Commercial Appeal

   "At the Celebration of Innovation, you'll find Fortune 500 business consultants, visionary artists, pioneering scientists, futuristic architects, psychologists studying hallucinogenic drugs, inspired musicians, clowns, and maybe some visitors from other planets and dimensions."

   So beckoned a brochure advertising a three-day "psychic fair" in downtown San Francisco in the fall of 1987, one of dozens of such New Age cosmic expos springing up with increasing regularity around the country these days.

   "Just walking in the door may change your life as you encounter the rich exhibit environment and more than 200 exhibit booths," the brochure tempted. "After sampling the ambiance, sit back and dine on some gourmet [vegetarian] food and drink. Then try spending an afternoon with medicine man Rolling Thunder or listen to Dr. NakaMats describe his 'seven pagoda' method of inventing, or trip out on Michael Pinder, founder of the Moody Blues."

   Science fiction, shamanism, synthesizer music, sacred architecture, megavitamins, spoon-bending engineers, and brain-stimulating devices — why bring these together under the New Age big top?

   "Creativity is what puts magic into life and enables us to evolve into higher levels of peace and health," answers Jim Swan, who directed the Celebration of Innovation and edits Shaman's Drum, a magazine that explores esoteric pathways

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to spiritual power. "This exposition will get your creative juices flowing and inspire the genius to come out in all of us."

   Four or five thousand souls — ranging from the committed to the curious — paid $10 for a one-day pass and $20 per workshop, to partake of this smorgasbord. And for a special $100 rate, there were a limited number of passes that included four workshops, entrance to the concourse all three days, a free bodywork session, preferred seating at the Saturday night concert — and a VIP badge.

   While many New Agers profess to eschew mainstream materialism, the movement itself strongly intersects with Madison Avenue merchandising and capitalistic commercialism. Perhaps it's simply a matter of taking advantage of the heady market for psychic goods and services that will naturally rise and fall with New Age faddishness.

   But there is, unmistakably, what TIME called "a slightly greedy tone" to the movement.1 More than a few ads that promise healing, growth, and transformation also appeal to the pocketbook: "How to use a green candle to gain money"; "The power of the pendulum can be in your hands"; "Make money doing what you love."

   Indeed, some New Age entrepreneurs are getting rich selling enlightenment. Author Gita Mehta calls it marketing "Karma Kola."

   J.Z. Knight, according to ABC TV's 20/20, can earn up to $200,000 in a single appearance channeling Ramtha, the controversial 35,000-year-old warrior. Her weekend retreats bring in $400 to $500 per person. Knight's Yelm, Washington, spread includes a $1.5 million brick mansion ("It isn't nearly as nice as the Pope's house," she explains); Arabian horse stables ("nicer than most homes") complete with crystal chandeliers; fancy clothes; and a late-model powder-blue Rolls Royce.2

   Shirley MacLaine, wealthy as a superstar well before her entrance into the world of New Age, charged 1,200 seekers $300 a head to attend a spirituality session in the ballroom of the New York Hilton Hotel. That was the going rate for a seventeen-city, sell-out national tour in 1987, calculated to garner $1.5 million for a 300-acre, state-of-the-art meditation retreat center MacLaine planned to build in Southern Colorado.

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   "I want to prove that spirituality is profitable," she said.3 "I've liked moderate success, but I've . . . not wanted gigantic success. I'm changing now. I want gigantic success," she told another interviewer.4

   MacLaine, and other New Agers interviewed for this book, defend the crossover from spiritualism to materialism as being a part of religion in general.

   "After all," demurred one practitioner, "look at television evangelists and their millions. And about those Tammy Faye Bakker dolls that sold for $650?"

   Beverly Hills shaman Lynn Andrews, author of bestselling wilderness adventure books telling of her fanciful searches for female consciousness (Medicine Woman, Flight of the Seventh Moon, Jaguar Woman, Star Woman, and Crystal Woman), connects spirituality with health and wealth, and unabashedly insists money is just a medium of exchange that should not be resisted.

   "We have chosen to be born into a world where we have to make money to survive," she says. "But there's no reason why we can't also be spiritual."5

   Or consider circuit speaker and former Religious Science minister Terry Cole-Whittaker. By the early 1980s she was out front with the lapel buttons that blurted: "Pro$perity — Your Divine Right!"

   Writer Carol McGraw notes that the enterprising often capitalize on the New Age message: "Madison Avenue sells everything from shoes to lottery tickets using New Age lingo. Neiman-Marcus is pushing fetish dolls described as 'representatives from another dimension.' A Club-Med ad features a student telling his yoga teacher that he is going on vacation: The ad concludes, 'Perfect climate for body and soul . . . but hurry — Nirvana won't wait.' Creator Lynn McGrath of N.W. Ayer Co. in New York got the concept from her yoga instructor."6

   Nowhere has the nearly unquenchable thirst for New Age knowledge and technologies been more apparent than in the book and tape industries.

