universe has conspired to bring him and Winfrey together.

"I feel I'm being used by consciousness and she's being used by consciousness," he says. "I'm just open for what wants to happen, and I believe Oprah is the same."

Not a fan of television (A New Earth suggests TV is partially responsible for causing attention-deficit disorder), Tolle says Winfrey is the exception. "She's done a lot for the transformation of consciousness."

Tolle has not yet met Winfrey in person, but he took a call from her in mid-December asking if he'd be interested in the collaboration. "She said she loved the book, she'd been reading it, and she wants the message to get out into the world," says Tolle.

On Wednesday, Winfrey revealed that A New Earth would be her 61st book-club selection and, in an Oprah first, the basis of a 10-week course Tolle and Winfrey will teach at Oprah.com. "This is my boldest choice yet," Winfrey told her audience. "I'm just over-the-moon excited about it."

Tolle watched the show in his little downtown Vancouver office. He couldn't tune in at home — the cable isn't connected at the moment. In his quiet German/Spanish/English accent, Tolle says he was "quite amazed" by what he saw. "It's hard to connect when she holds up the book and says 'Eckhart Tolle' and to [realize] 'Oh, that's me.' "

Afterward, there was no splashy celebration, not even a dinner out. His partner, Kim, is on an all-raw-food diet right now.

Despite the announcement, Tolle is trying to keep things as they always have been in his life. He's refusing most interview requests, not answering the phone, and continuing with grocery shopping and his daily walks. "Sometimes, it feels a little bit overwhelming, but I continue to lead a very normal life"

It's no secret that in publishing, Winfrey's word is gold. Being named to her book club means instant fame and an enormous spike in book sales. Marion Garner, Publisher at Vintage Canada, says that after Ann-Marie McDonald's Fall on Your Knees was made an Oprah pick in 2002, "sales went through the roof." (The first Canadian Oprah pick, in 2001, was Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance.) Sure enough, on Thursday morning, when Tolle checked Amazon.com, A New Earth was the site's top seller.

But Tolle says he is much more interested in the spiritual impact on Winfrey's viewers and, ultimately, the human race. "What I enjoy is to be used by the evolving consciousness. I don't feel so much that I am doing what I do. I feel that I'm being used by something that is evolving here on this planet through humanity."

A New Earth explores Tolle's theory that human beings have not yet fully evolved. The race can only reach the next stage of evolution, he argues, if people turn away from their negative, cluttered, ego-driven lives. Tolle says the future of the race depends on reaching a new state of consciousness; that human dysfunction's creation of weapons and warfare, coupled with technology, could spell the end of the planet.

"We've arrived at a crisis point where the collective dysfunction of humanity has become a threat to humanity's very survival," he said on Thursday, before taking his current read, Niall Ferguson's War of the World, down from one of his many bookshelves. "Before, the dysfunction manifested itself with people killing each other with swords or clubs. And then it became rifles and cannons. And now it's atom bombs."

Tolle, 59, was born in postwar Germany, hated school, and dropped out at 13. He spent some time in Spain, then returned to his studies in his 20s, in London. After graduating from university, he left academia to become a spiritual teacher. Then, in the early 1990s, he had a revelation. "One morning I woke up and I realized, 'I have to move. I have to move to the west coast of North America.' "

He left England for Vancouver, then California, ultimately settling in British Columbia. "Vancouver, I find, has a particularly gentle energy field."

During that time, Tolle began writing his first book, The Power of Now. He asked a friend, Constance Kellough, to publish it. The first print run, only 3,000 copies, still proved challenging to unload.

Then Meg Ryan, introduced to the book by her yoga instructor in Los Angeles, told Winfrey about it. Winfrey wrote about it in her magazine O, and then mentioned it on one of her episodes devoted to her favourite things.

That day, Kellough watched The Power of Now inch its way up Amazon's bestseller list, as the show was broadcast in different time zones across the continent. "By the time it hit California, [the book] was No. 1," she says.

It has now sold some four million copies, according to Kellough, and has been translated into more than 30 languages. Winfrey keeps a copy by her bedside (according to her website).

It's all made Tolle and Kellough very wealthy, and Kellough's tiny Vancouver publishing company, Namaste, very solvent. "The monetary rewards that we receive are not to be downplayed. They're substantial," says Kellough. "But they are not the motivation for our work."

Despite what some might expect of a spiritual teacher, Tolle enjoys his creature comforts. He has a spacious condominium on the edge of the UBC campus overlooking the forest, almost at treetop level. He has another suite on the same floor, where Kim lives with her dog. He has a place on Saltspring Island. He enjoys the odd glass of wine with dinner. He drinks coffee — usually lattes — at Starbucks.

He gets recognized fairly often. Like many of his celebrity devotees, he's taken to wearing ball caps when he goes out. On the main floor of his building, someone posted a note on Thursday about the Oprah developments; neighbours smiled and nodded in quiet congratulations as they passed Tolle in the hall.

Tolle describes himself as a private person, a hermit even, and all of this public exposure, and being recognized on the street, is not really his cup of tea. "I'd rather sit alone or watch the trees or read a book," he says. "And yet I do this because I know that's what's needed. The universe is telling me that's what I need to do."

an entertaining reader comment arising from the above, from the Toronto Globe and Mail website, 2008-Feb-2, by John Williams of Ajax, Ontario, Canada:

I had the good fortune of having some of Eckhart Tolle's books and recordings lent to me by a friend. See how Karma works? Well, actually, she shoved them on me like a Scientologist pushing Dianetics, and I like analyzing pop-culture trash for fun, so I checked it out. The most boring, pretentious tripe I have heard in a very long time. It sounds like a parody of a Wilhelm Reich Ogone Energy film from the 70's, minus the moaning. But comedy aside, its actually psychologically dangerous for vulnerable people. He preaches the old 'Ego-Death' gag. That is a form of cognitive suicide, and its the first step used in 'softening up' the head, as they say. Its the antithesis of Critical Intelligence. a few Tolle quotes: _____ 'until my 30th year, I lived in a state of almost continuous anxiety interspersed with periods of suicidal depression'...one day his... 'mind stopped', and 'there were no more thoughts', 'for the next 5 months, I lived in a state of uninterrupted deep peace and bliss', 'the suffering self collapsed'. 'I had no relationships, no job, no home, no identity. I spent almost 2 years sitting on park benches in a state of the most intense joy'. _____ Now, they have locked Britney Spears up for far less than this. But this guy writes it in a book, and walks around faking he is 'deep' and makes a fortune in cashmoney! Yippee! Here is more irony. He preaches Ego-Death, and No-Self yet all he does is promote his SELF, his IMAGE, his NAME over and over and over. The guy is an Ego-maniac! So Oprah has dumped more New Age junk into the massmind of America. Could you imagine if Oprah for once promoted some Critical Thinking for the masses? As in some basic Epistemology? Naw, its better to soften up the heads of the stupid masses, this way when you tell them your fabric softener works best, they all run out and buy it! Its all about softening up the heads of the public for the TV advertisers, and it works great for voting too.

from the Denver Post, 2006-Nov-21, by Carlos Illescas:

City goes light on invocations

Aurora - Jesus and Muhammad are out. But God, in a general sense, is OK.

New guidelines on what can be said during invocations at the beginning of City Council meetings have led to a ban on specific references to religious figures.

Many clergy members have objected to the restrictions. They say if they can't pray the way they want to, then they don't want to pray at the meetings at all.

"I really am disappointed," said the Rev. Jay Yousling of Prairie Ridge Community Church, who has given the invocation several times but won't likely do so again under the current guidelines. "I was proud of Aurora (leaders) that they were not extreme in their thinking.

"Tolerance doesn't mean only one way. Tolerance allows for differences."

Now the city is struggling to book anyone to give the invocations. For the past half-dozen or so meetings, Mayor Ed Tauer has given ecumenically ambiguous invocations. At Monday's council meeting, instead of an invocation, he asked for a moment of silence.

City governments throughout the country have wrestled with the issue of invocations at meetings, many doing away with the practice entirely or limiting the reference to religious figures.

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a ruling that barred the town of Great Falls, S.C., from using Jesus' name in prayer prior to meetings because it favored one religion.

That and other rulings led Aurora City Attorney Charlie Richardson to propose changing the guidelines for invocations. Some residents who watch the meetings on cable access complained that the invocations tilted too far toward the Christian faith, Richardson said. There was also concern about those who do not believe in a higher being.

The city's guidelines request "that invocations given at Council meetings be non-sectarian."

"References to Jesus Christ, Muhammad, or other religious figures in government invocations have been held by the Courts to be an impermissible preference for one religion over other religions," they continue.

A handful of cities throughout Colorado still do invocations, including Colorado Springs and Grand Junction, while others, such as Denver and Arvada, do not. Others just say the Pledge of Allegiance. At a recent council meeting in Aurora, Tauer gave the invocation.

"Heavenly God, we have assembled before you this evening and ask for your blessing," he said. "We ask you to bless this City Council and grant us wisdom as we deliberate. Bless the people who work in our city, those that teach and care for our children and those many groups that do charitable work in our community. Amen."

35-plus-year tradition

Aurora city officials say it's important to maintain the tradition of invocations at council meetings, which goes back more than 35 years. Tauer also says it promotes a sense of unity.

"The purpose of having an invocation is to be inspirational for the community and the council and to be inclusive and bring people together," Tauer said. "Unfortunately, we live in a time we can be sued no matter what you do. But our preference is to find something everyone can agree on."

John Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit conservative legal organization in Charlottesville, Va., sent a letter to the city this month, urging officials to do away with the new regulations.

"Government should not be telling people how to pray," Whitehead said. "Once you do that, you violate the First Amendment, separation-of- church-and-state clause."

Cities would be better off not saying a prayer at all, he said.

For years, Colorado Springs had allowed invocations before council meetings, but like Aurora, the prayers were mainly Christian-oriented, and some complained. So in 2001, the city went to more nonsectarian prayers. Then, the ministers complained.

"I had ministers come in and say, 'If I have to watch every word I say, then I can't pray,"' said Dean Beukema, who schedules the invocations for Colorado Springs.

For a year, Beukema couldn't get anyone to lead the invocations, so the city lifted the restrictions but included a wide range of people to do them.

She booked rabbis, Buddhists, clergy from the Church of Nazarene, Baptists, Unitarians and the Unity Church, among others. She brought in Native Americans who played flute and performed hand signs to lead the prayers, and once had people of Hawaiian heritage say the the Lord's Prayer while hula dancers performed.

"I really try to mix it up," Beukema said. "To me, that's what diversity is, to experience the different ones."

Carefully chosen words

The Rev. Edwin Simon of Aurora Hills Baptist Church said he has been doing invocations at the council meetings for the past six years.

He said he purposely left out any reference to Jesus Christ or anything else that could make a person of another faith uncomfortable.

And while he's sensitive to the city's position, he has an issue with being told how he can pray.

"Telling us we cannot name Jesus, that's a problem for us," Simon said. "For those of us who are Christians, that's been a bother. It's the government telling me what I can and cannot say."

Air Force Chaplain Weston Walker said he and other chaplains in the military also intentionally leave out any references to religious figures when they give invocations during military events.

When there's an awards or promotion ceremony in which people from different backgrounds attend, he uses more "generic" words during prayer, he said. But when he's giving a Protestant service, which is his religion, then he feels free to use words such as "Jesus."

"In public gatherings, we, as chaplains, try our best to be as inclusive as possible. I don't want to turn people off," said Walker, who is based out of Buckley Air Force Base. "I carefully choose my words."

Tauer hopes to meet with the Aurora Ministerial Alliance next month to see if the two sides can come to an agreement.

If not, as City Councilwoman Molly Markert said, the city might have to have a moment of silence instead.

"Prayer is supposed to draw you together, and invocation is supposed to give you a chance to stop and think," said Markert, who supported the change in the guidelines. "It can't be distracting or divisive. By its very nature, if someone is complaining, it loses its purpose."

Denver Post researcher Barbara Hudson contributed to this report.

Staff writer Carlos Illescas can be reached at 303-954-1175 or cillescas@denverpost.com.

What other cities do

Commerce City has a moment of silence

Cortez says the Pledge of Allegiance

Durango has no prayers, invocations or Pledge

Englewood has a nonsectarian prayer

Grand Junction has a prayer, invocation and Pledge

Gunnison council has no prayers, invocations or Pledge, but planning commission says Pledge

LaJunta has no prayers or invocations

Limon says the Pledge

Montrose says the Pledge at council meetings

Pueblo has an invocation, then the Pledge

Sterling has an invocation

Westminster says the Pledge

Boulder, Broomfield, Greeley, Lakewood and Parker say no prayers are said at their meetings

Compiled by Denver Post staff researcher Barb Hudson

from the New York Times, 2005-Oct-19, by Benedict Carey:

Scientists Bridle at Lecture Plan for Dalai Lama

The Dalai Lama, the exiled leader of Tibet who is revered as a spiritual teacher, is at the center of a scientific controversy.

He has been an enthusiastic collaborator in research on whether the intense meditation practiced by Buddhist monks can train the brain to generate compassion and positive thoughts. Next month in Washington, the Dalai Lama is scheduled to speak about the research at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

But 544 brain researchers have signed a petition urging the society to cancel the lecture, because, according to the petition, "it will highlight a subject with largely unsubstantiated claims and compromised scientific rigor and objectivity."

Defenders of the Dalai Lama's appearance say that the motivation of many protesters is political, because many are Chinese or of Chinese descent. The Dalai Lama fled Tibet in 1959 after the Chinese crushed a Tibetan bid for independence.

But many scientists who signed the petition say they did so because they believe that the field of neuroscience risks losing credibility if it ventures too recklessly into spiritual matters.

"As the public face of neuroscience, we have a responsibility to at least see that research is replicated before it is promoted and highlighted," said Dr. Nancy Hayes, a neurobiologist at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey who objects to the Dalai Lama's speaking. "If we don't do that, we may as well be the Flat Earth Society."

In the past decade, scientists and journalists have increasingly taken interest in meditation and "mindfulness," a related state of focused inner awareness, topics once left to weekend mystics and religious retreats. The Dalai Lama has been working with a small number of researchers to study how the practice of Buddhist contemplation affects moods and promotes a sense of peace and compassion.

In one widely reported 2003 study, Dr. Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison led a team of researchers that found that 25 employees of a biotechnology company showed increased levels of neural activity in the left anterior temporal region of their brains after taking a course in meditation. The region is active during sensations of happiness and positive emotion, the researchers reported.

In a 2004 experiment supported by the Mind and Life Institute, a nonprofit organization that the Dalai Lama helped establish, and also involving Dr. Davidson, investigators tracked brain waves in eight Tibetan monks as they meditated in a state of "unconditional loving-kindness and compassion."

Using an electronic scanner, the researchers found that the monks were producing a very strong pattern of gamma waves, a synchronized oscillation of brain cells that is associated with concentration and emotional control. A group of 10 college students who were learning to meditate produced a much weaker gamma signal.

Taken together, the studies suggest that "human qualities like compassion and altruism may in some sense be regarded as skills which can be improved through mental training," said Dr. Davidson, who is director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin.

Yet the neuroscientists who have signed the petition say that there are several problems with this research. First, they say, Dr. Davidson and some of his colleagues meditate themselves, and they have collaborated with the Dalai Lama for years. Dr. Davidson said he had helped persuade the spiritual leader to accept the society's invitation to speak, and was with him when he received the request.

The critics also point out that there are flaws in the 2004 experiment that the researchers have acknowledged: The monks being studied were 12 to 45 years older than the students, and age could have accounted for some of the differences. The students, as beginners, may have been anxious or simply not skilled enough to find a meditative state in the time allotted, which would alter their brain wave patterns. And there was no way to know if the monks were adept at generating high gamma wave activity before they ever started meditating.

"This paper has not tested the idea whether meditation promotes compassion or any kind of positive emotion," Dr. Yi Rao, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University who helped draft the petition and was one of the sharpest critics, said in an e-mail message.

"Nonetheless, advocates of Buddhism and meditation have confused the public with the claim that this idea has received scientific proof," Dr. Rao said. "If one reads the published scientific literature, it is not difficult to see that this claim is far from being proven. It will not hurt if the public also realizes that some researchers are declared believers playing dual roles as advocates and researchers."

In a telephone interview, Dr. Davidson said that the critics' assertions were overblown, given that the field of study was in its infancy and the studies so far had been exploratory.

"I wouldn't consider myself a Buddhist or a card-carrying zealot at all," Dr. Davidson said. "My first commitment is as a scientist to uncover the truth about all this."

He said it was "ridiculous" to suggest that neuroscientists should shy away from topics just because they were difficult to study.

Many of his colleagues agree.

"This research is a first pass on a new topic, and you just can't do perfect science the first time through," said Dr. Robert Wyman, a neurobiologist at Yale. "You get curious about something and you mess around. That's what science is in the beginning, you mess around."

Fair enough, say some scientists who have signed the petition, but neuroscientists must be extra careful with such subjects. The field is already trying to manage a deeply mystifying presence: the brain, which in some ways is still as dark as deepest space.

The scientists point out that scans showing areas of the brain that light up during emotions like jealousy or guilt are fascinating but that their significance is still unclear. And in their laboratories, some investigators who plan to attend the neuroscience meetings are trying to find the neural traces of consciousness itself, a notoriously disorienting quest that has led more than one enterprising scientist into a philosophical fog.

"Neuroscience more than other disciplines is the science at the interface between modern philosophy and science," wrote one neuroscientist on the petition, Dr. Zvani Rossetti of the University of Cagliari in Italy. He added, "No opportunity should be given to anybody to use neuroscience for supporting transcendent views of the world."

One thing certain about the Dalai Lama's scheduled talk is that he will not lack for an audience. Neuroscientists around the world have been intensely debating the event, and Dr. Carol Barnes, president of the neuroscience society, says she will not cancel the talk or change the schedule.

"The practice of meditation is a human behavior, and the Dalai Lama is extraordinarily skilled at it and at promoting qualities of peace and compassion that I thought could bring us together," said Dr. Barnes, a professor of psychology and neurology at the University of Arizona who invited the Dalai Lama to speak last February. "That's not the way it's gone so far."

from the Times of London, 2005-Oct-20, by David Charter:

Positive thinking, negative reaction
Brain specialists object to Dalai Lama's lecture on fostering compassion by means of meditation

HE HAS devoted his life to promoting happiness and harmony. But the Dalai Lama's forthcoming lecture to a gathering of American brain specialists on “fostering compassionate behaviour” has provoked a bitter dispute.

More than 900 researchers have signed a petition calling for the Tibetan spiritual leader's talk to be scrapped because it will “highlight a subject with largely unsubstantiated claims and compromised scientific rigour and objectivity”.

The Dalai Lama, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, is due to share his views on the power of meditation to alter the brain and generate positive thoughts at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting in Washington next month.

Some of his supporters believe his critics may be motivated more by political objections than scientific doubts, pointing to a number of petition signatories of Chinese origin. The Dalai Lama has been in exile since 1959, after China annexed his homeland.

Yi Rao, a neurology professor at Northwestern University, and one of the first to sign the petition, said that the Tibetan monk's beliefs contradicted the fundamental basis of neuroscience.

“This merger of serious neuroscience with a particular religion is a practical joke because the very recognition of the Dalai Lama relies on the belief in reincarnation,” he said. “That means that the mind and the body have to be separate for the mind to pass from one generation to another.”

The petition says: “The presentation of a religious symbol with a controversial political agenda may cause unnecessary controversies, unwanted press, and significant divisions among SfN members . . . with conflicting religious beliefs and political leanings.

“Inviting the Dalai Lama to lecture on the neuroscience of meditation is of poor scientific taste because it will highlight a subject with largely unsubstantiated claims at a prestigious meeting attended by more than 20,000 neuroscientists.”

Supporters of the Dalai Lama, who will mark his 70th birthday in Washington on a ten-day visit, say that he has collaborated with scientists for 15 years. He has worked with Richard Davidson, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, whose researchers reported that biotechnology workers showed increased levels of neural activity after taking a course in meditation.

But Dr Nancy Hayes, a neurobiologist at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey, said: “As the public face of neuroscience, we have a responsibility to see that research is replicated before it is promoted and highlighted. If we do not do that we may as well be the Flat Earth Society.”