   "It's a ripe time for books with a metaphysical view of everything from crystals and channeling to business, baby's future and AIDS," enthused David Tuller in Publishers Weekly, the trade magazine of the publishing industry.7

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Bantam Books, sensing the swelling tide as far back as 1980, was the first major publishing house to create a New Age book division and published such classics as The Way of the Shaman and The New Physics. Bantam also went out on the limb of what turned out to be a money tree by publishing MacLaine's mystic-journey books after another publisher turned them down. (Sales of Out on a Limb weren't hurt a bit by the inclusion of juicy details of MacLaine's torrid love affair with a heavily disguised member of British Parliament whom she called "Gerry.")

   Bestsellers like those of MacLaine, Knight, Marilyn Ferguson, and New Age physicist Fritjof Capra prime the pump for even wider interest in New Age titles. MacLaine's books alone had sold 8 million copies by the end of 1987 — an estimated gross of $40 million annually.

   Noted Bantam vice-president Stuart Applebaum: "Metaphysical books are "one of our strongest categories" and are "getting even stronger."

   Masterworks Publishers of Friday Harbor, Washington, must have known the strength of the market when it arranged for a special 2000-copy hardcover, limited "keepsake edition" of Genies Are Usually Green to be "elaborately presented, numbered and signed by J.Z. Knight" for $30 a copy.8

   The cover story of the January 1988 American Bookseller magazine, "Read the Signs of a New Age," described at length promotional and merchandising ideas for the burgeoning New Age book trade. Nationwide, at least 2,500 bookstores specialized in New Age books (twice the 1982 number); and 25,000 titles were in print, accounting for more than a billion dollars in sales in 1987 (up 30% over 1986), according to industry figures.

   By the end of 1987, most major publishers were getting in on the action. Harper & Row published a first-run of 40,000 copies of Channeling, the Intuitive Connection, by William H. Kautz, with a foreword by Kevin Ryerson, one of MacLaine's foremost channelers. Warner Books came out with State of Mind, the autobiography of J.Z. Knight. Nor was the greening of New Age lost on St. Martin's Press, which in late 1987 ran a healthy 250,000 first printing of Linda Goodman's Star Signs, her first book in ten years.

   As a promo flyer from Waldenbooks reminded, "Linda

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Goodman is, of course, the superstar astrologer who gave us the 7-million-copy bestseller Linda Goodman's Love Signs. In Star Signs, . . . Goodman covers virtually every facet of the New Age smorgasbord — from numerology and reincarnation to holistic healing, the power of sound, and ghosts and gurus. There's even an astrological guide to financial security. As for Linda Goodman, she divides her time between her homes in Colorado and California. And, for you astrology fans out there, she's an Aries."

   The buyer for Waldenbooks' metaphysical titles said that, following the MacLaine phenomenon, sales of New Age titles jumped from 25 to 900 a week. And B. Dalton Books reported a 95% increase in occult book sales during the week of MacLaine's "Out on a Limb" TV miniseries in January 1987.9

   Marcia Gervase Ingenito's National New Age Yellow Pages Directory debuted in 1987 as an annual sourcebook of publishers, goods, and services such as New Age artists, New Age dentists, New Age churches, New Age resorts, and even New Age subdivisions.

   Meanwhile, the occult bookshop, often ensconced in a seedy part of town, has gained prominence and respectability. One of the largest in California is the Bodhi Tree (named for the fabled spot of Buddha's enlightenment), which occupies a block of buildings housing a mind-boggling array of New Age literature and a clearinghouse-posting of seminars, lectures, and other events.

   Most mystic oriented bookstores have added sections for New Age music, tapes and videos, tarot cards, board games, incense, crystals, jewelry, and greeting cards.

   New Age books for children are increasingly popular. The Tao of Pooh, by Benjamin Hoff, was a featured cover-display item in the 1987 holiday catalog for Yes! Bookstore in Washington, D.C.

   Need a gift for Dad? Try The Tao Jones Averages: A Guide to Whole-Grained Investing by Bennett W. Goodspeed. It was out just in time for Black Monday on October 19, 1987!

   Who buys these books? asks religion-watcher and historian Martin Marty. "Clearly they are beamed at highly educated and well-off people, people who can afford $300 weekend

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seminars and complex equipment and expensive books; this is not a populist revolution."10

   And, of course, the large Christian book industry also sensed the trend and stepped up its output of counter-New Age literature.