The society yesterday defended the lecture. It said: that the Dalai Lama's talk “is expected to bridge the cultural gap between neuroscientists and Buddhist practitioners by pointing to the methods of observation and verification that lie at the heart of both science and Buddhism”.

from the Washington Post, 2005-Nov-13, p.C1, by Marc Kaufman:

Dalai Lama Gives Talk On Science
Monk's D.C. Lecture Links Mind, Matter

In an unusual marrying of science and spirituality, the Dalai Lama addressed thousands of the world's top neuroscientists yesterday, telling them that society is falling behind in its efforts to make sense of their groundbreaking research.

Speaking sometimes in Tibetan and sometimes in halting English to a receptive audience at the 35th annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, the Tibetan spiritual and political leader said scientists and moral leaders need each other.

"It is all too evident that our moral thinking simply has not been able to keep pace with such rapid progress in our acquisition of knowledge and power," he said in a prepared text.

The speech at the Washington Convention Center had been opposed by some members of the society who objected to a religious leader addressing neuroscientists, who research the brain, emotions and human behavior. Nearly 800 people had signed an online petition demanding that the Dalai Lama's invitation be withdrawn.

Many of the petition signers were Chinese Americans, leading to countercharges that they opposed him on political grounds. Relations between China and once-independent Tibet have been badly strained for a half-century, and the Dalai Lama is at the center of the dispute.

But except for minor protests yesterday -- one woman held a sign that read "Dalai Lama not qualified to speak here" -- that conflict was barely visible at the conference. Some attendees stayed away from his talk, and others left early in what a few described as a protest of sorts.

For most of the 14,000 conference participants who watched in the lecture hall or from overflow rooms, the Dalai Lama's enthusiastic embrace of science and promotion of meditation were warmly received. His 10-day visit to Washington, which included a meeting with President Bush last week, will continue today at MCI Center, where he is scheduled to give a public talk on "Global Peace Through Compassion."

The author of a new book on the convergence of Buddhism and science, the Dalai Lama has met with prominent scientists around the world for almost 20 years and has encouraged an increasingly fruitful collaboration between brain researchers and Tibetan monks.

Because of the controversy over his speech to the neuroscientists in Washington, his aides said he would keep to a prepared text, something quite unusual for him. But he often diverged from the text, despite saying with a smile that he was feeling unusual "stress."

His talk focused on how he developed his interest in science as a boy in Tibet, within a closed and isolated society, and on his view that morality and compassion are central to science. He pointed out in his prepared text, for instance, that although the atom bomb was great science, it created great moral problems.

"It is no longer adequate to adopt the view that our responsibility as a society is to simply further scientific knowledge and enhance technological power and that the choice of what to do with this knowledge and power should be left in the hands of the individual," he said.

"By invoking fundamental ethical principles, I am not advocating a fusion of religious ethics and scientific inquiry. Rather, I am speaking of what I call 'secular ethics' that embrace the key ethical principles, such as compassion, tolerance, a sense of caring, consideration of others, and the responsible use of knowledge and power -- principles that transcend the barriers between religious believers and nonbelievers, and followers of this religion or that religion," he said.

He acknowledged that some might wonder why a Buddhist monk is taking such an interest in science.

"What relation could there be between Buddhism, an ancient Indian philosophical and spiritual tradition, and modern science?" he said. His answer was that the scientific empirical approach and the Buddhist exploration of the mind and world have many similarities.

In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, however, the Dalai Lama is known as the reincarnation of a major force for compassion, and his strongest words yesterday were directed at religious people who might lack that trait.

"People who call themselves religious without basic human values like compassion, they are not really religious people," he told the audience, offering no names. "They are hypocrites." The words were unusually critical for a speaker who likes to emphasize the positive and productive.

The single protester outside his follow-up news conference at the convention center was Pei Wang, a neuroscience graduate student at the State University of New York at Buffalo. "This is supposed to be a scientific talk," she said. "If he is not presenting data, he should not speak. This should be about research, not about some politician giving a speech."

The Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, which will continue through Thursday and has attracted 31,000 people, features scores of papers on research into human behavior.

In keeping with the Dalai Lama's involvement with meditation and the physical and mental implications of the contemplative life, one of the higher-profile papers reports on how regular meditation appears to produce structural changes in areas of the brain associated with attention and sensory processing. An imaging study led by Massachusetts General Hospital researchers showed that particular areas of the cerebral cortex, the outer layer of the brain, were thicker in participants who were experienced practitioners of a type of meditation commonly practiced in the United States.

"Our results suggest that meditation can produce experience-based structural alterations in the brain," said Sara Lazar of the hospital's Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program and lead author of the study, which will appear in the journal NeuroReport. "We also found evidence that mediation may slow down the aging-related atrophy of certain areas of the brain."

from Agence France-Presse, 2008-Nov-28:

Sex invariably spells trouble, says Dalai Lama

The Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual and temporal leader, on Friday said sex spelt fleeting satisfaction and trouble later, while chastity offered a better life and "more freedom."

"Sexual pressure, sexual desire, actually I think is short period satisfaction and often, that leads to more complication," the Dalai Lama told reporters in a Lagos hotel, speaking in English without a translator.

He said conjugal life caused "too much ups and downs.

"Naturally as a human being ... some kind of desire for sex comes, but then you use human intelligence to make comprehension that those couples always full of trouble. And in some cases there is suicide, murder cases," the Dalai Lama said.

He said the "consolation" in celibacy is that although "we miss something, but at the same time, compare whole life, it's better, more independence, more freedom."

Considered a Buddhist Master exempt from the religion's wheel of death and reincarnation, the Dalai Lama waxed eloquent on the Buddhist credo of non-attachment.

"Too much attachment towards your children, towards your partner," was "one of the obstacle or hindrance of peace of mind," he said.

Revered by his followers as a god-king, the Dalai Lama arrived in Lagos on Friday on a three-day visit following an invitation from a foundation to attend a conference. He has made no political speeches in the west African country.

He leaves Friday night for the Czech Republic and then on to Brussels to address the European Parliament before heading to Poland, where he is due to meet with French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The 73-year-old Nobel Peace laureate has been a mainstay on the diplomatic stage ever since he fled his native land for neighbouring India in 1959.

Still based in northern India, the Dalai Lama has increasingly been in the spotlight since protests in Tibet turned violent in March this year, just months before the Chinese capital Beijing hosted the Summer Olympic Games.

Regarded by his many supporters outside China as a visionary in the vein of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 for his accent on non-violence to achieve change.

However, he is reviled by the Chinese government, which has branded him a "monster" and accused him of trying to split the nation.

from the Telegraph of London, 2008-Dec-27, by Andrew Alderson and Simon Trump:

Alternative health capital turns its 'negative energy' on pioneering wi-fi system
It is regarded as an oasis of calm and tranquility, and the nation's capital for alternative health therapies and spiritual healing remedies.

But now the residents of Glastonbury, which has long been a favoured destination for pilgrims, are at the centre of a bitter row in which many blame the town's new wireless computer network - known as wi-fi - for a spate of health problems.

Some healers even hold that electro-magnetic fields (EMFs) generated by the wi-fi system are responsible for upsetting positive energy fields of the body, which are known as chakras, and positive energy fields of the earth, which are known as ley lines.

There are now calls for the project, the first of its kind in Britain, to be "unplugged" and for wi-fi masts in the centre of the Somerset market town to be removed just seven months into its experimental run.

Meanwhile soothsayers, astrologers and other opponents of the wi-fi system have resorted to an alternative technology - known as "orgone" - to combat the alleged negative effects of the high-tech system.

In May, Glastonbury - which has a population of 9,000 and which lends its name to the country's largest rock festival, staged on a farm six miles outside the town - became the first place in the country to have a free wi-fi network installed in its town centre. The £34,000 project is financed by county council and regional development agency funding,

At a public meeting to discuss alleged health problems in the Somerset town, residents complained of numerous symptoms including headaches, dizziness, rashes and even pneumonia.

Protesters claim that radiation associated with the wi-fi network suppresses the production of melatonin, a hormone which helps to control sleep patterns, regulates the body's metabolic rate and boosts the immune system.

One of those who claims to have been affected is Natalie Fee, a former yoga teacher, who has now moved home - from inside to outside the wi-fi zone - so that she can protect her son Elliot, five, from what she sees as the harmful effects of wi-fi.

"I would like to see the masts removed," she said. "Perhaps one day that will happen and hopefully it won't be too late.

"I had a radiation expert come round to take measurements at our old home which was within sight of one of the masts. The highest reading was in Elliot's room.

"I thought Glastonbury was a rural town. I don't want my son exposed to risk 24 hours a day, including at his primary school which is within the wi-fi zone. I would be failing in my duty as a parent if I did."

Matt Todd, who campaigns against EMFs, said that residents had complained that chakras and ley lines are being disrupted. "They believe positive energy flows are being disturbed," he said.

Mr Todd has started building small generators which he believes can neutralise the allegedly-harmful radiation using the principles of orgone science. The pyramid-like machines use quartz crystals, selenite (a clear form of the mineral gypsum), semi-precious lapis lazuli stones, gold leaf and copper coil to absorb and recycle the supposedly-negative energy.

"I have given a number of generators to shops in the High Street and hidden others in bushes in the immediate vicinity of the antennae. That way you can bring back the balance," said Mr Todd.

Orgone science was developed by the Austro-Hungarian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who claimed all living matter contains a biological energy. Mr Todd added: "The science hasn't really got into the mainstream because the Government won't make decisions which will affect big business, even if it concerns everyone's health.

"I think wi-fi has tipped things over the edge because a lot of people can feel it. It seems to have introduced this large blast of energy into the environment and that's what people are picking up on."

Jane Saunders, who runs the Glastonbury natural health clinic, felt so strongly she founded the Why Wi-Fi? protest campaign. "I am not a Luddite and I recognise there are benefits to new technology," she said.

"Initially wi-fi was a development I welcomed with open arms, especially with teenage children who need to be on-line almost all the time.

"But I had to take it out and go back to a conventional broadband cable network because it was affecting my health. I show symptoms when it's switched on that I don't when the network is off."

David Heathcoat Amory, the local Conservative MP, said: "I have detected no public support for this project and I have received many letters and emails from concerned residents who believe the siting of the emitting masts are causing health problems."

A spokesman for Powerwatch, an independent EMF pressure group, said: "Someone using a wi-fi laptop will be exposed to approximately twice the level of radiation as someone living 70 yards from a mobile phone mast. Unlike the food and drink industry whose products have to go through extensive pre-market trials and testing, there is no safety net for wireless devices."

However, Dr Eric de Silva, a physicist at Imperial College, London, disagreed. He said: "All the studies which have so far concluded show there is no evidence of a connection between exposure to wi-fi and ill health."

A Somerset County Council spokesman said: "The project was established to support the local economy and encourage tourist and business visitors to stay longer and use local services.

"It has the potential to be a real asset. It conforms to all UK and EU telecommunications health and safety standards, but we do take public concerns very seriously and a review of the system is due to be completed in the New Year."

The following three quotes from the Buddha underscore the unreality that is at the center of Buddhism in general, and Maitreyanism in particular:

"It is mind which gives things their quality, their foundation and their being."

"Mind precedes reality, mind governs reality, mind creates reality."

"there is consciousness in all matter."

Taking them in order: (1) things are what they are regardless of what a person thinks. The sunlight one person sees comes from the exact same sun as the sunlight that another sees, and if one argues to the contrary, he is a nut. (2) Minds are parts of a single reality. This means that they cannot precede reality and cannot create reality. Minds can and do, of course, govern and manipulate other parts of reality. (3) Consciousness is a specific and systematic phenomenon. It is flat-out bonkers to maintain that electrons and stones and rain drops have any consciousness intrinsic to them at all. To do so is not only loony, it tears consciousness down to the level of a stone.

The point of the Buddha's bizarre statements is to erode the follower's connection to reality, so that he can be controlled more easily. All religion is sociocognitive warfare (though most are also other things, some good some bad). All religion exists solely to influence and control the actions of people, by controlling the thoughts of people (though religions do distinguish themselves by their aims - some aims, and hence some forms of social influence and control, are plainly good).

Establishment intellectual hero Albert Einstein offers his own contribution of garbage:

``the illusion that we are separate from each other is an optical delusion of our consciousness''

Einstein was wrong about nearly everything. He was a proponent of pacifism and world government. His theory of General Relativity is on the threshold of being debunked by mainstream science. He neglected his family and was psychologically abusive. He spent the last decades of his life frantically and vainly searching for a non-probabilistic theory of everything, because he found the uncertainty of quantum theory insupportably horrible. It was Einstein who was insupportably horrible.

Addressing the above quote directly: our separateness is no illusion. Our consciousnesses are quite distinct, as are our whole minds and bodies. To believe otherwise is mystical hokum.

New Ager quotes (one from the utterly dreadful Book of Matthew), from http://www.inetport.com/~one:

"The aim should be the development of the habit of meditation all the day long, and the living in the higher consciousness till that consciousness is so stable that the lower mind, desire, and the physical elementals, become so atrophied and starved through lack of nourishment, that the threefold lower nature becomes simply the means whereby the Ego (soul) contacts the world for purposes of helping the race." (The Tibetan)

"Feed your brothers. Remember that mankind is One, children of the One Father. Make over in trust, the goods of the Earth to all who are in need. Do this now & save the world." (The Teacher)

"I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me... Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me." (Matt. 25:36,40)

"There is nothing in your world, either alive or dead, that is worth being agitated about, except the alleviation of suffering." (From: "The Boy & the Brothers")

"The cause of all sorrow and woes is desire -- desire for that which is material. ... 'No man liveth unto himself", and no nation either, and ...the goal of all human effort is loving understanding, prompted by a love for the whole." (Djwhal Khul)

"I have said Ye are Gods, and all of you are children of the Most High." (Psalms 82 verse 6)

from Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, 2000-Jun, by Lee Penn, from http://www.touchstonemag.com/docs/issues/13.5docs/13-5pg44.html:

Midwives of a Common God:
The Myriad Friends of the United Religions Initiative

San Francisco's Episcopal Bishop William E. Swing expects "tens of thousands of leaders of the world's religions, spiritualities, and indigenous traditions"1 to attend the signing of the United Religions Initiative (URI) Charter in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on June 26, 2000. The URI also expects United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the Dalai Lama to attend.2 Bishop Swing founded the United Religions Initiative in 1995. The URI intends to become "a permanent assembly, with the stature and visibility of the United Nations"3 encompassing "all religions, spiritual expressions, and indigenous traditions."4 While the URI actually may not see its "tens of thousands" show up in Pittsburgh in June, it has been highly successful in extending its reach in only five years and is growing steadily. So far, URI activities have occurred in 58 countries on all continents, and in 33 states in the United States.5 The URI claims that one million people participated in its three-day global "religious cease-fire" from December 31, 1999, to January 2, 20006—a millennial bash dedicated to the propositions that good intentions are the road to peace, and that all religions really intend the same thing. Birthing & Funding the "New Hope" The leaders of the URI hope to assist in creating an earthly utopia. The proposed URI charter says that the organization's purpose is "to promote enduring, daily interfaith cooperation" and to "end religiously motivated violence." The URI also plans to "create cultures of peace, justice and healing for the Earth and all living beings."7 Bishop Swing told the 1997 URI summit conference: "If you have come here because a spirit of colossal energy is being born in the loins of earth, then come here and be a midwife. Assist, in awe, at the birth of new hope."8 This "new hope" will have the Earth, not the Church or the Virgin Mary, as its mother. In a sermon given during the 1999 Parliament of World Religions, Bishop Swing said, "What a time to wait on God. . . . for the coming new light among religions, spiritual expressions, and indigenous traditions."9 This "new light" will not be the light of Christ. As a parallel effort with the URI, Bishop Swing has formed the Inter-Religious Friendship Group (IRFG). Other leaders of the IRFG are the Dalai Lama and Richard Blum, a wealthy San Francisco investment banker—and the husband of United States Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA).10 The founders of the IRFG say that their goal is to "create a confidential and relatively unstructured forum where the leaders of the world's religions can have regular conversations with one another."11 The IRFG has met three times, most recently in November 1999 at the Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia. The Reverend Dr. Gary Gunderson, director of the Carter Center's Interfaith Health Program,12 says that the URI "is one of the most promising global initiatives," a "long term alignment that will bear fruit for decades."13 He said, "While not a formal member of the URI, President Carter stressed how much the Center valued the role of religious leaders in conflict situations. . . . He asked the group to request his involvement in the future as specific interventions or projects crystallize."14 Thus, President Carter may become an open ally of the URI. The URI has recently acquired substantial funding. In October 1999, Bishop Swing announced that the URI had received a $1.7 million grant from a Pittsburgh-area foundation, and that the URI will move its headquarters there from San Francisco.15 Swing noted that many people have not wanted to cooperate with the URI because the current San Francisco location carries "negative connotations."16 A source in close contact with the ECUSA hierarchy indicates that "the move is being sponsored by some foundations with deep pockets and a strong liberal agenda that includes putting pressure on the Episcopal diocesan structure"; one of these foundations is the Hillman Foundation, associated with a wealthy, nationally prominent liberal Republican family and with Calvary Church, "one of the few remaining liberal parishes in Pittsburgh."17 The Pittsburgh URI coordinator is a UN employee, Karen Plavan; she is also associated with the Pittsburgh Leadership Foundation.18 The URI has applied for UN recognition as a nongovernmental organization,19 showing that it seeks a UN seal of approval. The URI has received grants from the Soros Foundation and the Copen Family Foundation,20 the Christopher Columbus Foundation,21 the Surdna Fund,22 the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund,23 the Community Foundation of Monterey County,24 the San Francisco Foundation,25 the International Education and Resource Network,26 the Worldwide Education and Research Institute,27 and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation.28 Foundation money has been essential to the URI from the start. In 1998, Bishop Swing said that "ninety-nine percent" of URI funding "is raised from private, nonreligious sources."29 Gathering Religious Partners Numerous leaders of Asian religions—most notably, the Dalai Lama30—support the URI. Muslim URI supporters include URI board member Iftekhar Hai, of the United Muslims of America;31 Javid Iqbal, a former Pakistani supreme court justice;32 and W. D. Mohammed.33 URI outreach now also includes Iranian Shiites. The URI in Zimbabwe "has formed a unique and innovative Partnership with the Iranian Embassy in Harare. The URI convened a meeting to be funded by the Iranian Embassy at which the URI Preamble, Purpose & Principles was discussed, and more members were received into the URI community."34 Meanwhile, URI Vice President William Rankin has provided an excuse for the crimes of the Islamic regime in Sudan: "In North Sudan the government, in some measure, is forced into strong Muslim identity by the history of overthrows when a more tolerant attitude was promulgated."35 The URI has the tacit support or active cooperation of most of the other active interfaith organizations—including the Millennium Forum,36 the International Interfaith Centre,37 the Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions,38 the Global Education Associates,39 the Interfaith Center of New York,40 the Interfaith Youth Corps,41 the Temple of Understanding,42 the North American Interfaith Network, the International Association for Religious Freedom, the World Congress of Faiths, the Peace Council, and the World Conference on Religion and Peace.43 The URI has support among liberal Protestants and Jews, dissident Catholics, a few bishops of non-Chalcedonian East Syriac and Coptic Churches, and the leaders of the China Christian Council, the state-approved Protestant church in China.44 In November 1999, URI Vice President William Rankin spoke to an interfaith forum at Foundry Methodist Church—the church usually attended by the First Family.45 Catholic supporters of the URI include Cardinal Paul Evaristo Arns, the retired Archbishop of São Paulo, Brazil;46 Archbishop Anthony Pantin, from Trinidad;47 and the auxiliary Bishop of Detroit, Thomas Gumbleton.48 Other Catholic URI activists include two URI board members—Fr. John LoSchiavo, S.J. (former president of the University of San Francisco), and Fr. Gerard O'Rourke, director of ecumenical affairs for the Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco—URI treasurer Rick Murray, and Latin American URI Coordinator Fr. Luis Dolan.49 Sister Joan Kirby, of the Temple of Understanding, also supports the URI.50 Theologians supporting the URI include Paul Knitter, senior editor at Orbis Books and professor of theology at Xavier University;51 Leonard Swidler, professor at Temple University;52 and Hans Küng;53 all are dissenters from Church teachings. These Catholic religious groups supported the URI's global "religious cease-fire": the Leadership Conference of Women Religious,54 Monastic Inter-Religious Dialogue,55 the Pakistani Catholic Bishops National Commission for Christian Muslim Relations,56 the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Saco, Maine,57 the Franciscan Sisters of the Poor in New York and New Jersey,58 the Sisters of St. Joseph in Wheeling, West Virginia59 and in Philadelphia,60 the Sisters of St. Francis in Philadelphia,61 the Medical Mission Sisters in Philadelphia,62 the Sisters of the Humility of Mary in Villa Maria, Pennsylvania,63 40,000 Benedictine and Cistercian monks worldwide,64 Pax Christi of Cleveland, Ohio,65 the Sisters of Charity of St. Augustine in Richfield, Ohio,66 the Notre Dame Sisters in Omaha, Nebraska,67 Pax Christi USA and the Los Angeles Catholic Worker,68 the Holy Redeemer Retreat Center in Oakland, California,69 the Justice and Peace Committee of the California province of the Sisters of the Holy Name,70 the Sisters of Providence in St. Mary-in-the-Woods in Indiana and the Religious Orders Partnership71 (associated with Global Education Associates and more than 165 religious orders worldwide),72 the Maryknoll religious,73 and the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary in the Philippines.74 In addition to Bishop Swing, the Anglican bishops who publicly support the URI include Frank Griswold, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States (ECUSA);75 Bishop James Ottley,76 formerly the Anglican Observer at the UN; Samir Kafity, formerly the Bishop of Jerusalem;77 Bishop Michael Ingham,78 of the Diocese of New Westminster in Canada; and the Nobel laureate Archbishop from South Africa, Desmond Tutu.79 Bishop Clark Grew of Ohio, who is one of 11 members of Griswold's "Council of Advice,"80 asked his diocese to participate in the URI's three-day global "religious cease-fire."81 The annual convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles has likewise endorsed the "cease-fire";82 Bishop Talton, suffragan Bishop for this diocese, is also a member of Griswold's "Council of Advice." 83 Not Everyone Is Friendly The Archbishop of Canterbury has not spoken publicly about the URI, although the Church of England newspaper offered gentle criticism in an October 1999 editorial.84 One active Anglican bishop—Archbishop Harry Goodhew, of Australia—has publicly criticized the URI.85 Bishop Charles Murphy, recently consecrated in Singapore by two conservative Anglican Archbishops, has denounced the URI as part of the "crisis of faith"86 in ECUSA—but the Archbishop of Canterbury will not recognize Murphy as an Anglican Bishop because of his belief that the Singapore consecrations were "irresponsible and irregular."87 No Eastern Orthodox bishops support the URI. Evangelical Protestants and the Vatican oppose the URI. In 1996, Cardinal Arinze declined Bishop Swing's invitation to participate in the URI.88 In mid-1999, a representative of the Vatican department responsible for interfaith work stated: "Religious syncretism is a theological error. That is why the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue does not approve of the United Religions Initiative and does not work with it."89 In a January 28, 2000 message to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the pope said, "It is erroneous to consider the Church as a way of salvation equal to those of other religions, which would be complementary to the Church."90 No Fundamentalists, No Martyrs Faithful Christians have good reason to shun the URI. Bishop Swing condemns Christian evangelism, which he calls "proselytizing."91 Swing says that "proselytizing, condemning, murdering, or dominating" will "not be tolerated in the United Religions zone"92—the whole world. URI leaders say "proselytizing" is the work of "fundamentalists," and URI board member Paul Chafee said in 1997 that "We can't afford fundamentalists in a world this small."93 ECUSA Presiding Bishop Griswold shares the URI's loathing of "fundamentalism." When denouncing the Singapore consecrations of two evangelical bishops to serve in the United States, Griswold condemned "the dangerous fundamentalism—both within Islam and our own Christian community—which threatens to turn our God of compassion into a [sic] idol of wrath."94 Bishop Swing has said, "The United Religions will not be a rejection of ancient religion but will be found buried in the depths of these religions."95 If United Religions were "buried in the depths" of Christianity, countless martyrs could have avoided death by burning incense before the statue of the Roman emperor, and today's martyrs in Sudan and China could apostatize with a clear conscience. Maybe martyrs are passé; URI Vice President William Rankin says, "The United Religions Initiative exists to bring people together from all the religions of the world, to create a world where no one has to die because of God, or for God, any more."96 Rankin, formerly the president of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, joined the URI staff in 1998. Regarding the ecclesiastical trial of Episcopal Bishop Walter Righter for ordaining an openly homosexual deacon, Rankin said in 1995, "Heresy implies orthodoxy, and we have no such thing in the Episcopal Church."97 Despite the URI's insistent denial that it intends to mix the world's religions or start a new religion, URI ceremonies point in that direction. Lex orandi, lex credendi—the law of praying is the law of believing. At the 1995 interfaith service that launched the URI, "holy water from the Ganges, the Amazon, the Red Sea, the River Jordan, and other sacred streams" was mixed in a single "bowl of unity" on the altar of Grace Cathedral.98 Bishop Swing made the meaning of the ritual clear: "As these sacred waters find confluence here . . . may the city that chartered the nations of the world bring together the religions of the world."99 Anglican Bishop Michael Ingham said in support of the URI that "I can imagine a time when the founders and saints of all the traditions—Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Guru Nanak, and so on—are honoured and cherished in all of them." 100 In —The Coming United Religions, Bishop Swing says, "The time comes, though, when common language and a common purpose for all religions and spiritual movements must be discerned and agreed upon. Merely respecting and understanding other religions is not enough."101 Since the purpose of religion is the service and worship of God, Bishop Swing's call for "all religions and spiritual movements" to have "common language and a common purpose" is, in effect, a call for all to worship a common god. No Closed Doors Organizations should be known by the company they keep. Enthusiastic URI supporters include New Age authors Robert Muller102 (former Assistant Secretary-General of the UN), Neale Donald Walsch103 (author of the best-selling —Conversations With God books), and Barbara Marx Hubbard.104 Ms. Hubbard introduced Dee Hock, the founder of VISA, to the URI and to Bishop Swing;105 he is now an active supporter of the URI.106 Ms. Hubbard was also active in the early 1998 preparation of the draft URI Charter.107 The Rudolf Steiner Foundation, which promotes theosophical schools, has recently made a grant to the URI.108 The New York-based Lucis Trust, which spreads the teachings of American theosophist Alice Bailey, praised the URI in two 1999 issues of its newsletter World Goodwill, citing it as part of a "global shift in consciousness" that will usher in "an era in which the glory of the One will be free to shine forth in all human actions."109 The URI proclaims its openness to all "spiritual expressions," and its logo—15 miniature religious symbols in a circle around the letters "URI"—includes a Wiccan pentagram, as well as an empty circle to represent "the people of all beliefs yet to come."110 A motley crew has responded to the invitation. Participants in URI events have included the Association for Global New Thought,111 Unity Church,112 the founder of "The Order of Divinity,"113 the "New Cult Awareness Network"114—dominated by Scientologists since they sued the former Cult Awareness Network out of existence in 1996—Reiki circles,115 the World Federalist Association,116 followers of "Supreme Master Ching Hai,"117 the Pagan Sanctuary Network,118 Druids,119 the Temple of Isis,120 the "Goddess Holding the World Mural Project,"121 the Covenant of the Goddess,122 the Coven of the Stone and the Mirror,123 the Wittenberg Center for Alternative Resources124 (an interfaith seminary whose core courses include such topics as "crystal & etheric healing"125), and the Western Federation Church and Tribe.126 The Tribe has adopted the URI as part of its "by-laws and tenets," and declares that Mars and "the Earth's Moon" are "entirely owned by the Western Federation Church and Tribe."127 It does seem that maybe the sky is the limit. Bishop Swing has vowed that the URI will remain all-inclusive, saying, "Once you open the door, you have to keep it open."128 Perhaps the Episcopalian prelate now wishes he had kept the key to the front door.

NOTES 1 E-mail messages dated 10/29/99 and 10/30/99 by a person who attended and reported upon Bishop Swing's 10/28/99 URI presentation in Pittsburgh. 2 Kathy Blair, "United Religions Gets Canadian start in B.C.," Anglican Journal, April 2000, http://www.anglicanjournal.com/126/04/canada11.html. 3 United Religions Initiative, "Questions: What Is the URI," http://www.united-religions.org/questions/question_1.shtml. 4 United Religions Initiative, "72 Hours," http://www.united-religions.org/newsite/index.htm, p. 1. 5 United Religions Initiative, "72 Hours: An Interfaith Peace-Building Project of the United Religions InitiativeSM," p. 1; analysis and country count by author, http://www.united-religions.org/newsite/72hours/index.htm. 6 United Religions Initiative, "URI Update," No. 7, Spring 2000, p. 1. 7 United Religions Initiative, "The United Religions Initiative Charter," November 18, 1999, http://www.united-religions.org/newsite/charter/Charter111899.htm, Preamble, p. 2. 8 Bishop William Swing, "Opening Address" to the 1997 URI summit conference, http://www.united-religions.org/youth/welcome/swingspeech.htm, p. 2. 9 Dennis Delman, "Bishop Swing Preaches at Cape Town Cathedral: Urges 'New Day and New Way of Peacemaking'," Pacific Church News, February/March 2000, p. 25. 10 Elaine Ruth Fletcher, "S.F. Group's Interfaith Meeting Draws Dalai Lama to Jerusalem," San Francisco Examiner, June 11, 1999, page A-2; Internet version, downloaded from http://www.sfgate.com, p. 1; Bill Wallace, "Lotus Fund's Ex-Leader Gets Prison," San Francisco Chronicle, June 5, 1999, page A-15; Internet version, downloaded from http://www.sfgate.com-for the relationship between Feinstein and Blum. 11 Elaine Ruth Fletcher, "S.F. Group's Interfaith Meeting Draws Dalai Lama to Jerusalem," San Francisco Examiner, June 11, 1999, page A-2; Internet version, downloaded from http://www.sfgate.com, p. 2. 12 The Carter Center, Gary Gunderson, M. Div., "Biography," http://www.cartercenter.org/gunderson.html. 13 12/2/99 e-mail message to the author from Gary Gunderson, of the Carter Center. 14 12/2/99 e-mail message to the author from Gary Gunderson, of the Carter Center. 15 E-mail messages dated 10/29/99 and 10/30/99, from a person who attended and reported upon Bishop Swing's 10/28/99 URI presentation in Pittsburgh. 16 E-mail messages dated 10/29/99 and 10/30/99, from a person who attended and reported upon Bishop Swing's 10/28/99 URI presentation in Pittsburgh. 17 E-mail message dated 11/29/99, from a source associated with Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry, an Evangelical ECUSA seminary in Pittsburgh. 18 E-mail dated 12/2/99 from a person who attended the 10/28/99 URI gathering in Pittsburgh, and who contacted the URI headquarters to confirm the information. 19 Conversation by the author with a UN staff member in the Department of Public Information, 4/18/2000. 20 "Youth Task Group," URI News Update, March 1997, no. 2, p. 1. 21 List provided on November 20, 1997 by Paul Andrews, a URI staff member. 22 List provided on November 20, 1997 by Paul Andrews, a URI staff member 23 List provided on November 20, 1997 by Paul Andrews, a URI staff member; http://www.goldmanfund.org/other.html-$50,000 per year for 1997-2001. 24 List provided on November 20, 1997 by Paul Andrews, a URI staff member. 25 List provided on November 20, 1997 by Paul Andrews, a URI staff member. 26 "Youth Task Group," URI News Update, March 1997, no. 2, p. 1. 27 Worldwide Education and Research Institute, "Philanthropic and Emergency Projects," http://weri.org/projects/philanth.htm, p. 2. 28 Arthur Vining Davis Foundation, "1999 Grants," http://jvm.com/davis/RECENT.HTM, p. 7, and "About The Foundation," http://jvm.com/davis/FND.HTM, p. 1; http://jvm.com/davis/1998GRANTS.HTM, p. 7. 29 Carol Barnwell, "'United Religions' Is Bishop Swing's Goal," The Lambeth Daily, Issue 4, 22 July 1998, http://anglican.org/online/Lambeth-Daily/22/UR.html, p. 2. 30 Bishop William Swing, "Reactions from Religious Leaders," document released in the summer of 1996 by the URI. 31 Don Lattin, "Religious Violence Decried at Gathering," San Francisco Chronicle, June 26, 1997, p. A-19. 32 Paul Chaffee, "URI Global Conference Begins Work Toward June 2000 Charter Ceremony," Pacific Church News, October/November 1997, p. 32. 33 Paul Chaffee, "URI Global Conference Begins Work Toward June 2000 Charter Ceremony," Pacific Church News, October/November 1997, p. 32. 34 United Religions Initiative, "Africa," http://www.united-religions.org/newsite/regions/africa/index.htm. 35 The Center for Progressive Christianity, "President's Report, February 1999, part 3, 'The United Religions Initiative'," by William Rankin, http://www.tcpc.org/URI.htm, p. 2. 36 Millennium Forum, "We The Peoples-Schedule," http://www.millenniumforum.org/html/Misked.html, p. 4. 37 International Interfaith Centre, "Interfaith Action in a Global Context," http://www.interfaith-center.org/oxford/cooperation/symposium.html. 38 Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions, press release, Nov. 9, 1999. 39 Global Education Associates, "Religious Orders Partnership," http://www.globaleduc.org/rop.htm; "United Religions Initiative," http://www.globaleduc.org/uri.htm. 40 Interfaith Center of New York, "Links," http://www.interfaithcenter.org/links.html. 41 Interfaith Youth Corps, Newsletter, February 2000, p. 2. 42 URI pamphlet, "Dear Brothers and Sisters . . ." first page signed by Bishop William Swing, Juliet Hollister, and Robert Muller, dated Fall 1996, front page; Temple of Understanding, "Media," http://www.templeofunderstanding.org/currentmedia.htm. 43 Bishop William Swing, The Coming United Religions, United Religions Initiative and CoNexus Press, 1998, ISBN 0-9637897-5-9; pp. 24-25. 44 Bishop William Swing, "Reactions from Religious Leaders," document released in the summer of 1996 by the URI, p. 4. 45 "Invitation to Conference," at Foundry Methodist Church, November 13, 1999-reprinted at http://server.soros.org/tajik/cenasia/1012.html, message 3. 46 Information received by Lee Penn during a telephone conversation with Barbara Hartford, May 11, 1998; confirmed by Paul Andrews, May 14, 1998. 47 "News Updates from Around the World," URI News Update, Spring 1998, No. 4, p. 5. 48 United Religions Initiative, "What People Will Be Doing . . ." Internet document, http://www.united-religions.org/72hours/doing.htm; United Religions Initiative, "Some Early Supporters . . ." Internet document, http://www.united-religions.org/72hours/supporters.htm. 49 United Religions Initiative, "United Religions Initiative: Building Spiritual Partnerships for a Just, Sustainable and Peaceable World," leaflet issued May 15, 1999, "Board of Directors" and "Staff & Leadership" sections. 50 Charles Gibbs, "Report from the Executive Director," Journal of the United Religions Initiative, issue 3, Summer 1997, p. 2. 51 Paul Chaffee, "Ring of Breath Around the World: A Report on the United Religions Initiative Global Conference," document issued in the summer of 1997 by the United Religions Initiative, p. 3. 52 Bruce Schuman, "Letter to Drs. Leonard Swidler and Ingrid Shafer," Internet document, http://web-wiz.com/origin/uri/uri007.htm, p. 1; see also, curriculum vitae of Leonard Swidler, Internet document, http://blue.temple.edu/~dialogue/swidvit.html, p. 1. Swidler attended the 1997 URI summit meeting. 53 Bishop William Swing, "The United Religions Initiative," document issued in April 1996, p. 6. 54 Leadership Conference of Western Religious, Update, http://www.paulist.org/lcwr/Newsltr.html. 55 United Religions Initiative, "Some Early Supporters," http://www.united-religions.org/72hours/supporters.html. 56 United Religions Initiative, "72 Hours-Geographical Listing of Projects Underway," March for Peace in Pakistan, http://www.united-religions.org/newsite/72hours/projects.htm, p. 8. 57 United Religions Initiative, "72 Hours-Geographical Listing of Projects Underway," project in Saco, Maine, http://www.united-religions.org/newsite/72hours/projects.htm, p. 19. 58 United Religions Initiative, "72 Hours-Geographical Listing of Projects Underway," projects in New York and New Jersey, http://www.united-religions.org/newsite/72hours/projects.htm, p. 22. 59 United Religions Initiative, "72 Hours-Geographical Listing of Projects Underway," project in Wheeling, West Virginia, http://www.united-religions.org/newsite/72hours/projects.htm, p. 23. 60 United Religions Initiative, "72 Hours-Geographical Listing of Projects Underway," project in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, http://www.united-religions.org/newsite/72hours/projects.htm, pp. 25-26. 61 United Religions Initiative, "72 Hours-Geographical Listing of Projects Underway," project in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, http://www.united-religions.org/newsite/72hours/projects.htm, p. 25. 62 United Religions Initiative, "72 Hours-Geographical Listing of Projects Underway," project in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, http://www.united-religions.org/newsite/72hours/projects.htm, p. 26. 63 United Religions Initiative, "72 Hours-Geographical Listing of Projects Underway," project in Villa Maria, Pennsylvania, http://www.united-religions.org/newsite/72hours/projects.htm, p. 27. 64 United Religions Initiative, "72 Hours-Geographical Listing of Projects Underway," project in Lisle, Illinois, http://www.united-religions.org/newsite/72hours/projects.htm, p. 29. 65 United Religions Initiative, "72 Hours-Geographical Listing of Projects Underway," project in Cleveland, Ohio, http://www.united-religions.org/newsite/72hours/projects.htm, p. 31. 66 United Religions Initiative, "72 Hours-Geographical Listing of Projects Underway," project in Richfield, Ohio, http://www.united-religions.org/newsite/72hours/projects.htm, p. 33. 67 United Religions Initiative, "72 Hours-Geographical Listing of Projects Underway," project in Omaha, Nebraska, http://www.united-religions.org/newsite/72hours/projects.htm, p. 36. 68 United Religions Initiative, "72 Hours-Geographical Listing of Projects Underway," project at the Nevada Test Site, http://www.united-religions.org/newsite/72hours/projects.htm, pp. 40-41. 69 United Religions Initiative, "72 Hours-Geographical Listing of Projects Underway," project in Oakland, California, http://www.united-religions.org/newsite/72hours/projects.htm, p. 44. 70 United Religions Initiative, "72 Hours-Geographical Listing of Projects Underway," project in San Jose, California, http://www.united-religions.org/newsite/72hours/projects.htm, p. 54. 71 Sisters of Providence, "General Officer Sister Joan Slobig Elected to Lead Branch of International Organization," http://www.spsmw.org/news/releases/joan.htm, p. 2. 72 Global Education Associates, "Religious Orders Partnership," http://www.globaleduc.org/rop.htm 73 Maryknoll Magazine, "World Watch," http://www.maryknoll.org/MEDIA/xMAGAZINE/xmag02/m1s13.htm . 74 United Religions Initiative, "72 Hours-Geographical Listing of Projects Underway," worldwide project, http://www.united-religions.org/newsite/72hours/projects.htm, pp. 63-64. 75 Diocese of California, "July 17, 1999-We Shined," http://diocal.org/pcn/5pcn99/index2.html-Griswold's statement was, "determined farsightedness is a characteristic I particularly associate with this diocese . . . as well as your present bishop's vision of the potential of the world's religions to bind up and bring together, rather than divide and turn the people of the earth against each other." 76 Telephone interview by Lee Penn of Bishop James Ottley, April 24, 1998; also, Anglican Communion Office at the United Nations, "Ministry Update-June 1997," http://www.aco.org/united-nations/upjune.htm, p. 1. 77 Bishop William Swing, "The United Religions Initiative," document issued in April 1996, pp. 5-6. 78 Bishop Michael Ingham, "Christmas Message," as quoted in The Globe and Mail, Toronto, Canada, December 1, 1999, p. A-17, http://www.prayerbook.ca/pblam885.htm. 79 Bishop William Swing, The Coming United Religions, United Religions Initiative and CoNexus Press, 1998, ISBN 0-9637897-5-9; foreword, p. 6. 80 List of members of Council of Advice provided by Jim Solheim, press officer for ECUSA, 4/17/2000. 81 Bishop Clark Grew, "Episcopal Address to the 1999 Diocesan Convention," http://dohio.org/convention/episcaddress.html, pp. 2-3. 82 Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, "Resolutions Adopted from Diocesan Convention," http://www.ladiocese.org/resolutions.html. 83 List of members of Council of Advice provided by Jim Solheim, press officer for ECUSA, 4/17/2000. 84 The Church of England Newspaper, "Editorial," October 21, 1999, http://www.churchnewspaper.com/edit.html. 85 Archbishop Harry Goodhew, "The Cross of Christ in a Pluralistic World," Southern Cross Online, April 2000, http://www.anglicanmediasydney.asn.au/scn/abwrites.html. 86 Bishop Charles Murphy, statement to The Living Church, February 13-20, 2000, interviewed by Patricia Nakamura, circulated as e-mail on 3/18/00. 87 "Press Statement from the Archbishop of Canterbury," 31 January 2000, http://fifamerica.faithweb.com/ARTICLES/2000January/newpages47.htm. 88 Bishop William Swing, "The United Religions Initiative," document issued in April 1996, p. 7. 89 Fr. Chidi Denis Isizoh, letter to the editor, Homiletic & Pastoral Review, Vol. XCIX, June 1999, p. 60. 90 John Paul II, message to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on Occasion of Plenary Assembly, January 28, 2000, version from http://www.geocities.com/romcath1/genarticle8.html. 91 Bishop William Swing, The Coming United Religions, United Religions Initiative and CoNexus Press, 1998, ISBN 0-9637897-5-9; p. 33. 92 Bishop William Swing, The Coming United Religions, United Religions Initiative and CoNexus Press, 1998, ISBN 0-9637897-5-9; p. 31. 93 Transcribed by Lee Penn from URI-provided tape of URI forum at Grace Cathedral, held on 2/2/97. 94 Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold, statement of January 31, 2000, "For the Primates of the Anglican Communion," in response to the consecration in Singapore of Bishop Rodgers and Bishop Murphy, http://fifamerica.faithweb.com/ARTICLES2000January/newpage49.htm, p. 1. 95 Bishop William Swing, The Coming United Religions, United Religions Initiative and CoNexus Press, 1998, ISBN 0-9637897-5-9; p. 64. 96 The Center for Progressive Christianity, "President's Report, February 1999, part 3, 'The United Religions Initiative'," by William Rankin, http://www.tcpc.org/URI.htm, p. 4. 97 As quoted by Witness magazine (a liberal Episcopal magazine), December 1995, p. 36. 98 Richard Scheinin, "Interfaith Ceremony Promotes World Peace," San Jose Mercury News, June 26, 1995. 99 Don Lattin, "Religions of World Celebrated With Prayers to Dozen Deities," San Francisco Chronicle, June 26, 1995, pp. A1 and A11, front page section. 100 Bishop Michael Ingham, "Christmas Message," as quoted in The Globe and Mail, Toronto, Canada, December 1, 1999, p. A-17, http://www.prayerbook.ca/pblam885.htm. 101 Bishop William Swing, The Coming United Religions, United Religions Initiative and CoNexus Press, 1998, ISBN 0-9637897-5-9; p. 63. 102 Don Lattin, "Religions of World Celebrated With Prayers to Dozen Deities," San Francisco Chronicle, June 26, 1995, p. A11, front page section. 103 Neale Donald Walsch, "Ending Religious Conflict," Magical Blend, Issue 58, December 1997, p. 40. 104 Barbara Marx Hubbard, Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential, New World Library, Novato, California, 1998, ISBN 1-57731-016-0, pp. 193, 194. 105 URI on-line archive, e-mail from Sally Ackerly to URI leadership, February 27, 1998, Internet document, http://origin.org/uri/txt/Org2Design.txt, p. 2. 106 The Chaordic Alliance, "United Religions Initiative," http://www.chaordic.org/chaordic/par_uri.html. 107 URI on-line archive, e-mail from Sally Ackerly to URI leadership, February 27, 1998, Internet document, http://origin.org/uri/txt/Org2Design.txt, p. 2. 108 Rudolf Steiner Foundation, "Client Profiles," http://www.rsfoundation.org/clientprofiles/projectdescriptions.html, p. 1. 109 Lucis Trust, "Transition Activities: The United Religions Initiative," World Goodwill, vol. 1, 1999, http://www.lucistrust.org/goodwill/wgnl991.shtml, pp. 21-22; Lucis Trust, "Invoking the Spirit of Peace," World Goodwill, vol. 3, 1999, http://www.lucistrust.org/goodwill/wgnl993.shtml, pp. 2, 3. 110 Rowan Fairgrove, "Holy Brighid Holding the World in Her Hands," http://www.conjure.com/inspired.html. 111 Association for Global New Thought, "AGNT Panel Presentation-Parliament of the World's Religions-Cape Town, South Africa December 1-8, 1999," Internet document, http://www.agnt.org/parliament~1.htm. 112 Unity School of Christianity, "Sowing the Seeds of Hope," http://www.unityworldhq.org/seeds_of_hope.htm. 113 Carolyn Amrit Knaus, O.D., M.S., "New Spiritual Order for the Next Millennium: Order of Divinity," http://www.myfreeoffice.com/spiritualorder/millennium, p. 3. 114 Cult Awareness Network, "CAN Update Archive," Vol. II, Issue I, http://cultawarenessnetwork.org/Can_Update/0201.html, p. 6; Pastor George Robertson, Chairman of the Board, New Cult Awareness Network, letter of 9/9/99 to a newspaper that criticized the New CAN, as posted at http://www.cultawarenessnetwork.org/CAN-it.html, p. 3; "CAN Update Archive," Vol. II, Issue III, http://www.cultawarenessnetwork.org/Can_Update/0203.htm, p. 2. 115 United Religions Initiative, "72 Hours-Geographical Listing of Projects Underway," projects in Long Island and Hampton Bays, NY, http://www.united-religions.org/newsite/72hours/projects.htm, p. 21. 116 United Religions Initiative, "72 Hours-Geographical Listing of Projects Underway," project in Washington DC, http://www.united-religions.org/newsite/72hours/projects.htm, p. 24. 117 Thomas One Wolf and others; "Sharing Master's Love at the World Vision Conference," http://www.chinghai.com/WORLDsharing.html, p. 1; the home page for Supreme Master Ching Hai is http://www.chinghai.com. 118 "Pagan Sanctuary Network"-a member of the URI Web ring, http://pagansanctuary.ulink.net. 119 United Religions Initiative, "72 Hours-Geographical Listing of Projects Underway," project in Mobile, Alabama, http://www.united-religions.org/newsite/72hours/projects.htm, p. 34. 120 United Religions Initiative, "72 Hours-Geographical Listing of Projects Underway," project in Isis Oasis, CA, http://www.united-religions.org/newsite/72hours/projects.htm, p. 42. 121 United Religions Initiative, "72 Hours-Geographical Listing of Projects Underway," project in San Francisco, CA, http://www.united-religions.org/newsite/72hours/projects.htm, p. 44. 122 United Religions Initiative, "June 1999 Global Summit Conference," http://www.united-religions.org/events/jun2.shtml, p. 2. 123 "About Coven of the Stone and the Mirror," http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Agora/2416/cosminfo.html 124 Wittenberg Center for Alternative Resources, "Internship Programs: The Wittenberg Center 1998," Internet document, http://www.balpoint.com/wicar/intern.htm, p. 1. 125 Wittenberg Center for Alternative Resources, "The Course: Survival & Empowerment for the Twenty-First Century," Internet document, http://www.balpoint.com/wicar/survival.htm, p. 1. 126 Western Federation Church and Tribe, "Home Page," http://www.accrediting.com/tribe.htm,pp. 5-6; also, http://www.accrediting.com/marsconvention.htm. 127 Western Federation Church and Tribe, "Home Page," http://www.accrediting.com/tribe.htm,pp. 5-6; also, http://www.accrediting.com/marsconvention.htm. 128 Dennis Delman, "For the Sake of the Children, We've Got to Talk," Bishop Swing Tells Commonwealth Club Gathering," Pacific Church News, August/September 1999, p. 25. 7/16/00 1