Celestial Entertainment Unlimited

   New Age music has also turned up the volume at the cash registers. According to Publishers Weekly, the New Age music category is growing "at a rate even faster than printed and spoken materials, and a comprehensive listing of these recordings would simply overwhelm the [magazine] issue."11

   I was surprised to find a rack of New Age music tapes next to the cashier's counter at the local car wash. But what better time to listen to "Music for an Inner Journey" than while driving to work. Frazzled in freeway gridlock? Step "Through the Portals of Infinity," or try the "ambient psychoacoustics" of Thunder Storm." Or how about "Sailing," the sound of "splashing sea, gulls and creaking mast"?

   The Institute for Human Development in Ojai, California, added a line of subliminal tapes in 1987: "Our new Tropical Ocean format is the most relaxing, soothing ocean we've heard yet," burbled the Winter-Spring catalog.

   Pregnant women who want to prepare their unborn children for the outer world can turn to Prenatal U. of Hayward, California. This organization offers manuals and cassettes to guide parents-to-be through exercises said to stimulate and even educate the child while he/she attends "in utero university."12

   Effective Learning Systems of Edina, Minnesota, markets "The Love Tapes," touted to teach "how to use your mind to do anything you choose." Regular tapes cost $9.98; subliminals, $11.98.13 Sybervision of Newark, California, which advertises extensively in airline magazines and calls itself "the leader in personal achievement technology," markets audio and videocassettes on everything from excelling in sports, to weight control and self-discipline and self-defense, to language learning and successful parenting.

   Lectures and exercises for achieving altered states and,

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yes! — even channeled wisdom from Elvis Presley — abound on tapes and videocassettes. Popular video categories also include instruction on yoga and martial arts and "be-it-yourself" mediumship — although discerning metaphysical bookstore managers are cautious about the latter.

   "You have no idea how many channeling videos I refuse to carry," says Jamie Michaels of Bodhi Tree. "There are more channels in L.A. than there are TV sets."14

   Still, tens of thousands of Americans shell out from $10 to $300 an hour to seek counsel from channeled beings (including at least one dolphin); and profits from channeling tapes, seminars, and books range from an estimated $100 to $400 million annually.15

   New Age radio stations are proliferating, with most major U.S. cities offering round-the-clock "planetarium music," spinning off the popularity and profitability of New Age artists like Grammy Award-winning Andreas Vollenweider, the Swiss harpist.

   Mass entertainment shows strong penetration by the New Age. Films and television programs with occult and mystical themes have caught on well, as box-office receipts and Nielsen ratings attest.

   One of the most familiar, of course, is George Lucas's Star Wars, which tells of Luke Skywalker's initiation into a league of Jedi knights by mastering the " 'force' that animates the cosmos, dwells within, and is tapped intuitively through feelings . . . . Sights and sounds from the Star Wars trilogy are rattling around in the brains of millions of Americans," points out New Age researcher Robert J. Burrows.16

   Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones was such a smash hit that it called for a sequel. In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom the handsome hero combats a Tantric yoga sect for possession of a primeval talisman called a "shankara stone."

   The popular cycle of recent horror films, many of which contain occult and metaphysical themes, traces from The Exorcist in 1974 and The Omen, 1976. Other box-office favorites include An American Werewolf in London and The Amityville Horror.

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Product Profitability

   As we saw in the chapter on crystals and pyramids, these "energy fields" have become de rigueur talismans for New Agers, resulting in a bauble bonanza.

   New York-based Crystal Resources says Americans spend $100 million a year on crystals. Nationwide, prices can run from a couple dollars for a small slice to $150,000 for museum-quality crystals. That's as much as 1000% more than ten years ago.17

   But if New Age rocks are on a roll, pyramid power is exponential.

   At the Celebration of Innovation in San Francisco, Paradyne Systems of Laguna Beach offered a choice of five wire pyramids, all about a foot long at the base and slightly less in height. Curiously, the largest, the VITAMID, was the least expensive. For the $10 show's price ($11.95 regularly) the VITAMID was said to "generate the negative ion effect . . . . and extend the shelf-life of vitamins." Prices quickly escalated from the PYRADOME ($19) to the FIREDOME ($20), RAYDOME ($30) and POWERDOME, which was a show-time-only bargain at $99.95 (regularly $120). The POWERDOME was billed as being "omnidirectional" and "100 times higher than a normal pyramid" in power.

   Other benefits / selling points were listed above stacks of the wire POWERDOME triangles:

   In Van Nuys, California, Nick Cariglia has appointed his Rubicon Realty offices with crystals and pyramids to smooth transactions. He encourages clients to strike crystal Tibetan bowls to create calming tones and focus their energy as they approach the close of a deal. And he provides his brokers with subliminal audiotapes to inspire sales. Cariglia, who sets his net worth at $10 million, "has merged the two quintessentially

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Californian preoccupations of acquiring property and attaining enlightenment, and the marriage was worked," observed Steve Chawkins in the Los Angeles Times.18

   "It's not that unusual these days," remarked social psychologist Michael Ray, "to see enormously successful, hard-core corporate types doing biofeedback and using crystals."19

   Harvard Business School graduate Mason Sexton has 1,500 subscribers who pay $360 a year for his biweekly newsletter of stock market predictions, which are based on unorthodox and New Age concepts. Those who took his advice on October 2, 1987, were well-rewarded: Sexton warned investors that the stock market would peak later that month and that they should bail out.