Lee Penn is a health care information systems consultant who is also active as a researcher and writer on Church affairs, covering the United Religions Initiative and the New Age movement. His work has appeared in the New Oxford Review, the Journal of the Spiritual Counterfeits Project, and the Christian Challenge. Episcopalian by background, Penn was received into the Russian Catholic Church, an Eastern Rite Church in communion with Rome, in 1995.

This report is a revised and updated portion of the author's feature article, ?The United Religions Initiative: Foundations for a World Religion? (part 3 of a series), Journal of the Spiritual Counterfeits Project (Spring 2000). For more information on the series or the URI, visit the website http://www.scp-inc.org/ or call 510-540-0300.

from http://inetport.com/~one/mscoop.html:

Co-operation
by the Master --

Humanity today stands poised for a great leap into the future, a future in which man's essentially divine nature will demonstrate. Little though he may know this, man has passed and is passing the tests which will allow him, in full adulthood, to become the recipient of knowledge and powers with which to fashion the future.

At present, only to the inner vision of the Guides of the Race may this reality be clear, but such it is, and portends well for the coming time. Wherever men may gather today, can be seen and felt a new urgency, a new sense of commitment to the well-being of the planet and its kingdoms.

Only now, after aeons spent in the struggle for existence and progress, can man be said to have reached maturity, a maturity discernible to Us, albeit well hidden from man himself.

The opportunity arises now for a major advance in human progress, outstripped by fear, in speed and accomplishment, all previous advances. Whereas, until now, a slow and steady progress was desirable, and even preferable, a new dynamic rhythm is being created whose momentum will sweep humanity into the future on a wave of global change. So great are the tensions in today's divided world that only a rapid change of direction will prevent catastrophe. This rapid change, there is no doubt, will present problems of adjustment to many, but many more, by far, will welcome these changes as the opportunity for new life.

We, the Toilers behind the scenes, have every confidence that humanity will set in motion this radical transformation of its structures. They no longer serve man's needs and block the emergence of the new. We watch and guide, overseeing all.

Little by little, a new consciousness is awakening humanity to its inner needs. The old, competitive spirit dies hard, but nevertheless a new spirit of co-operation is likewise to be seen. This augurs well for the future, for it is by co-operation alone that mankind will survive; by co-operation alone that the new civilization will be built; by co-operation only that men can know and demonstrate the inner truth of their divinity.

Co-operation is the natural result of right relationship. Right relationship likewise follows wise co-operation. Co-operation holds the key to all successful group effort and is a manifestation of divine goodwill. Without co-operation nothing lasting can be achieved, for co-operation brings into synthesis many diverse points of view.

Co-operation is another word for Unity. Unity and co-operation are the springboards to the future and the guarantee of achievement for all men. Great reservoirs of power lie untapped within humanity, waiting for the magic of co-operation to unleash.

Competition strains the natural order; co-operation liberates the goodwill in men. Competition cares only for the self, whereas co-operation seeks to blend and fuse the many-coloured strands of the one divine life.

Competition has led man to the precipice; co-operation alone will help him find the path.

The old and backward-looking love competition; the new embrace with joy divine co-operation.

The people of the world can be divided into two kinds; those who compete, and those who co-operate.

Cleanse the heart of the stain of competition; open the heart to joyful co-operation.

---

The Master -- is a senior member of the Hierarchy of the Masters of Wisdom. His name, well-known in esoteric circles, has not yet been revealed for various reasons. Benjamin Creme is in telepathic contact with this Master who dictated this article to him. From the files of Share International.

``The Master'' is the recurrent title of the Maitreyan spiritual leader. The term ``master'' denotes not only skillfulness, but dominance over subordinates, as in, master-slave relationships.

A general phenomenon that is a crucial component of the cultural substrate of Maitreyanism is specialism. Here is an excerpt from a presentation by Robert David Steele, President of Open Source Solutions, from God, Man, & Information: Comments to Interval In-House, 1998-Mar-9:

[...]

The reality is that wealth can be translated into information power, and that the apathy of the people is allowing private wealth to control public information. We are very, very close to private tyranny.

There are a few fundamental concepts in public administration, including the concepts of accountability, administrative ecology and power, incremental public choice, information networks and systems of cooperative effort, budgeting as a political manifestation of organized trade-offs, and the moral ambiguities of public choice.

Accountability depends on openness. As John Ralston Saul argues so well in Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, secrecy and the cult of expertise have in fact undermined humanism and created a pathological civilization, a civilization of decline. Consider:

``The invention of the secret is perhaps the most damaging outgrowth of the power produced when control over knowledge was combined with the protective armor of civilization. Until recently very little was considered improper to know. Today the restricted lists are endless.

These restrictions have been counterbalanced over the last thirty years by an apparent explosion in individual freedoms. This breakdown of social order--rules of dress, sexual controls, speech patterns, family structures--have been seen as a great victory for the individual. On the other hand, it may simply be a reflection of the individual's frustration at being locked up inside a specialization. These acts of personal freedom are irrelevant to the exercise of power. So in lieu of taking a real part in the evolution of society, the individual struggles to appear as if no one has power over his personal evolution. Thus victories won for these individual liberties may actually be an acceptance of defeat by the individual.

Not since the etiquette-ridden courts of the eighteenth century has public debate been so locked into fixed positions, fixed formulas and fixed elites expert in rhetoric.

In fact, the question which arises is whether the rational approach has not removed from democracy its greatest single strength--the ability to act in an unconventional manner.''

The ability to act in an unconventional manner. Let us hold that thought as we look at other fundamentals. Administrative ecology, administrative power, incremental public choice. Who is really in charge of our civilization and our commonweal? The Office of Technology Assessment not-withstanding, the reality is that our civilization and our government in particular, but all governments in general, are out of control. Each area of specialization, from defense to energy to agriculture, is the captive of mindless and amoral specialists who have no interest in holistic policy or the public good. In the absence of kinship, of family, of religion, or even of ideas, man has been domesticated in the worst sense of the word.

[...]

The terms Maitreya and Führer are interchangeable (have the same etymological and practical meaning). Devout Maitreyans intend to commit an eternal worldwide genocide of individualists and heretics - of those who are incompatible with the ideology, and of those who are insufficiently pliable. They plan profuse apologies and tears of sorrow, but they believe devoutly that they must kill, often describing it as a relieving of suffering and/or a deliverance to a better place.

There is more, much more to the connection between the Nazis and New Age. This is all rather roundabout, and the story would be laughable and silly were it not for all the corpses.

The Rothschilds, that great Jewish lion of European banking, were instrumental in bringing the Nazis to power. At the time of Hitler's election, the Farben trust (interest group, I G Farben) was a Rothschild-dominated concern. Nobel laureate Paul Ehrlich, also a Jew, discovered antibodies and invented chemotherapy and the first cure for syphilis while at Farben years earlier. In fact the Farben trust was veritably awash in Jewish scientists. Nonetheless, Farben, with the other major industrial trusts of Germany, threw its support behind Hitler's candidacy, precipitating his election. Years later, Zyklon B - the nerve gas used in concentration camps to murder enemies of the Nazi state - was invented by scientists at Farben.

The Rothschild agenda was, at least in part, public and transparent, dating to the nineteenth century. They were and are committed and leading Zionists (a street is named in their honor in Jerusalem), and they (and other allied Zionists) sought to shoo Jews out of Europe and into Israel by making life for Jews in Europe miserable.

Seemingly, they overshot their mark. Or did they? Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, a prominent religious leader in Israel, recently repeated an explanation I've heard with some skepticism before, regarding the Holocaust: ``These are incarnations of those who have sinned and made others sin... They were reincarnated to make amends.''

That is, he maintains that the Holocaust was a collosal burnt offering to appease an unnamed god. This constitutes a mystical, fringy sort of Jewish cult ritual run amok. In fact, it is none other than cabalism. The Star of David the Zionists adopted as their symbol and put on their flag is actually an expressly cabalistic symbol. Cabalism is the direct ancestor of modern theosophy as institutionalized in the Third Reich in particular and in New Age in general.

In its modernized form as New Age, the ideology centrally features both reincarnation (in the form of Hindu karma, samsara, and nirvana) and intense anti-Semitism: the premise is that Jews are peculiarly obstinate varmints, having missed two quantum leaps of consciousness (constituting disobedience to Maitreya or ``natural law'' or some other such hogwash), and so must be exterminated to make way for a harmonious global unified consciousness/awakening.

The swastika (the word is Sanskrit for ``well being prevails'') was borrowed from Buddhism, in which it is an ancient traditional symbol of Buddha's heart, often appearing emblazened on his chest in religious artwork. The Nazis are considered to use only the clockwise form of the swastika, while traditionally the chiral variants are both used, related to each other dialectically, associated with male and female. Since the Nazis often emblazened flags with the swastika, the chiral variants were both routinely displayed.

The Nazis embarked on treks to Tibet, mythical homeland of Maitreya and seat of mystical wisdom. The United Nations, built on Rockefeller-donated land, is closely associated with Share International, which distributes explicitly Maitreyan Buddhist propaganda. J D Rockefeller the first got his start, and made his race to monopoly, with Rothschild money and favors. Rockefeller was a key supporter of the eugenics movement (coercive eugenics is a core doctrine of New Age), and the organization he funded became the Racial Hygiene Society when the Nazis built their apparatus. For more on this, see Anton Chaitkin's discussion on the Rockefeller roots of Nazi eugenics.

I suspect that some mischievous wankers in the intelligence community - critical ground pounders of the nuclear establishment - are using state of the art technology and tactics to create Maitreyan apparitions, as discussed in An Appraisal of Technologies of Political Control, published by the Directorate General for Research of the European Parliament and written by Steve Wright.

"We are no longer at a theoretical stage with these weapons. US companies are already piloting new systems, lobbying hard and where possible, laying down potentially lucrative patents. For example, last year New Scientist reported that the American Technology Corporation (ATC) of Poway California has used what it calls acoustical heterodyning technology to target individuals in a crowd with infra-sound to pinpoint an individual 200-300 metres away. The system can also project sonic holograms which can conjure audio messages out of thin air so just one person hears."

and from http://www.techmgmt.com/restore/orange.htm:

AEN News
Carol Valentine (Skywriter@public-action.com)

Pentagon's New Offensive Info. War

The March 31, 1997 Defense Week ran a story "Air Force Organizes For Offensive Info War." According to the article, the US Air Force has created the position of deputy director for information operations. An "offensive information warfare" division will be created under the new deputy director. The division will have the organizational code AF/XOIOW and will be headed by Lt. Col. Jimmy Miyamoto.

Offensive information warfare, which implies attacks on both military and civilian targets, is among the least discussed aspect of the Air Force's moves to organize, train, and equip the service for information dominance, the article admits.

The new Information Operations office will coordinate with the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency.

New research efforts are underway to support this new program, including:

• Lethal HPM munitions. The USAF Office of Scientific Research is working on developing a small affordable laser and high powered microwave for unmanned aerial vehicles to perform a wide variety of missions, including enemy communications and computer systems.
  
  
• Software viruses to be placed or injected into enemy weapons and information links. These viruses would remain dormant until activated by satellite, aircraft radar, or jamming equipment, etc. When activated, the virus would render the equipment useless, or "better yet, there could be a very subtle change for a finite period of time."
  
  
• Holographic projection. The article describes a quasi-information warfare/psychological operations program that was first discussed in the Air Force after Desert Storm. Holographic projection involves projection of a three-dimensional holographic image in project decoys, or even an "angry god" above the battlefield.
  
  

The Pentagon had listed holographic projections openly as part of its "nonlethal" weapons program. But since 1994, the program has disappeared from view, evidently now a "black" effort, says Defense Week.

In conclusion, the Defense Week article states that the Army's JFK Special Warfare Center and School in late 1991 disclosed that it was looking to develop a PSYOPS Hologram System with a capability "to project persuasive messages and three-dimensional pictures of cloud, smoke, rain droplets, buildings . . . The use of holograms as a persuasive message will have worldwide application."

Carol A. Valentine
President
Public Action, Inc.

from http://www.shareintl.org/maitreya.html:

WHO IS MAITREYA?

He has been expected for generations by all of the major religions. Christians know Him as the Christ, and expect His imminent return. Jews await Him as the Messiah; Hindus look for the coming of Krishna; Buddhists expect Him as Maitreya Buddha; and Muslims anticipate the Imam Mahdi or Messiah.

Although the names are different, many believe that they all refer to the same individual: the World Teacher, whose personal name is Maitreya (My-'tray-ah).

Preferring to be known simply as the Teacher, Maitreya has not come as a religious leader, or to found a new religion, but as a teacher and guide for people of every religion and those of no religion.

At this time of great political, economic and social crisis Maitreya will inspire humanity to see itself as one family, and create a civilization based on sharing, economic and social justice, and global cooperation.

He will launch a call to action to save the millions of people who starve to death every year in a world of plenty. Among Maitreya's recommendations will be a shift in social priorities so that adequate food, housing, clothing, education, and medical care become universal rights.

Under Maitreya's inspiration, humanity itself will make the required changes and create a saner and more just world for all.

---

The process of the Emergence

In recent years, Maitreya has been appearing to individuals ----- important world leaders as well as ordinary people ---- and to groups of people, large and small, all over the world. In this way, He is gradually affecting world events, and making His presence known.

He appears to individuals in one of three ways: most commonly in people's dreams; secondly, as a vision ---- not in a dream but not totally solid; and, thirdly, as a solid, physical person who suddenly appears before them and then disappears.

On 11 June 1988 He appeared miraculously from out of no-where before 6,000 people at a prayer meeting in Nairobi, Kenya. The people instantly recognized Him as the Christ. He spoke to them for some minutes in perfect Swahili, the local language, and then disappeared as amazingly as He had come, leaving behind some 30 or 40 people completely healed of their illnesses.

Since then, Maitreya has appeared miraculously before large groups of people in Mexico, Russia, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Czecho-slovakia, Romania, Scotland, Norway, the Middle East, North Africa, India and Pakistan. Near the majority of these appearances miraculous healing water will be found. This has already happened in Tlacote, near Mexico City, Düsseldorf in Germany and New Delhi in India. He will continue to do this until people begin to talk, the media take notice, and He becomes universally known. Maitreya will then be invited by the international media to speak directly to the entire world through the television networks linked together by satellites.

On this Day of Declaration, we will see His face on the television screen wherever we have access. The Bible statement, ``All eyes will see Him,'' will be fulfilled, in the only way in which it can be fulfilled. We will see His face, but He will not speak. His thoughts, His ideas, His call to humanity for justice, sharing, right relationships and peace, will take place silently, telepathically. Each of us will hear Him inwardly in our own language. In this way, He will re-enact on a world-wide scale the true happenings of Pentecost 2,000 years ago.

At the same time, the energy which He embodies ---- the Christ principle, the energy of love ---- will flow out in tremendous potency through the hearts of all humanity. He has said, ``It will be as if I embrace the world. People will feel it even physically.'' This will evoke an intuitive, heartfelt response to His message. Simultaneously, on the outer, physical plane, there will be hundreds of thousands of miracle healings throughout the planet. In these three ways we will know that Maitreya is the Christ, the World Teacher, come for all groups, religious and non-religious alike, an educator in the broadest sense, here to help us fulfill our destiny as Gods in incarnation.

Maitreya and His group of Masters have come to show us the way, to inspire and guide us to create the conditions in which that divinity can correctly manifest. They have come to teach us to know who we are. Maitreya has said, ``I have come to teach the art of Self or God realization. That is the destiny of all people in the world.''

Those of us now in incarnation have an extraordinary responsibility. That is why we are in the world at this time. Every generation brings into incarnation those who are equipped with the knowledge to solve the problems of their time. We have to solve the problems of today and the immediate future, to decide for all time whether or not the human race will continue ---- to make the choice for justice, sharing, right relationships, and peace, or to destroy all life. Maitreya is in no doubt that we will make the right choice.

Barbara Marx Hubbard is a leading proponent of the ideology. Her name, quite appropriately, combines Karl Marx and L. Ron Hubbard under one roof. From her book The Revelation, comments (authored by her) she attributes to the book's Christ character:

"A Quantum Transformation is the time of selection of what evolves from what devolves. The species known as self-centered humanity will become extinct. The species known as whole-centered humanity will evolve" (comments on Rev. 3:4-5, p. 101).

What did Hubbard just espouse? Nothing less than the subjection of the individual to the collective as a mystical gateway to future humanity (not to mention, genocide of the unshakeably self-centered). This is, not to put too fine a point on it, moose droppings. Later this becomes more obvious:

"All the people on Earth will be reduced to the same status. Rich and poor, powerful and powerless, black, white, red, yellow and brown. When all are in total awe of the creative force, the destruction will cease for a time" (comments on Rev. 7:1-4, p. 138)

"Those who have the seal of the living God will be able to take the next step of evolution. They shall hunger no more." (comments on Rev. 7:9-17, p. 140)

"Evangelists are proclaiming that the Kingdom of God is at hand. They are urging repentance and acceptance of Jesus as your personal savior. But they are not laying forth the image of the collective future of the human race as a generation of the saved. They have not yet envisioned what it will be like when everything works" (comments on 1 Cor. 15:45, p. 162).

Hubbard, echoing the Christian bible, dangles the same bait that the communists dangle. The mystical power she drones on about endlessly does not exist.

This idea of a time when ``everything works'' is ridiculous. Such a circumstance is physically impossible, because of thermal and quantum noise. Its hypothetical attainment would, however, constitute the total termination of evolution. This is the real purpose of the program - to arrest evolution, destroying the world (though New Agers do not consciously recognize the latter).

Later in the book Hubbard makes clear that, in her accounting, one is either insane (though she does not put it that way) or evil (though she does not logically exclude the possibility of being both insane and evil, which is consistent with the reality that Hubbard is herself both insane and evil):

"They that dwell on the Earth, whose names are not written in the Book of Life, are they who gave primary reality to 'the beast,' to the things seen and felt with the senses alone; it is they who had no faith in things unseen and unknown, who did not believe in God above all else and love their neighbors as themselves" (The Revelation, The Christs' comments on Rev. 17:7-8, p. 203-204).

If one abandons the most basic of logical premises - that things which exist can be sensed possibly with the assistance of machinery though eventually through human senses, and that the absence of sensation is strongly correlated with non-existence and with sufficiently thorough examination is in and of itself compelling evidence of non-existence - then reasoning about the nature of the universe, and hence about the nature of the self and the true relationship of the self to the universe, is made impossible. An empirical foundation is indispensable. To dispense with it is nothing less than to embrace madness. Her madness continues, and 30 pages later she rants:

The consciousness defect of the illusion of separation will be corrected once and for all. You will never go back again. This is the key to the positive scenario. The cancer of self-centeredness will be consumed by the experience of wholeness.

The plan for your regeneration will begin. Millions will instantly feel a subtle change of electricity in their bodies. . . .

And I will be enabled to contact all of you at once. This is my dream, this is my passion, this is my desire - to have all of you paying attention to me at once through the activation of your inner experience of your potential to be me, rather than relying on priests, mystics, or saints, beloved though they are. Their work is done. Yours has begun" (The Revelation, The Christs' comments on Rev. 20:1-3, p. 235-236).

But, of course, the separation between bodies is not an illusion at all. This separation is critical. A critical characteristic of any lifeform is the manner in which it divides the universe into that portion of the universe which is it, and that portion which is not. To break this down is to exterminate life. Boundaries are prerequisite. Hubbard describes self-centeredness as a "cancer," but it is instinctive or intrinsic self-centeredness which produced the rich speciation of the planet, and conscious, deliberate self-centeredness which produced and produces the overwhelming bulk of scientific, technological, artistic, and cultural innovation. Self-centeredness is not a cancer, it is the natural way of things. Christianity, and Hubbard's ideology, are cancers.

Notice three things about the final paragraph in the above quoted passage. First, the Christ's desire to have everyone paying attention to him is pathetic - it manifests the same self-perception of inadequacy, and the same bogus remedy, as those Ayn Rand's antagonist and antihero characters exhibit (notwithstanding the great address in Atlas Shrugged, which ain't half bad). Second. this system (of sorts) in which the Christ has everyone paying attention to him at once is the ultimate isotropic engine, eradicating chaos with optimal efficiency. This is morbid. Read J. Orlin Grabbe's essay on chaos for a wonderful treatment of the topic.

Third, we (human inhabitants of planet earth) already have the ability to have everyone pay attention to one person at once. It is called radio, and it can relay representations of sounds and moving pictures through the atmosphere, through satellites, around the world, instantly, recreating the sound and image anywhere. And we didn't embrace total madness to make it so - these systems are the product of science and technology, discovered, invented, and built, by the rational effort of self-centered men.

What does "self-centered" really mean? Webster's dictionary offers the following definition for "self": "the union of elements (as body, emotions, thoughts, sensations) that constitute the individuality and identity of a person." "Center" is defined "to place or fix at or around a center or central area or position." For "self-centered," Webster offers the definition "independent of outside force or influence." "Independent" is defined as "self-governing" or "not requiring or relying on something else." In short, a self-centered individual is an individual who recognizes that his own body, emotions, thoughts, and sensations, are his own, and that he is self-governing and self-supporting - that is, responsible for himself. Self-centeredness is not simply compatible with social and environmental responsibility, responsibility demands it. Self-centeredness is cohesive and allows for the construction of robust communities. All of this is manifestly good. However, it is all manifestly contrary to the desires of those who lust after control over other people. Thus, self-centeredness has been demonized for millennia by morbid second handers, and the ideological systems they have contrived and promulgated to that end (Judaism, Christianity, communism, and the other religions) corrode humanity like so many cancerous tumors.

Finally, Hubbard bends the Masonic mottos of the Great Seal to her own purposes - which, to be sure, requires little interpretive amendment.

"It is the purpose of the people who came to the United States of America to be free, to be fully human. It embodies the symbols of the nation which are: E Pluribus Unum; out of many, one; Novus Ordo Seclorum; a new order of the ages; Annuit Coeptis; God favors this enterprise" (The Revelation, The Christs' comments on Rev. 21:2, p. 249)

from Slate.com, 2004-Sep-23, by Ron Rosenbaum:

Dead Like Her
How Elisabeth Kübler-Ross went around the bend.

First off—for those speak-no-ill-about-the-dead types—let's get this straight: She's not dead. Yes, sure, the obituaries say Elisabeth Kübler-Ross died, on Aug. 24, but I have it on record that she is not dead.

Back in the '80s, I was writing a critical examination (for Harper's) of Kübler-Ross' "Five Stages of Dying"—the ones she made famous in her 1969 book On Death and Dying and some 15 follow-up tomes (including Death: The Final Stage of Growth). The Stages (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance) became the foundation for an entire "Death 'n' Dying" Movement, as I dubbed it. And while there is no doubt Kübler-Ross made an important contribution to the treatment of dying patients (hospice care, etc.) in an age of increasingly mechanized medicine (and medical doctors), she also contributed to a kind of cultlike reverence for the allegedly superior truth-telling wisdom of the dying (and later the dead as well).

It's a sentimentalizing of mortality that's become incorporated into popular culture and can be seen as the source of such death-obsessed dramas as Touched by an Angel and Dead Like Me—and series like Six Feet Under and the proliferations of CSIs, in which the dead body is fetishized as a catalyst for truth telling. (Perhaps the funniest embodiment and satire upon the trend is Curb Your Enthusiasm's famous "aunt" obituary episode.)

In any case, I'll never forget one conversation I had with Kübler-Ross' official spokeswoman. I was asking her whether Kübler-Ross' "heavenly car mechanic" vision (more details anon) was a Near Death Experience, and the spokeswoman corrected me: "Elisabeth doesn't like the term 'Near Death Experience' because she doesn't believe that death exists. No such thing."

The path to the moment in the early '80s when Kübler-Ross declared there is "no such thing as death" (and got into trouble fooling around with some "afterlife entities") can be traced to the landscape of postwar Europe. She was a Swiss resident (born in 1926) who volunteered to help care for Holocaust survivors and came to America after getting a medical degree. There in the early '60s she began specializing in the care of patients deemed to be dying and the neglect of their needs, chief among them, she believed, honesty on the part of doctors and a willingness to listen.

All of this was quite noble, but there came a point when caring became codifying as well. She began identifying herself as a "scientist" and took her accumulated anecdotal experience and declared that the dying process (and then the grieving process, too) had those famous five stages. Staging death had a remarkable appeal and gave an illusion of control over the uncontrollable. She became a saintly icon, the Queen of Death.

But then, quietly, in the late '70s, the Queen began to go around the bend, began declaring there was no death, there were only "transitions" from one permeable boundary to another. And often back. So, if one takes her belief seriously, not only have the reports of her death been exaggerated but reports of death itself have been exaggerated. Death for Kübler-Ross became just a kind of bonus "Sixth Stage," a kind of heavenly spa where one could freshen up before cruising around among the living again. That might be her, looking over your shoulder as you're reading this.

Whether or not Kübler-Ross is dead, her alleged "science" of Death 'n' Dying lives on in all its meretriciousness, rarely challenged any more. According to Kübler-Ross, there's a right way and a wrong way to die, a sober responsible Five Stage Way. Forget "Do not go gentle into that good night" by that alcoholic Welshman Dylan Thomas. You better go gentle, buster, you better die the New Age Way or you'll never appreciate how beautiful death can be. It's the only way to go, you might say.

The famous five stages of dying, of grieving, has gone beyond being a mere meme. It has become a deeply embedded unexamined ideology of death, something that doesn't merely describe the dying process that people go through but shapes—virtually prescribes—the process. It sets up the Five Stages as a kind of Moral Progress, and brands you as inauthentic if you don't grimly trudge through each. Sort of like a Twelve Step Program for Death.

Until I looked into it, I admit that I was one of the ones content to accept on faith that Kübler-Ross' Five Stages of "Death 'n' Dying" was founded on something more solid than Kübler-Ross' anecdotes. She claimed to have investigated the process like a scientist; she claimed her stages were based on her observations as a doctor and on her encounters with the dying (this was before she claimed she was interacting with actual dead people). She'd become a revered mainstream American icon—and was even named a Ladies' Home Journal "Woman of the Decade" at the end of the 70s, when she was jetting around the country holding "Death 'n' Dying" workshops to promote her Five Stages and her many books. (The Five Stages were the Mars and Venus of death.) By the '80s she'd helped make death the hot commodity it is now.

What prompted my examination was a small—but stunning—news clipping I came across in the early '80s describing the completely bizarre sexual scandal at Kübler-Ross' retreat in Escondido, Calif., the mountaintop center she called Shanti Nilaya. The scandal concerned the involvement of Kübler-Ross—and some of the grieving widows visiting her retreat—with a self-proclaimed spirit medium who conned them all into believing he had the ability to channel "afterlife entities." Not only channel them but facilitate their having sex with the grieving widows.

It was, if you ask me, not an aberration but a culmination of Kübler-Ross' love affair with death; love affairs with the dead. But by then her growing belief that "death does not exist" had made her fall prey to a host of spirit mediums and charlatans who claimed they could make contact with the beautiful beings on the Other side.

She herself first encountered the "afterlife entities" during an "out of body" experience after one of her "workshops." She wrote that "I saw myself lifted out of my physical body. ... [I]t was as if a whole lot of loving beings were taking all the tired parts out of me, similar to car mechanics in a car repair shop. ... I had an incredible sense that once all the parts were replaced I would be a young and fresh and energetic as I had been prior to the rather exhausting, draining workshop."

After several trips to the auto repair shop and a lot of heart to hearts with the heavenly mechanics, she began to speak about death as the fountain of youth: "People after death become complete again. The blind can see, the deaf can hear, cripples are no longer crippled after all their vital signs have ceased to exist." The emphasis had shifted from a spiritual renewal while still alive, albeit dying, to the physical renewal awaiting one after death. It made death seem all too sweetly attractive (especially at a time when there were deep-rooted problems in the medical establishment's handling of dying patients). Some might say it made suicide seductive to the physically and mentally troubled. Death, in her new view, was a kind of Lourdes-cum-plastic-surgery spa.

But few challenged the escalating nonsense because—after all—she had "discovered" the five stages of death and grieving. She got to people when they were most wounded, scared, and vulnerable, and gave them a secular religion of death.

Enter the spirit medium of Escondido—a guy she had invited to her workshops, who somehow facilitated intercourse between the grieving widows and the "afterlife entities." The scandal erupted when several of the widows came down with similar vaginal infections, and one turned on the light during a session with an "afterlife entity" and discovered the opportunistic spirit medium himself, naked except for a turban. (He offered the completely plausible explanation that the afterlife entities had "cloned" him—and the turban, too, I guess—to help enable the afterlife entities to engage in the pleasures of the flesh.)

I'm not making this up. It's just sort of conveniently been forgotten that the founder of the so called "scientific" "five stages" encouraged and at first defended these practices. "There are those who might say this has damaged my credibility," Kübler-Ross said, when she finally conceded that the spirit medium's behavior "did not meet the standards" of her retreat. But it's not important "whether people believe what I say ... I'm a doctor and a scientist, who simply reports what she sees, hears, and experiences."

Right. Science. It's probably too late to disengage our culture from the unexamined assumptions in the Kübler-Ross death and dying ideology/movement, but we can at least examine them now from a distance. When I first wrote about it I saw it as a kind of confidence trick: In the guise of telling people that they were fearlessly investigating the realm of death, staring death in the face, etc., etc., it was offering people a way of distancing themselves from dread. Turning something scary like death into a "process" with nothing unpredictable to fear. Disguising it with a familiarizing scaffolding of "stages," swathing it in a gauzy romanticism of self-examination, self-expression. Death: the highest point of life, the "final stage of growth."

I also suggested that its popular success was due in large part to the behavior control function of the five stages and its appeal to hospital and hospice caregivers, who all took D 'n' D workshops. It made the five stages into a kind of moral progress: Potentially disruptive and annoying anger would give way to the more quiet stages of "depression" and "acceptance." Easier on the night nurses.

But now, looking back I think it can be seen as part of the Me-Decade ideology that denial is always bad. We must constantly be staring death in the face and rubbing everybody's nose in it, or we're really not living life. (Although if we spend all our time staring death in the face we have little time left to live life.)

Part of this ideology was rooted in the overheated overrated polemic by the Freudian Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, in which he blamed all of civilization's problems on its unwillingness to stare death in the face. (One could argue that all civilization's achievements were accomplished by those who didn't have time to dwell on the obvious fact that they were going to die.)

But is denial always a bad thing? Must death be regimented so it loses its mystery? These questions have some contemporary resonances: Are we in denial if we don't watch every terrorist beheading video or gaze repeatedly at the descent of those who jumped from the World Trade Center towers? Come to think of it, aren't Kübler-Ross' five stages arbitrary in their order? Wouldn't it be more fun to go out angry or better, bargaining, than depressed and accepting? Or maybe with a different "stage" of our own devising. Laughter in the dark?

I'm sure Kübler-Ross was well intentioned and serious-minded before she commodified and quantified her caring into a D 'n' D industry. And I understand why people will turn to her books in time of grief when consolation of any sort is the first priority. Millions of the dead and dying have reason to be grateful to her for raising their standard of care. I just feel we who are about to die (well, sooner or later) deserve better than this treacly simulacrum of pseudo-science to guide us. Her Five Stages of dying is the Emperor's New Shroud.

from the Ludwig von Mises Institute, by Murray N. Rothbard:

The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult

Written in 1972, this was the first piece of Rand revisionism from the libertarian standpoint.

In the America of the 1970s we are all too familiar with the religious cult, which has been proliferating in the last decade. Characteristic of the cult (from Hare Krishna to the "Moonies" to EST to Scientology to the Manson Family) is the dominance of the guru, or Maximum Leader, who is also the creator and ultimate interpreter of a given creed to which the acolyte must be unswervingly loyal. The major if not the only qualification for membership and advancement in the cult is absolute loyalty to and adoration of the guru, and absolute and unquestioning obedience to his commands. The lives of the members are dominated by the guru's influence and presence. If the cult grows beyond a few members, it naturally becomes hierarchically structured, if only because the guru cannot spend his time indoctrinating and watching over every disciple. Top positions in the hierarchy are generally filled by the original handful of disciples, who come to assume these positions by virtue of their longer stint of loyal and devoted service. Sometimes the top leadership may be related to each other, a useful occurrence which can strengthen intra-cult loyalty through the familial bond.

The goals of the cult leadership are money and power. Power is achieved over the minds of the disciples through inducing them to accept without question the guru and his creed. This devotion is enforced through psychological sanctions. For once the acolyte is imbued with the view that approval of, and communication with, the guru are essential to his life, then the implicit and explicit threat of excommunication – of removal from the direct or indirect presence of the guru – creates a powerful psychological sanction for the "enforcement" of loyalty and obedience. Money flows upward from the members through the hierarchy, either in the form of volunteer labor service contributed by the members, or through cash payments.

It should be clear at this point in history that an ideological cult can adopt the same features as the more overtly religious cult, even when the ideology is explicitly atheistic and anti-religious. That the cults of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Trotsky, and Mao are religious in nature, despite the explicit atheism of the latter, is by now common knowledge. The adoration of the cult founder and leader, the hierarchical structure, the unswerving loyalty, the psychological (and when in command of State power, the physical) sanctions are all too evident.

The Exoteric and the Esoteric

Every religious cult has two sets of differing and distinctive creeds: the exoteric and the esoteric. The exoteric creed is the official, public doctrine, the creed which attracts the acolyte in the first place and brings him into the movement as a rank-and-file member. The quite different creed is the unknown, hidden agenda, a creed which is only known to its full extent by the top leadership, the "high priests" of the cult. The latter are the keepers of the Mysteries of the cult.

But cults become particularly fascinating when the esoteric and exoteric creeds are not only different, but totally and glaringly in mutual contradiction. The havoc that this fundamental contradiction plays in the minds and lives of the disciples may readily be imagined. Thus, the various Marxist-Leninists cults officially and publicly extol Reason and Science, and denounce all religion, and yet the members are mystically attracted to the cult and its alleged infallibility.

Thus, Alfred G. Meyer writes of Leninist views on party infallibility:

Lenin seems to have believed that the party, as organized consciousness, consciousness as a decision-making machinery, had superior reasoning power. Indeed, in time this collective body took on an aura of infallibility, which was later elevated to a dogma, and a member's loyalty was tested, in part, by his acceptance of it. It became part of the communist confession of faith to proclaim that the party was never wrong.... The party itself never makes mistakes.¹

If the glaring inner contradictions of the Leninist cults make them intriguing objects of study, still more so is the Ayn Rand cult, which, while in some sense is still faintly alive, flourished for just ten years in the 1960s; more specifically, from the founding of the Nathaniel Branden lecture series in early 1958 to the Rand-Branden split ten years later. For not only was the Rand cult explicitly atheist, anti-religious, and an extoller of Reason; it also promoted slavish dependence on the guru in the name of independence; adoration and obedience to the leader in the name of every person's individuality; and blind emotion and faith in the guru in the name of Reason.

Virtually every one of its members entered the cult through reading Rand's lengthy novel Atlas Shrugged, which appeared in late 1957, a few months before the organized cult came into being. Entering the movement through a novel meant that despite repeated obeisances to Reason, febrile emotion was the driving force behind the acolyte's conversion. Soon, he found that the Randian ideology sketched out in Atlas was supplemented by a few non-fiction essays, and, in particular, by a regular monthly magazine, The Objectivist Newsletter (later, The Objectivist).

The Index of Permitted Books

Since every cult is grounded on a faith in the infallibility of the guru, it becomes necessary to keep its disciples in ignorance of contradictory infidel writings which may wean cult members away from the fold. The Catholic Church maintained an Index of Prohibited Books; more sweeping was the ancient Muslim cry: "Burn all books, for all truth is in the Koran!" But cults, which attempt to mold every member into a rigidly integrated world view, must go further. Just as Communists are often instructed not to read anti-Communist literature, the Rand cult went further to disseminate what was virtually an Index of Permitted Books. Since most neophyte Randians were both young and relatively ignorant, a careful channeling of their reading insured that they would remain ignorant of non- or anti-Randian ideas or arguments permanently (except as they were taken up briefly, brusquely, and in a highly distorted and hectoring fashion in Randian publications).

The philosophical rationale for keeping Rand cultists in blissful ignorance was the Randian theory of "not giving your sanction to the Enemy." Reading the Enemy (which, with a few carefully selected exceptions, meant all non- or anti-Randians) meant "giving him your moral sanction," which was strictly forbidden as irrational. In a few selected cases, limited exceptions were made for leading cult members who could prove that they had to read certain Enemy works in order to refute them. This book-banning reached its apogee after the titanic Rand-Branden split in late 1968, a split which was the moral equivalent in miniature of, say, a split between Marx and Lenin, or between Jesus and St. Paul. In a development eerily reminiscent of the organized hatred directed against the arch-heretic Emanuel Goldstein in Orwell's 1984, Rand cultists were required to sign a loyalty oath to Rand; essential to the loyalty oath was a declaration that the signer would henceforth never read any future works of the apostate and arch-heretic Branden. After the split, any Rand cultist seen carrying a book or writing by Branden was promptly excommunicated. Close relatives of Branden were expected to – and did – break with him completely.

Interestingly enough for a movement which proclaimed its devotion to the individual exertion of reason, to curiosity, and to the question "Why?" cultists were required to swear their unquestioning belief that Rand was right and Branden wrong, even though they were not permitted to learn the facts behind the split. In fact, the mere failure to take a stand, the mere attempt to find the facts, or the statement that one could not take a stand on such a grave matter without knowledge of the facts was sufficient for instant expulsion. For such an attitude was conclusive proof of the defective "loyalty" of the disciple to his guru, Ayn Rand.

Steel-Hardened Cadre Man

Frank Meyer writes, in his The Moulding of Communists,² of the series of crises that Communists repeatedly go through in their career in the Party. From his account, it is clear that the rank-and-file member joins the party from being attracted to the official or exoteric creed; but, as he continues in the Party and rises through its hierarchical structures, he is confronted with a series of crises that test his mettle, that either drive him out of the party or convert him increasingly into a steel-hardened cadre man. The crises might be ideological, say, justifying slave labor camps or the Stalin-Hitler pact, or it might be personal, to demonstrate that one's loyalty to the party is higher than to friends, family, or loved ones. The continuing pressure of such crises leads, unsurprisingly, to a very high turnover in Communist ranks, creating a sea of ex-Communists far larger than the party itself at any given time.

A similar but far more intensive process remained at work throughout the years of the Randian movement The Randian neophyte typically joined the movement emotionally caught by Atlas and impressed by the concepts of reason, liberty, individuality, and independence. A series of crises and growing inner contradictions was then necessary to gain power over the minds and lives of the membership, and to inculcate absolute loyalty to Rand, both in ideological matters and in personal lives. But what mechanisms did the cult leaders use to develop such blind loyalty?

One method, as we have seen, was to keep the members in ignorance. Another was to insure that every spoken and written word of the Randian member was not only correct in content but also in form, for any slight nuance or difference in wording could and would be attacked for deviating from the Randian position. Thus, just as the Marxist movements developed jargon and slogans which were clung to for fear of uttering incorrect deviations, the same was true in the Randian movement. In the name of "precision of language," in short, nuance and even synonyms were in effect prohibited.

Another method was to keep the members, as far as possible, in a state of fevered emotion through continual re-readings of Atlas. Shortly after Atlas was published, one high-ranking cult leader chided me for only having read Atlas once. "It's about time for you to start reading it again," he admonished. "I have already read Atlas thirty-five times."

The rereading of Atlas was also important to the cult because the wooden, posturing, and one-dimensional heroes and heroines were explicitly supposed to serve as role models for every Randian. Just as every Christian is supposed to aim at the imitation of Christ in his own daily life, so every Randian was supposed to aim at the imitation of John Galt (Rand's hero of heroes in Atlas.) He was always supposed to ask himself in every situation "What would John Galt have done?" When we remind ourselves that Jesus, after all, was an actual historical figure whereas Galt was not, the bizarrerie of this injunction can be readily grasped. (Although from the awed way Randians spoke of John Galt, one often got the impression that, for them, the line between fiction and reality was very thin indeed.)

Her Bible

The Biblical nature of Atlas for many Randians is illustrated by the wedding of a Randian couple that took place in New York. At the ceremony, the couple pledged their joint devotion and fealty to Ayn Rand, and then supplemented it by opening Atlas – perhaps at random – to read aloud a passage from the sacred text.

Wit and humor, as might be gathered from this incident, were verboten in the Randian movement. The philosophical rationale was that humor demonstrates that one "is not serious about one's values." The actual reason, of course, is that no cult can withstand the piercing and sobering effect, the sane perspective, provided by humor. One was permitted to sneer at one's enemies, but that was the only humor allowed, if humor that be.

Personal enjoyment, indeed, was also frowned upon in the movement and denounced as hedonistic "whim-worship." In particular, nothing could be enjoyed for its own sake – every activity had to serve some indirect, "rational" function. Thus, food was not to be savored, but only eaten joylessly as a necessary means of one's survival; sex was not to be enjoyed for its own sake, but only to be engaged in grimly as a reflection and reaffirmation of one's "highest values"; painting or movies only to be enjoyed if one could find "rational values" in doing so. All of these values were not simply to be discovered quietly by each person – the heresy of "subjectivism" – but had to be proven to the rest of the cult. In practice, as will be seen further below, the only safe aesthetic or romantic "values" or objects for the member were those explicitly sanctioned by Ayn Rand or other top disciples.

As in the case of all cults and sects, a particularly vital method for moulding the members and keeping them in line was maintaining their constant and unrelenting activity within the movement. Frank Meyer relates that Communists preserve their members from the dangerous practice of thinking on their own by keeping them in constant activity together with other Communists. He notes that, of the major Communist defectors in the United States, almost all defected only after a period of enforced isolation. In short, they had room to think for themselves (e.g. ,being in the army, going underground, etc.). In the case of Randians – particularly in New York City, where the movement was largest and Rand and the top hierarchy all lived – activity was continuous. Every night one of the top Randians lectured to different members expounding various aspects of the "party line": on basics, on psychology, fiction, sex, thinking, art, economics, or philosophy. (This structure reflected the vision of Utopia outlined in Atlas Shrugged itself, where every evening was spent with the heroes and heroines lecturing to each other.)

Failure to attend these lectures was a matter of serious concern in the movement. The philosophical rationale for the pressure to attend these meetings went as follows:

1. Randians are the most rational people one could possibly meet (a conclusion derived from the thesis that Randianism was rationality in theory and in practice);
2. You, of course, want to be rational (and if you didn't, you were in grave trouble in the movement);
3. Ergo, you should be eager to spend all your time with fellow Randians and a fortiori with Rand and her top disciples if possible.

The logic seemed impeccable, but what if, as so often happens, one didn't like, even couldn't stand, these people? Under Randian theory, emotions are always the consequence of ideas, and incorrect emotions the consequence of wrong ideas, so that therefore, personal dislike of other (and especially of leading) Randians must be due to a grave canker of irrationality which either had to be kept concealed or else confessed to the leaders. Any such confession meant a harrowing process of ideological and psychological purification, supposedly ending in one's success at achieving rationality, independence, and self-esteem and therefore an unquestioning and blind devotion to Ayn Rand.

One incident of suppressed doubt of Randian tenets is revealing of the psychology of even the leading cult members. One top young Randian, a veteran of the movement in New York City, admitted privately one day that he had grave doubts on a key Randian philosophic tenet: I believe it was the fact of his own existence. He was deathly afraid to ask the question, it being so basic that he knew he would be excommunicated on the spot for simply raising the point; but he had complete faith that if Rand should be asked the question, she would answer it satisfactorily and resolve his doubts. And so he waited, year after year, hoping against hope that someone would ask the question, be expelled, but that his own doubts would then be resolved in the process.

In the manner of many cults, loyalty to the guru had to supersede loyalty to family and friends – typically the first personal crises for the fledgling Randian. If non-Randian family and friends persisted in their heresies even after being hectored at some length by the young neophyte, they were then considered to be irrational and part of the Enemy and had to be abandoned. The same was true of spouses; many marriages were broken up by the cult leadership who sternly informed either the wife or the husband that their spouses were not sufficiently Randworthy. Indeed, since emotions resulted only from premises, and since the leaders' premises were by definition supremely rational, that top leadership presumed to try to match and unmatch couples. As one of them asserted one day: "I know all the rational young men and women in New York and I can match them up." But suppose that Mr. A was matched with Miss B and one of them didn't like the other? Well, once again, "reason" prevailed: the dislike was irrational, requiring intensive psychotherapeutic investigation to purge oneself of the erroneous ideas.

Psychological Hold

The psychological hold that the cult held on the members may be illustrated by the case of one girl, a certified top Randian, who experienced the misfortune of falling in love with an unworthy non-Randian. The leadership told the girl that if she persisted in her desire to marry the man, she would be instantly excommunicated. She did so nevertheless, and was promptly expelled. And yet, a year or so later, she told a friend that the Randians had been right, that she had indeed sinned and that they should have expelled her as unworthy of being a rational Randian.

But the most important sanction for the enforcement of loyalty and obedience, the most important instrument for psychological control of the members, was the development and practice of Objectivist Psychotherapy. In effect, this psychological theory held that since emotion always stems from incorrect ideas, that therefore all neurosis did so as well; and hence, the cure for that neurosis is to discover and purge oneself of those incorrect ideas and values. And since Randian ideas were all correct and all deviation therefore incorrect, Objectivist Psychotherapy consisted of (a) inculcating everyone with Randian theory – except now in a supposedly psycho-therapeutic setting; and (b) searching for the hidden deviation from Randian theory responsible for the neurosis and purging it by correcting the deviation.

It is clear that, considering the emotional and psychological power of the psychotherapeutic experience, the Rand cult had in its hands a powerful weapon for reinforcing and sanctioning the moulding of the New Randian Man. Philosophy and psychology, explicit doctrine, social pressure, and therapeutic pressure, all reinforced each other to generate obedient and loyal acolytes of Ayn Rand.

It is no wonder that the enormous psychological pressure of cult membership led to an extremely high turnover in the Randian movement, relatively far more so than among the Communists. But so long as he was in the movement, a new Randian Man emerged, a grim and joyless figure indeed. For a while the Randians would discourse at length on "happiness," and on the alleged fact of their perpetual state of being happy, it became clear on closer examination that they were happy only by definition. That in short, in Randian theory, happiness refers not at all to the ordinary language meaning of subjective states of contentment or joy, but to the alleged fact of using one's mind to the fullest (i.e., in agreement with Randian precepts).

In practice, however, the dominant subjective emotions of the Randian cultist were fear and even terror: fear of displeasing Rand or her leading disciples; fear of using an incorrect word or nuance that would get the member into trouble; fear of being found out in the "irrationality" of some ideological or personal deviation; fear, even, of smiling at an unworthy (i.e., non-Randian) person. Such fear was greater than that of a Communist member, because the Randian had far less leeway for ideological or personal deviation. Furthermore, since Rand had an absolute and total line on every conceivable question of ideology and daily life, all aspects of such life had to be searched – by oneself and by others – for suspicious heresies and deviations. Everything was the object of fear and suspicion. There was the fear of making an independent judgment, for suppose that the member was to make a statement on some subject on which he did not know Rand's position, and then were to find out that Rand disagreed. The Randian would then be in grave trouble, even if the only problem were that his language was a bit differently nuanced. So it was far more prudent to keep silent and then check with headquarters for the precisely correct line.

Check With Headquarters

Thus, one time a leading Randian attorney was giving a speech on Randian political theory. During the question period, he was caught short by being asked how he could reconcile Rand's support for the compulsory subpoena power with the Randian political axiom of non-initiation of force. He hemmed and hawed, and then said that he had to think about this – a code phrase for hurriedly checking with Rand and the other leaders on the proper answer.

Part of the continuing need to check with headquarters came from the fact that Rand, though considered infallible by her disciples, changed her mind a great deal, particularly on concrete personalities or institutions. The fundamental line change on Branden is a glaring example, as well as the line change on other formerly high-ranking Randians who were expelled from the movement. But far more frequent if less important were changes of position on show business folk whom Rand might have met. Thus, the "line" on such people as Johnny Carson or Mike Wallace (prominent TV personalities) changed rapidly – largely because of Rand's discovering various heresies and alleged betrayals on their part. If the Randian member was not attuned to these changes, and happened to aver that Carson was "rational" or had a benevolent "sense of life" when he had already been designated as irrational or malevolent, he was in for serious trouble and inquiry into the rationality of his own premises.

Driven by their conception of rational duty, every Randian lived in – and indeed was himself – a community of spies and informers, ready to ferret out and denounce any deviations from Randian doctrine. Thus, one time a Randian, walking with a girl friend, told her that he had attended a party at which several Randians had made an impromptu tape imitating the voices of the top Randian leaders. Stricken by this dire information and after spending a sleepless night, the girl rushed to inform the top leadership of this terrible transgression. Promptly, the leading participants were called on the carpet by their Objectivist Psychotherapist and bitterly denounced in their "therapy" sessions: "After all," said the therapist, "you wouldn't mock God." When the owner of the tape refused the therapist's demand to relinquish it so that it could be inspected in detail, his doom as a member of the movement was effectively sealed.

No Randian, even the top leadership, was exempt from the all-pervasive fear and repression. Every one of the original cadre, for example, was placed on probation at least once, and was forced to demonstrate his loyalty to Rand at length and in numerous ways. How such an atmosphere of fear and censorship crippled the productivity of Randian members may be seen by the fact that not one of the top Randians published any books while in the movement (all of Branden's books, for example, were published after his expulsion). The only exception that proves the rule was the authorized exercise in uncritical adulation, Who Is Ayn Rand? by Barbara Branden.

But if the Randian lived in a state of fear and awe of Rand and her leading disciples, there were psychological compensations; for he could also live in the exciting and comforting knowledge that he was one of a small number of the elect, that only the members of this small band were in tune with reason and reality. The rest of the world, even those who were seemingly intelligent, happy, and successful, were really living in limbo, cut off from reason and from understanding the nature of reality. They could not be happy because cult theory decreed that happiness can only be achieved by being a committed Randian; they couldn't even be intelligent, since how could seemingly intelligent people not be Randians, especially if they commit the gravest sin – failing to become Randians once they were exposed to this new gospel.

Excommunications and Purges

We have already mentioned the excommunications and "purges" in the Randian movement. Often, the excommunications – especially of important Randians – proceeded in a ritual manner. The errant member was peremptorily ordered to appear at a "trial" to hear charges against him. If he refused to appear – as he would if he had any shred of self-respect left – then the trial would continue in absentia, with all the members present taking turns in denouncing the expelled member, reading charges against him (again in a manner eerily reminiscent of 1984). When his inevitable conviction was sealed, someone – generally his closest friend – wrote the excommunicate, a bitter, febrile, and portentous letter, damning the apostate forevermore and excluding him forever from the Elysian fields of reason and reality. Having his closest friend take the leading part in the heresy proceeding was of course important as a way of forcing the friend to demonstrate his own loyalty to Rand, thereby clearing himself of any lingering taint by association. It is reported that when Branden was expelled, one of his closest former friends in New York sent him a letter proclaiming that the only moral thing he could do at that point was to commit suicide – a strange position for an allegedly pro-life, pro-individual-purpose philosophy to take.

The break with the apostate – even if once closest friends – had to be uncompromising, permanent, and total. Thus, a woman, very high in the Randian hierarchy, once hired a Randian girl to be her assistant in editing a magazine. When the woman was summarily expelled from the movement, her assistant refused to talk to her at all, except strictly in the line of business – a position steadfastly maintained despite the obvious tensions at the office that had to result.

As is true of all witch-hunting groups, the greatest sin was not so much the specific transgressions of the member, but any refusal to sanction the heresy-hunting procedure itself. Thus, Barbara Branden reported that her greatest sin was held to be her refusal to attend, and therefore to sanction the legitimacy of, her own trial, and other purgees have had similar tales to tell.

It should come as no surprise to learn that, in contrast to most other psychotherapies, the Objectivist Psychotherapists served as stern moral guardians for the troops. "Immoral" patients were expelled from therapy, a practice that reached its apogee when patients of Objectivist Psychotherapists were expelled for simply asking their therapists the reasons for the Rand-Branden split.

Thus, kept in ignorance of the world, of facts, ideas, or people who might deviate from the full Randian line, held in check by adoration and terror of Rand and her anointed hierarchy, the grim, robotic, joyless Randian Man emerged.

For the moulding processes of the cult did succeed in creating a New Randian Man – for so long as the man or woman remained in the movement. People were invariably transformed by the moulding process from diverse, often likeable men and women to grim, tense, hostile poseurs – whose personalities could best be summed up by the word "robotic." Robotically, the Randians intoned their slogans, generally imitating the poses and manner of Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, and further, imitating their common cult vision of heroes and heroines of the Randian fictional canon. If any criticism of Rand or her disciples were made, or any arguments were pressed that they could not answer, the Randians would adopt a tone of high offense: "How dare you say such a thing about her?," turn on their heels and stomp off. No smile, nor many other human qualities, managed to shine through their ritualized facade. Many of the young men managed to look like carbon copies of Branden, while the young women tried to look like Barbara Branden, replete with the cigarette-holder held aloft, derived from Ayn Rand herself, that was supposed to symbolize the high moral standards and the mocking contempt wielded by Randian heroines.

Son of Rand

Some Randians emulated their leader by changing their names from Russian or Jewish to a presumably harder, tougher, more heroic Anglo-Saxon. Branden himself changed his name from Blumenthal; it is perhaps not a coincidence, as Nora Ephron has pointed out, that if the letters of the new name are rearranged, they spell, B-E-N-R-A-N-D, Hebrew for "son of Rand." A Randian girl, with a Polish name beginning with "G-r," announced one day that she was changing her name the following week. When asked deadpan, by a humorous observer whether she was changing her name to "Grand," she replied, in all seriousness, that no she was changing it to "Grant" – presumably, as the observer later remarked, the "t" was her one gesture of independence.

If looking and talking and even being named like the top Randians was the most "rational" way to act, and seeing them as much as possible was the most rational form of activity, then surely residing as close as possible to the leaders was the rational place to live. Thus, the typical New York Randian, upon his or her conversion, would leave his parents and find an apartment as close to Rand's as possible. As a result, virtually the entire New York movement lived with a few square blocks of each other in Manhattan's East 30's, many of the leaders in the same apartment house as Rand's.

If continuing an intense psychological pressure was in part responsible for the extremely high turnover among Randian disciples, another reason for this turnover was the very fact that the movement had a rigid line on literally every subject, from aesthetics to history to epistemology. In the first place it meant that deviation from the correct line was all too easy: Preferring Bach, for example, to Rachmaninoff, subjected one to charges of believing in a "malevolent universe." lf not corrected by self-criticism and psychotherapeutic brainwashing, such deviation could well lead to ejection from the movement. Secondly, it is difficult to impose a rigid line on every area of life and thought when, as was the case with Rand and her top disciples, they were largely ignorant of these various disciplines. Rand admitted that reading was not her strong suit, and the disciples, of course, were not allowed to read the real world of heresies even if they had been inclined to do so. And so the young convert – and they were almost all young – began to buckle when he learned more about his own chosen subject. Thus, the historian, upon learning more his subject, could scarcely rest content with long outdated Burkhardtian clichés about the Renaissance, or the pap about the Founding Fathers. And if the disciple began to realize that Rand was wrong and oversimplified in his own field, it was easy for him to entertain fundamental doubts about her infallibility elsewhere.

Rational Tobacco

The all-encompassing nature of the Randian line may be illustrated by an incident that occurred to a friend of mine who once asked a leading Randian if he disagreed with the movement's position on any conceivable subject. After several minutes of hard thought, the Randian replied: "Well, I can't quite understand their position on smoking." Astonished that the Rand cult had any position on smoking, my friend pressed on: "They have a position on smoking? What is it?" The Randian replied that smoking, according to the cult, was a moral obligation. In my own experience, a top Randian once asked me rather sharply, "How is it that you don't smoke?" When I replied that I had discovered early that I was allergic to smoke, the Randian was mollified: "Oh, that's OK, then." The official justification for making smoking a moral obligation was a sentence in Atlas where the heroine refers to a lit cigarette as symbolizing a fire in the mind, the fire of creative ideas. (One would think that simply holding up a lit match could do just as readily for this symbolic function.) One suspects that the actual reason, as in so many other parts of Randian theory, from Rachmaninoff to Victor Hugo to tap dancing, was that Rand simply liked smoking and had the need to cast about for a philosophical system that would make her personal whims not only moral but also a moral obligation incumbent upon everyone who desires to be rational.

If the Rand line was totalitarian, encompassing all of one's life, then, even when all the general premises were agreed upon and Randians checked with headquarters to see who was In or Out, there was still need to have some "judicial" mechanism to resolve concrete issues and to make sure that every member toed the line on that question. No one was ever allowed to be neutral on any issue. The judicial mechanism to resolve such concrete disputes was, as usual in cults, the rank one enjoyed in the Randian hierarchy. By definition, so to speak, the higher-ranking Randian was right, the lower one wrong, and everyone accepted this Argument from Authority that might have seemed not exactly consonant with the explicit Randian devotion to Reason.

One amusing incident illustrates this decision-by-hierarchy. One day a dispute over concretes occurred between two certified and high-ranking Randians, both of whom had been dubbed as rational by their Objectivist Psychotherapist. Specifically, one was a secretary to the other. The secretary went to her boss and demanded a raise, which she rationally intuited was her just dessert. The boss, however, checking his own reason, decided that she was incompetent and fired her. Now here was a dispute, a conflict of interest, between two certified Randians. How were all the other members to decide who was right, and therefore rational, and who was wrong, irrational, and therefore subject to expulsion? In any truly rational group of people, of course, it would not be incumbent upon anyone but these – the only ones familiar with the facts of the case – to take any position at all. But that sort of benign neutrality is not permitted in any cult, including the Randian one. Given the need to impose a uniform line on everyone, the dispute was resolved in the only way possible: through rank in the hierarchy. The boss happened to be in the top rank of disciples; and since the secretary was on a lower rank, she not only suffered discharge from her job, but expulsion from the Randian movement as well.

The Pyramid

And the Randian movement was strictly hierarchical. At the top of the pyramid, of course, was Rand herself, the Ultimate Decider of all questions. Branden, her designated "intellectual heir," and the St. Paul of the movement, was Number 2. Third in rank was the top circle, the original disciples, those who had been converted before the publication of Atlas. Since they were converted by reading her previous novel, The Fountainhead, which had been published 1943, the top circle was designated in the movement as "the class of '43." But there was an unofficial designation that was far more revealing: "the senior collective." On the surface, this phrase was supposed to "underscore" the high individuality of each of the Randian members; in reality, however, there was an irony within the irony, since the Randian movement was indeed a "collective" in any genuine meaning of the term. Strengthening the ties within the senior collective was the fact that each and every one of them was related to each other, all being part of one Canadian Jewish family, relatives of either Nathan or Barbara Branden. There was, for example, Nathan's sister Elaine Kalberman; his brother-in-law, Harry Kalberman; his first cousin, Dr. Allan Blumenthal, who assumed the mantle of leading Objectivist Psychotherapist after Branden's expulsion; Barbara's first cousin, Leonard Piekoff; and Joan Mitchell, wife of Allan Blumenthal. Alan Greenspan's familial relation was more tenuous, being the former husband of Joan Mitchell. The only non-relative in the class of '43 was Mary Ann Rukovina, who made the top rank after being the college roommate of Joan Mitchell.

These were the disciples before the publication of Atlas. After that, Branden began his basic lecture series, which soon evolved into the Nathaniel Branden Institute, the organizational arm of the movement. Eventually, NBI was established in Rand's symbolically heroic Empire State Building, although it resided unheroically in the basement. In New York City, the various lectures and lecture series were put on in person; outside New York, each city or region had a designated NBI representative, who was in charge of putting on performances of the lectures on tape. The NBI rep was generally the most robotic and faithful Randian in his particular area, and so attempts were made, largely though not always totally successfully, to duplicate the atmosphere of awe and obedience pervading the mother section in New York. Determined efforts were made to translate Rand's mass readership of her best-selling works into faithful disciples who would first subscribe to The Objectivist, and then keep attending NBI taped lectures in their area, thus being inducted into the movement. If a flow of magazines, tapes, and recommended books went out from NBI to the rank-and-file members of the movement, a flow of money and volunteer labor inevitably traveled the reverse path, not excluding payments for psychotherapeutic services.

It has been evident throughout this paper that the structure and implicit creed, the actual functioning, of the Randian movement, was in striking and diametric opposition to the official, exoteric creed of individuality, independence, and everyone's acknowledging no authority but his own mind and reason. But we have not yet precisely focused upon the central axiom of the esoteric creed of the Randian movement, the implicit premise, the hidden agenda that insured and enforced the unquestioning loyalty of the disciples. That central axiom was the assertion the "Ayn Rand is the greatest person that has ever lived or ever shall live." If Ayn Rand is the greatest person of all time, it follows that she is right on every question, or at the very least, will far more likely be correct at any time than the mere disciple, who grants himself no such all-encompassing greatness.

Typical of this attitude was a meeting of leading young Randians attended by a friend of mine. The meeting turned into a series of testimonials, in which each person in turn testified to the overriding influence that Ayn Rand had been in his own life. As one of them explained: "Ayn Rand has brought to the world the knowledge that A is A, and that 2 and 2 equal 4." When a top Randian, on hearing that a notoriously refractory member who was in the process of leaving the movement had written a parody in the Randian philosophical manner, a "proof" that Ayn Rand was God, the Randian, in genuine puzzlement, asked: "He's kidding, isn't he?"

There was a generally consuming concern with greatness and rank among the Randians. It was universally agreed that Rand was the greatest person of all time. There was then a friendly dispute about the precise ranking of Branden among the all-time all-stars. Some maintained that Branden was the second greatest of all time; others that Branden tied for second in a dead heat with Aristotle. Such was the range of permitted disagreement within the Randian movement.

The adoption of the central axiom of Rand's greatness was made possible by Rand's undoubted personal charisma, a charisma buttressed by her air of unshakeable arrogance and self-assurance. It was a charisma and an arrogance that was partially emulated by her leading disciples. Since the rank-and-file disciple knew in his heart that he was not all-wise or totally self-assured, it became all too easy to subordinate his own will and intellect to that of Rand. Rand became the living embodiment of Reason and Reality and by some quality of personality Rand was able to bring about the mind-set in her disciples that their highest value was to earn her approval while the gravest sin was to incur her displeasure. The ardent belief in Rand's supreme originality was of course reinforced by the disciples' not having read (or been able to read) anyone whom they might have discovered had said the same things long before.

Ejection From Paradise

The Rand cult grew and flourished until the irrevocable split between the Greatest and the Second Greatest, until Satan was ejected from Paradise in the fall of 1968. The Rand-Branden split destroyed NBI, and with it the organized Randian movement. Rand has not displayed the ability or the desire to pick up the pieces and reconstitute an equivalent organization. The Objectivist fell back to The Ayn Rand Letter, and now that too has gone.

With the death of NBI, the Randian cultists were cast adrift, for the first time in a decade, to think for themselves. Generally, their personalities rebounded to their non-robotic, pre-Randian selves. But there were some unfortunate legacies of the cult. In the first place, there is the problem of what the Thomists call invincible ignorance. For many ex-cultists remain imbued with the Randian belief that every individual is armed with the means of spinning out all truths a priori from his own head – hence there is felt to be no need to learn the concrete facts about the real world, either about contemporary history or the laws of the social sciences. Armed with axiomatic first principles, many ex-Randians see no need of learning very much else. Furthermore, lingering Randian hubris imbues many ex-members with the idea that each one is able and qualified to spin out an entire philosophy of life and of the world a priori. Such aberrations as the "Students of Objectivism for Rational Bestiality" are not far from the bizarreries of many neo-Randian philosophies, preaching to a handful of zealous partisans. On the other hand, there is another understandable but unfortunate reaction. After many years of subjection to Randian dictates in the name of "reason," there is a tendency among some ex-cultists to bend the stick the other way, to reject reason or thinking altogether in the name of hedonistic sensation and caprice.

We conclude our analysis of the Rand cult with the observation that here was an extreme example of contradiction between the exoteric and the esoteric creed. That in the name of individuality, reason, and liberty, the Rand cult in effect preached something totally different. The Rand cult was concerned not with every man's individuality, but only with Rand's individuality, not with everyone's right reason but only with Rand's reason. The only individuality that flowered to the extent of blotting out all others, was Ayn Rand's herself; everyone else was to become a cipher subject to Rand's mind and will.

Nikolai Bukharin's famous denuciation of the Stalin cult, masked during the Russia of the 1930's as a critique of the Jesuit order, does not seem very overdrawn as a portrayal of the Randian reality:

It has been correctly said that there isn't a meanness in the world which would not find for itself and ideological justification. The king of the Jesuits, Loyola, developed a theory of subordination, of "cadaver discipline," every member of the order was supposed to obey his superior "like a corpse which could be turned in all directions, like a stick which follows every movement, like a ball of wax which could be changed and extended in all directions"... This corpse is characterized by three degrees of perfection: subordination by action, subordination of the will, subordination of the intellect. When the last degree is reached, when the man substitutes naked subordination for intellect, renouncing all his convictions, then you have a hundred percent Jesuit.³

It has been remarked that a curious contradiction existed with the strategic perspective of the Randian movement. For, on the one hand, disciples were not allowed to read or talk to other persons who might be quite close to them as libertarians or Objectivists. Within the broad rationalist or libertarian movement, the Randians took a 100% pure, ultra-sectarian stance. And yet, in the larger political world, the Randian strategy shifted drastically, and Rand and her disciples were willing to endorse and work with politicians who might only be one millimeter more conservative than their opponents. In the larger world, concern with purity or principles seemed to be totally abandoned. Hence, Rand's whole-hearted endorsement of Goldwater, Nixon, and Ford, and even of Senators Henry Jackson and Daniel P. Moynihan.

Neither Liberty Nor Reason

There seems to be only one way to resolve the contradiction in the Randian strategic outlook of extreme sectarianism within the libertarian movement, coupled with extreme opportunism, and willingness to coalesce with slightly more conservative heads of State, in the outside world. That resolution, confirmed by the remainder of our analysis of the cult, holds that the guiding spirit of the Randian movement was not individual liberty – as it seemed to many young members – but rather personal power for Ayn Rand and her leading disciples. For power within the movement could be secured by totalitarian isolation and control of the minds and lives of every member; but such tactics could scarcely work outside the movement, where power could only hopefully be achieved by cozying up the President and his inner circles of dominion.

Thus, power not liberty or reason, was the central thrust of the Randian movement. The major lesson of the history of the movement to libertarians is that It Can Happen Here, that libertarians, despite explicit devotion to reason and individuality, are not exempt from the mystical and totalitarian cultism that pervades other ideological as well as religious movements. Hopefully, libertarians, once bitten by the virus, may now prove immune.

Bibliographical Note

Of the several works on Randianism, only one has concentrated on the cult itself: Leslie Hanscom, "Born Eccentric," Newsweek (March 27, 1961), pp. 104–05. Hanscom brilliantly and wittily captured the spirit of the Rand cult from attending and reporting on one of the Branden lectures. Thus, Hanscom wrote:

After three hours of heroically rapt attention to Branden's droning delivery, the fans were rewarded by the personal apparition of Miss Rand herself – a lady with drilling black eyes and Russian accent who often wears a brooch in the shape of a dollar sign as her private icon....

"Her books," said one member of the congregation, "are so good that most people should not be allowed to read them. I used to want to lock up nine-tenths of the world in a cage, and after reading her books, I want to lock them all up." Later on, this same chap – a self-employed "investment counselor" of 22 – got a lash of his idol's logic full in the face. Submitting a question from the floor – a privilege open to paying students only – the budding Baruch revealed himself as a mere visitor. Miss Rand – a lady whose glare would wilt a cactus – bawled him out from the platform as a "cheap fraud." Other seekers of wisdom came off better. One worried disciple was told that it was permissible to celebrate Christmas and Easter so long as one rejected the religious significance (the topic of the night's lecture was the folly of faith). A housewife was assured that she needn't feel guilty about being a housewife so long as she chose the job for non-emotional reasons....

Although mysticism is one of the nastiest words in her political arsenal, there hasn't been a she-messiah since Aimee McPherson who can so hypnotize a live audience."⁴

At least as revelatory as Hanscom's article were the predictable howls of overkill outrage by the cult members. Thus, two weeks later, under the caption "Thugs and Hoodlums?", Newsweek printed excerpts from Randian letters sent in reaction to the article. One letter stated: "Your vicious, vile, and obscene tirade against Ayn Rand is a new low, even for you. To have sanctioned such a stream of abusive invective...is an act of unprecedented moral depravity. A magazine staffed with irresponsible hoodlums has no place in my home." Another man wrote that "one who has read the works of Miss Rand and proceeds to write an article of this caliber can only be motivated by villainy. It is the work of a literary thug." Another warned, "Since you propose to behave like cockroaches, be prepared to be treated as such." And finally, one Bonnie Benov revealed the inner axiom: "Ayn Rand is...the greatest individual that has ever lived." Having fun with the cult, Newsweek printed a particularly unprepossessing picture of Rand underneath the Benov letter, and captioned it: "Greatest Ever?"⁵

Notes

1. Alfred G. Meyer, Leninism (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962), pp. 97–98. A particularly vivid expression of this communist faith was put forward by Trotsky, in a speech at the 1924 Congress of the Soviet Communist Party:

Comrades, none of us wishes to be or can be right against the party. In the last instance the party is always right, because it is the only historic instrument which the working class possesses, for the solution of its fundamental tasks.... One can be right only with the party and through the party because history has not created any other way for realization of one's rightness.

In Isaac Duetscher, The Prophet Unarmed. (New York: Random House, 1965), p. 139.

On all this, see in particular Williamson M. Evers, "Lenin and His Critics on the Organizational Question," (unpublished MS.) pp. 15ff.

2. Frank S. Meyer, The Moulding of Communists: The Training of the Communist Cadre (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1961).

3. Nikolai Bukharin, Finance Capital in Papal Robes: A Challenge (New York: Friends of the Soviet Union, n.d.), pp. 10–11. Also see Evers, "Lenin and his Critics," p. 15.

4. Newsweek (March 27, 1961), p. 105.

5. Newsweek (April 10, 1961), pp. 9, 14.

Snapping

1995
Flo Conway and Joe Siegelman

IN ALL THE WORLD, there is nothing quite so impenetrable as a human mind snapped shut with bliss. No call to reason, no emotional appeal can get through its armor of self-proclaimed joy.

We talked with dozens of individuals in this state of mind: cult members, group therapy graduates, born-again Christians, some Transcendental Meditators. After a while, it seemed very much like dancing to a broken record. We would ask a question, and the individual would spin round and round in a circle of dogma. If we tried to interrupt, he or she would simply pick right up again or go back to the beginning and start over.

Soon we began to realize that what we were watching went much deeper. These people were not simply incapable of carrying on a genuine conversation, they were completely mired in their unthinking, unfeeling, uncomprehending states. Whether cloistered in cults or passing blindly through the world, they were impervious to the pain of parents, spouses, friends and lovers. How do you reach such people? Can they be made to think and feel again? Is there any way to reunite them with their former personalities and the world around them?

A man named Ted Patrick developed the first remedy. A controversial figure dubbed by the cult world Black Lightning, Patrick was the first to point out publicly what the cults were doing to America's youth. He investigated the ploys by which many converts were ensnared and delved into the methods many cults used to manipulate the mind.

He was also the first to take action. In the early seventies, Patrick began a one-man campaign against the cults. His fight started in Southern California, on the Pacific beaches where, in the beginning, organizations such as the Hare Krishna and the Children of God recruited among the vacationing students and carefree dropouts who covered the sands in summer and roamed the bustling beach communities year round. The Children of God approached Patrick's son there one day and nearly made off with him. Patrick investigated, was horrified at what he found, and immediately set out on a course of direct action. His first-hand experiences with cult techniques and their effects led him to develop an antidote he named "deprogramming," a remarkably simple and-when properly used-nearly foolproof process for helping cult members regain their freedom of thought.

Before long, Ted Patrick was in action all over the country on behalf of desperate parents. Through the seventies, he made front page headlines in the east for his daring daylight kidnappings of Ivy League cult members. He made network news for his interstate car chases in the Pacific Northwest to elude both cult leaders and state troopers. And eventually he made American legal history. In his ultimate defense of the U.S. Constitution, Patrick challenged the confusion of First Amendment rights surrounding the cult controversy and drew an important distinction between Americans' guaranteed national freedoms of speech and religion and their more fundamental human right to freedom of thought. In precedent-setting cases, U.S. courts confirmed Patrick's argument that, by "artful and deceiving" means, the new cults were in fact robbing people of their natural capacity to think and choose. To that time, it was never considered possible that a human being could be stripped of this basic endowment.

In many courtrooms, however, Ted Patrick lost his case for freedom of thought, gathering a stack of convictions for kidnapping and unlawful detention. In unsuccessful attempts to free cult members from their invisible prisons, Patrick was repeatedly thrown into real ones, in New York, California and Colorado. In July 1976, during a time when Americans were celebrating their two hundredth year of freedom, Patrick was sentenced to serve a year in prison for a cult kidnapping he did not in fact perform.

Patrick confirmed our own perspective when he described the method of control used by many cults, beginning with the moment the recruiter hooks his listener.

"They have the ability to come up to you and talk about anything they feel you're interested in, anything," he said. "Their technique is to get your attention, then your trust. The minute they get your trust, just like that they can put you in the cult."

It was in 1971 that Patrick infiltrated the Children of God, the cult that had tried to recruit his son, Michael, one Fourth of July on Mission Beach in San Diego. His initial concern over the cults was personal but it also had a public side. Worried parents had already appealed to him for help in his official capacity as head community relations for California's San Diego and Imperial counties. Patrick had moved to the area years earlier and became active in local politics working against discrimination in employment. During the Watts riots is Los Angeles in 1965, he helped calm racial unrest in San Diego. His public service caught the attention of then California's Republican governor, Ronald Reagan, who appointed Patrick, an active Democrat, to the community relations post.

"Thinking to a cult member is like being stabbed in the heart with a dagger," said Patrick. "It's very painful because they've been told that the mind is Satan and thinking is the machinery of the Devil."

Having gained personal insight into the manner in which that machinery may be brought to a halt, Patrick developed his controversial deprogramming procedure, the essence of which, he explained, was simply to get the individual thinking again.

"When you deprogram people," he emphasized, "you force them to think. The only thing I do is shoot them challenging questions. I hit them with things that they haven't been programmed to respond to. I know what the cults do and how they do it, so I shoot them the right questions; and they get frustrated when they can't answer. They think they have the answer, they've been given answers to everything. But I keep them off balance and this forces them to begin questioning, to open their minds. When the mind gets to a certain point, they can see through all the lies that they've been programmed to believe. They realize that they've been duped and they come out of it. Their minds start working again."

That, according to Patrick, was all there was to deprogramming. Yet since Patrick began deprogramming cult members, both the man and his procedure had taken on monstrous proportions in the public eye. Patrick's legendary kidnappings, a tactic he employed only as a last resort, often brought him into physical confrontation with cult members who had been warned that Black Lightning was an agent of Satan who would subject them to unimaginable tortures to get them to renounce their beliefs. Cult members who managed to escape their parents and Patrick before being deprogrammed frequently ran to the media with horror stories about the procedure. One young woman charged on national television that Patrick had ripped her clothes off and chased her nude body across the neighbors' lawns. Other active cult members claimed to have been brutally beaten by Patrick, yet no parent, ex-cult member or other reliable witness we talked to ever substantiated any of those charges. In truth, Patrick told us, and others later confirmed, many of the distortions that had been disseminated about deprogramming were part of a coordinated campaign by several cults to discredit his methods. In the end, he said, the propaganda only worked to his advantage.

"The cults tell them that I rape the women and beat them. They say I lock them in closets and stuff bones done their throats." Patrick laughed. "What they don't know is that they're making my job easier. They come in here frightened to death of me, and then because of all the stuff they've been told, I can just sit there and look at them and I'll deprogram them just like that. They'll be thinking, What the hell is he going to do now? They're waiting for me to slap them or beat them and already their minds are working."

In the beginning, Patrick admitted, he developed his method by trial and error, attempting to reason with cult members and learning each cult's rituals and beliefs until he cracked the code. Refining his procedure with each case, he came to understand exactly what was needed to pierce the cult's mental shield. Like a diamond cutter, he probed with his questions the rough surface of speech and behavior until he found the key point of contention at the center of each cult member's encapsulated beliefs. Once he found that point, Patrick hit it head on, until the entire programmed state of mind gave way, revealing the cult member's original identity and true personality that had become trapped inside.

We asked him to describe a typical deprogramming from the beginning and, then, how he knew when a person had been deprogrammed, that is when he could say for sure that he had done his job.

"The first time I lay eyes on a person," he said, staring at us intently, "I can tell if his mind is working or not. Then, as I begin to question him, I can determine exactly how he has been programmed. From then on, it's all a matter of language. It's talking and knowing what to talk about. I start moving his mind, slowly, pushing it with questions, and I watch every move that mind makes. I know everything it is going to do, and when I hit on that one certain point that strikes home, I push it. I stay with that questionwhether it's about God, the Devil or that person's having rejected his parents. I keep pushing and pushing. I don't let him get around it with the lies he's been told. Then there'll be a minute, a second, when the mind snaps, when the person realizes he's been lied to by the cult and he just snaps out of it. It's like turning on the light in a dark room. They're in an almost unconscious state of mind, and then I switch the mind from unconsciousness to consciousness and it snaps, just like that."

It was Patrick's term this time - we hadn't said the word for what happens in deprogramming. And in almost every case, according to Patrick, it came about just that suddenly. When deprogramming has been accomplished, the cult member's appearance undergoes a sharp, drastic change. He comes out of his trancelike state and his ability to think for himself is restored.

"It's like seeing a person change from a werewolf into a man," said Patrick. "It's a beautiful thing. The whole personality changes, the eyes, the voice. Where they had hate and a blank expression, you can see feeling again."

Snapping, a word Ted Patrick used often, is a phenomenon that appears to have extreme moments at both ends. A moment of sudden, intense change may occur when a person enters a cult, during lectures, rituals and physical ordeals. Another change may take place with equal, or even greater, abruptness when the subject is deprogrammed and made to think again. Once this breakthrough is achieved, however, the person is not just "snapped out" and home free. Deprogramming always requires a period of rehabilitation to counteract an interim condition Patrick called "floating". Patrick told us, he recommended that his subjects return to everyday life and normal social relationships as quickly as possible. In that environment, the individual, must then actively work to rebuild the fundamental capacities of thought and feeling that have been systematically destroyed.

"Deprogramming is like taking a car out of the garage that hasn't been driven for a year," he said. "The battery has gone down, and in order to start it up you've got to put jumper cables on it. It will go dead again. So you keep the motor running until it builds up its own power. This is what rehabilitation is. Once we get the mind working, we keep it working long enough so that the person gets in the habit of thinking and making decisions again."

Deprogramming added a whole new dimension to the already complex mystery of snapping. In one sense, deprogramming confirms that some drastic change takes place in the workings of the mind in the course of a cult member's experience, for only through deprogramming does it become apparent to everyone, including the cult member, that his actions, expressions and even his physical appearance have not been under his own control. In another sense, deprogramming is itself a form of sudden personality change. Because it appears to be a genuinely broadening, expanding personal change, it would seem to bear closer resemblance to a true moment of enlightenment, to the natural process of personal growth and newfound awareness and understanding, than to the narrowing changes brought about by cult rituals and artificially induced group ordeals.

What is it like to experience the sudden snap of a deprogramming? As a result of Ted Patrick's efforts, and others, there are now thousands of answers to the question. Patrick claims to have personally deprogrammed more than two thousand cult members; thousands more have been deprogrammed by other deprogrammers and professional "exit counselors" who have since entered this fledgling field. In our first round of cross-country travels, we spoke with dozens of ex-cult members, many of whom had been deprogrammed by Patrick. As far as we could see, his clients showed no scars, either physical of mental, from their deprogramming experience. Most seemed to be healthy, happy, fully rehabilitated and completely free of the effects of cult life.

In contrast to the many tales of cult conversion that we heard, which after a while began to sound virtually identical, each story of a Patrick deprogramming was its own spellbinding adventure, rich with intrigue and planned in minute detail. The first step in the process was almost always to remove the member from the cult, which might be accomplished by abduction, legal custodianship or, as Patrick seemed to prefer, simply a clever subterfuge.

One puzzle of snapping that the deprogramming process illuminates is the enormous amount of mental activity that takes place in the unthinking, unfeeling state many cult members are drawn into. Ironically, most people we spoke with fought desperately to preserve their blissed-out states, although they often were saturated with fear, guilt, hatred and exhaustion. In the beginning this seemed to present a disturbing contradiction: How could an individual whose mind has apparently been shut off, who has been robbed of his freedom of thought, display such cunning and initiative? What the deprogramming process demonstrated is that cult members do not simply snap from a normal conscious state into one of complete unconsciousness (and vice versa during deprogramming). Rather, most pass from one frame of waking awareness into a second, entirely separate, frame of awareness in which they may be equally active and perceptive.

We talked with an ex-member of the Church of Scientology, one of the oldest and cagiest of America's cults, who took steps to preserve his cult frame of mind during his deprogramming, until Patrick's adept conversational skills caught his attention and he snapped out.

"I tried to pretend that I was listening," this former Scientologist told us, "but I also tried to stay spaced out and not really pay attention. Occasionally, something would go pop and I would suddenly be listening to him. From his continuously talking like that, he just snapped me out of the spaced-out state I was in. All of a sudden I felt a little flushed. I could feel the blood rushing through my face."

Through two decades of legal battles and repeated periods of imprisonment and probation, few people spoke up in defense of Ted Patrick or the pioneering work he was doing, ultimately, at his own great personal and financial expense. No mainstream mental health organization or established social institution has yet taken a stand on behalf of his concept of freedom of thought. Part of the problem, especially in those years, was attributed to Patrick's manner of action. In his single-minded focus on rescuing cult members, he minced no words and wasted little time on social niceties. As a result, he often irked and alienated those parents, clinicians and law enforcement officials who might otherwise be his natural allies.

Yet, regardless of his style, the grave questions Patrick first flamboyantly brought to public attention are not the ones we can choose to like or dislike - nor will they simply go away if we ignore them. Is an individual free to give up his freedom of thought? May a religion, popular therapy, political movement or any other enterprise systematically attack human thought and feeling in the name of God, the pursuit of happiness, personal growth or spiritual fulfillment? These are questions that Americans, perhaps more than others, are not prepared to deal with, because they challenge long-standing constitutional principles and cultural assumptions about the nature of the mind, personality and human freedom itself.

In the months after our trip to the Orange county Jail we spoke with many people about Ted Patrick: parents, ex-cult members, attorneys, mental health professionals and others who, at the time, were only dimly aware of the building controversy over some alleged forms of religion in America. Some denounced him as a villain and a fascist, others hailed him as a folk hero and dark prophet of what lay ahead for America. Yet Patrick himself showed little concern for titles or media images.

Through the eighties, Black Lightning remained a lightning rod, a target for aggressive counterattacks and disinformation campaigns waged against deprogramming by major cults and more mainstream fundamentalist Christian sects. By the mid-nineties, he was widely presumed to be out of commission, but Patrick was still active, working mostly on voluntary deprogrammings and rehabilitation counseling. In the interim, swayed by a changing religious, political and social climate, courts across the country grew cold to deprogramming. Another pioneering deprogrammer, New York cult counselor and private detective Galen Kelly, was prosecuted on criminal charges in two separate cases but was convicted and spent more than a year in prison on the second before an appeals court overturned his conviction.

Those cases and others brought a global chill. In the new climate, judges were deaf to the pleas of the parents and families of cult members, and the precarious deprogramming profession was largely eclipsed by the efforts of the new generation of cult "exit counselors." Exit counselors we talked with, many of them one-time sect members themselves who had gone on to acquire clinical training and credentials, were testing a wide range of eclectic approaches, some more successful, some less so. Many were generalists, counseling cultists and families across America and, increasingly, in other countries. Some specialized in counseling ex-Moonies, members of Eastern cults, of controlling charismatic groups and extreme fundamentalist sects.

Most confirmed a pattern we, too, had noted: the new methods of voluntary deprogramming and exit counseling, while far less controversial and much safer from a legal standpoint, prompted fewer cult members to experience a sudden "snapping out" of their controlled states of mind. Instead, most experienced a slower process of emergence, or as Rick Ross, an exit counselor from Arizona, called it, a gradual "unfolding" from the cults' ingrained altered states. Afterwards, many required additional counseling, specialized rehabilitation and, for some, ongoing psychotherapy to recover their personalities and regain full control over their impaired powers of mind.

But, two decades later, public understanding and professional support were still in short supply.

from http://www.crl.com/~thelema/crowley.html:

Aleister Crowley (1875-1947)

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Edward Alexander (Aleister) Crowley [rhymes with "holy"] was born October 12, 1875 in Leamington Spa, England. His parents were members of the Plymouth Brethren, a strict fundamentalist Christian sect. As a result, Aleister grew up with a thorough biblical education and an equally thorough disdain of Christianity.

He attended Trinity College at Cambridge University, leaving just before completing his degree. Shortly thereafter he was introduced to George Cecil Jones, who was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The Golden Dawn was an occult society led by S.L. MacGregor Mathers which taught magick, qabalah, alchemy, tarot, astrology, and other hermetic subjects. It had many notable members (including A. E. Waite, Dion Fortune, and W. B. Yeats), and its influence on the development of modern western occultism was profound.

Crowley was initiated into the Golden Dawn in 1898, and proceeded to climb up rapidly through the grades. But in 1900 the order was shattered by schism, and Crowley left England to travel extensively throughout the East. There he learned and practiced the mental and physical disciplines of yoga, supplementing his knowledge of western-style ritual magick with the methods of Oriental mysticism.

In 1903, Crowley married Rose Kelly, and they went to Egypt on their honeymoon. After returning to Cairo in early 1904, Rose (who until this point had shown no interest or familiarity with the occult) began entering trance states and insisting to her husband that the god Horus was trying to contact him. As a test, Crowley took Rose to the Boulak Museum and asked her to point out Horus to him. She passed several well-known images of the god and led Aleister straight to a painted wooden funerary stele from the 26th dynasty, depicting Horus receiving a sacrifice from the deceased, a priest named Ankh-f-n-khonsu. Crowley was especially impressed by the fact that this piece was numbered 666 by the museum, a number with which he had identified since childhood.

The upshot was that he began to listen to Rose, and at her direction, on three successive days beginning April 8, 1904, he entered his chamber at noon and wrote down what he heard dictated from a shadowy presence behind him. The result was the three chapters of verse known as Liber AL vel Legis, or The Book of the Law. This book heralded the dawning of the new aeon of Horus, which would be governed by the Law of Thelema. "Thelema" is a Greek word meaning "will", and the Law of Thelema is often stated as: "Do what thou wilt". As the prophet of this new aeon, Crowley spent the rest of his life working to develop and establish Thelemic philosophy.

In 1906 Crowley rejoined George Cecil Jones in England, where they set about the task of creating a magical order to continue where the Golden Dawn had left off. They called this order the A.'. A.'. (Astrum Argentium or Silver Star), and it became the primary vehicle for the transmission of Crowley's mystical and magical training system based on the principles of Thelema.

Then in 1910 Crowley was contacted by Theodore Reuss, the head of an organization based in Germany called the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.). This group of high-ranking Freemasons claimed to have discovered the supreme secret of practical magick, which was taught in its highest degrees. Apparently Crowley agreed, becoming a member of O.T.O. and eventually taking over as head of the order when Reuss suffered a stroke in 1921. Crowley reformulated the rites of the O.T.O. to conform them to the Law of Thelema, and vested the organization with its main purpose of establishing Thelema in the world. The order also became independent of Freemasonry (although still based on the same patterns) and opened its membership to women and men who were not masons.

Aleister Crowley died in Hastings, England on December 1, 1947. However, his legacy lives on in the Law of Thelema which he brought to mankind (along with dozens of books and writings on magick and other mystical subjects), and in the orders A.'. A.'. and O.T.O. which continue to advance the principles of Thelema to this day.

Love is the law, love under will.

excerpt from the web site of the Ordo Templi Orientis, from http://www.otohq.org/history.html:

[...]

In Ascona, Reuss held an "Anational Congress for Organising the Reconstruction of Society on Practical Cooperative [emphasis mine -AMPP Ed.] Lines" at Monte Verità from August 15-25, 1917. This Congress included readings of Crowley's poetry (on August 22) and a recitation of Crowley's Gnostic Mass (on August 24 -- for O.T.O. members only). The announcement for this congress stated: "There are two centres of the O.T.O., both in neutral countries, where enquiries can be lodged by those interested in the aim of this congress. One is at New York (U.S. of America), the other at Ascona (Italian Switzerland)." Crowley was living in New York at the time; so, evidently, he and Reuss were the only active National Heads of O.T.O. in 1917.

[...]

Also see the Manifesto of the O.T.O. by Aleister Crowley.

from The Walt Disney Company, from http://asp.disney.go.com/disneyworld/db/seetheworld/themeparks/facilities/attraction.asp?id=79&landid=8:

The ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter

Brace yourself for a sensory thrill hatched from the imaginations of Disney and the one and only George Lucas. An experiment goes dangerously awry when an Alien is accidentally teleported into the room, in the dark. So if you feel its hot breath on your neck, try not to make any sudden moves.

from the fan website of Londoner Chris Gibson, from http://www.mickey-mouse.com/wdwtomorrowland.htm:

[...]

The ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter - After you've seen the pre-show, you be led away to witness an amazing experiment. However, the experiment goes frighteningly wrong - it's something you'll never forget. Probably not suitable for real young children, or those who are lily-livered scaredy-cats. Be brave, get in line for Alien Encounter, you'll be talking about it for days!

[...]

from the Skeptics Society's Skeptic magazine hotline, 2000-Mar-15, via Ian Pitchford's Evolutionary Psychology Forum, 2000-Mar-16, by James Oberg, 2000-Mar-10:

Disney's Legendary 'Alien Encounters' Sneak TV Documentary Quotes

Several years ago, the Disney company aired a major one-hour television Special, with no advance notice, on stations in only 5 US cities. Thanks to a few viewers who were able to roll their vcrs and capture it, we have a record of the startling quotes and statements it contained.

In light of the current, purported 'rift' between Disney and NASA over the content of Disney's new film, "Mission To Mars", I thought it pertinent to revisit those quotes.

My thanks to my colleague Michael Lindemann of CNI News for his file containing the many arresting and downright shocking statements in that Disney special...which appears now, as it did then, to have been a definite probe to measure public reaction to news of the reality of visitation and interaction with various forms of non-human intelligent life.

Remember, the quotes you are about to read were delivered by Disney CEO Michael Eisner and program narrator Robert Urich with straight, matter-of-fact, totally serious cadence and inflection.

Script excerpts from "Alien Encounters From New Tomorrowland" All quotes were spoken by host/narrator Robert Urich unless otherwise noted.

INTRO sequence, over various UFO photos and film: "This is not swamp gas. It is not a flock of birds. This is an actual spacecraft from another world, piloted by alien intelligence, one sighting from tens of thousands made over the last fifty years on virtually every continent on the globe. Intelligent life from distant galaxies is now attempting to make open contact with the human race. And tonight, we'll show you the evidence."

Michael Eisner [standing in front of what looks like a military hangar, guarded by about a dozen heavily armed troops]: "Tonight we celebrate the New Tomorrowland at Walt Disney World in Florida with a television special that's out of this world. Hello, I'm Michael Eisner, head of the Walt Disney Company. At a top secret military installation somewhere in the United States, there are those who believe that the government is hiding the remains of an alien spacecraft that mysteriously crashed to earth. With more and more scientific evidence of alien encounters and UFO sightings, the idea of creatures from another planet might not be as far-fetched as we once thought. In fact, one of you out there could have the next alien encounter. Enjoy tonight's special. I'm going to walk over and see if I can sneak a peak. (soldiers raise weapons) Maybe not!"

Urich: "Scientific verification of extraterrestrial life forms routinel arriving on earth -- top secret reports from ongoing military investigations -- compelling home videos of alien craft captured within the last few months -- world figures who have gone public with their own extraterrestrial experiences -- the shocking history of government misinformation programs designed to prevent widespread panic -- and personal accounts of those who have been abducted and studied against their will...

"From beyond the boundaries of our perceptions, intelligent beings are beckoning mankind to join the galactic community. It's an invitation which is both wondrous and terrifying. This is the nature of alien encounters.

"Now as we approach the new millennium, mankind is in the midst of the most profound event in history -- actual contact with intelligent life from other planets. For nearly [fifty? -AMPP Ed.] years, officials have been documenting routine alien encounters here on earth, and thousands of people have seen or experienced this alien presence. Yet many others still refuse to acknowledge the obvious evidence all around them. What is it like to be confronted by a creature whose intelligence and skill is far beyond the comprehension of mankind? Would it be enlightening? Would it be an exercise in terror? Or perhaps both?

"At the Walt Disney World resort near Orlando, Florida, these concepts are brought to life as guests experience their own alien encounter, a sensory thriller from Disney and George Lukas. We'll give you a sneak preview later in the show. But first, we must prepare you for the future with some shocking insights from the recent past.

"Alien ships seem to arrive in waves, and if the last few years are any indication, planet Earth is experiencing a tsunami of sightings... In the last few months of 1994 and lately in 1995, Gulf Breeze, Florida has been ground zero for alien encounters. Especially during the day, extraterrestrial craft have become common ornaments in the uneasy skies....You would think these alien sightings would be front-page news. So why have they received almost no national attention? The answer is simple. For governments determined to maintain their authority, extraterrestrial contact is pure dynamite.

Kevin Randle: "There's beings from another planet. We don't know where they come from, we don't know what they're doing here. There's nothing we can do