   A significant number of stockbrokers consult astrology charts, and one investment banker with a $100,000-a-year salary talks about her previous life as a monk. Joe Sugarman, president of JS&A, a direct-mail marketing firm, says he profits from occult advice on negotiating deals, personnel decisions, and product promotion. And financial astrologer Arch Crawford, formerly an analyst for Merrill Lynch, charges $250 for a subscription (ten issues) of his newsletter; for an additional $2,500 a year, subscribers can phone the Wall Street psychic for advice anytime.

   Steep? Yes. But Timer Digest, which rates trade newsletters, ranked him the second most accurate forecaster of 1986.20

   For a mere $99.95, however, you can buy a computer software program called AstroTalk: "your own personal astrologer with daily forecasts, accurate horoscopes and pick-a-date features." Just phone your order to 1-800-PLANETS.21

   For half that price, The Mystic Trader in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, will sell you four tapes on "The Mastery of Money" by the catalog's creator, metaphysician Stuart Wilde. These "[p]ractical consciousness aligning techniques . . . will allow you to step effortlessly into abundance. While not judging others, you move to creating the wherewithal that you need to express the special individualized God Force that you are. You will begin to get the things in life that you have always wanted."22

   While some millionaire celebrities retain their own private

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gurus who make house calls, the travel industry, New Age style, will take you to Enlightenment — for a price.

   Wildland Journeys of Seattle (1-800-345-HIKE) features worldwide nature and cultural explorations supporting conservation and community development. Travelers can choose from Inca Trail Preservation, Himalayan Tree Planting, Ladakh Prayer Wheel Restoration, Costa Rica Cloud Forest Protection, or Kenya Wildlife Conservation.23

   Janie Gabbet, a writer for Reuters wire service agency, spied an ad that said, "This year, don't just take a vacation; take an adventure — a Shaman's Tour of Peru."

   "I said to myself, 'Goodbye Club Med, hello Peru.' I sent my money in," she reported.24

   Shamanistic journeys to Mexico and Guatemala are also available. Singing Pipe Woman of Springdale, Washington, offered a two-week pilgrimage ($2,450) in early 1988 that included studying with 108-year-old Huichol Indian shaman Don Jose Matsuwa and Bear Tribe teacher Sun Bear. According to the description, the tour explored the "sacred power" of ancient Mayan sites.

   A "mystical adventure to Egypt," presented by the Center of Applied Intuition and Quest Tours, runs a little more: $2,795 a person (in March 1988). Wilderness vision quests (limit ten people) offer transition experiences for a week in isolated places like Last Chance Range and Death Valley.

   Can't break away from home or job? Not to worry. "Spend a little time relaxing at Altered States and you'll swear you just returned from Maui," entices the Altered States' Float Center in West Hollywood, California. The brochure promises "an oasis of tranquility where, in the comfort of a flotation tank or using a device in our MindGym [trademarked], you'll discover your youthful energy. Your own Fountain of Youth!"

   And after you enjoy a sixty-minute vacation float, the MindGym allures with such cosmic contraptions as the hemisync (produces altered mental states through pulsing headset tones of different frequencies), the synchro-energizer (combines flickering lights, pulsating sounds, and vibrating electromagnetic impulses), the Graham Potentializer (a massage table that slowly rotates in a counterclockwise motion, and the mind mirror (a biofeedback device designed to reproduce a yogi's brain state).

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   But be warned: These are big-buck items! It takes $1,700 to "reduce your biological age" by sleeping in a magnetic cocoon, $5,795 for a flotation tank, $6,500 for an Alpha Chair," and $3,700 for the brain-sync machine, according to priced sampling at the Whole Life Expo in Los Angeles in the spring of 1988. Those with unlimited capital might go for the "crown jewel of mind-expansion technology" — the $65,000 "Brain-Mind Intensive Dome." A brochure tempts: "Imagine yourself revolving slowly on a platform inside a geodesic dome [surrounded by] 32 specially engineered speakers."

   "I did," reported Al Seckel of the Southern California Skeptics, "and the image of a baked potato turning slowly in the microwave popped into my head."25

   The list of New Age products is seemingly endless: Color, Sound and Fragrance kits; ChiPants, which feature a gusseted design to "free your crotch" for ease of movement in yoga and other therapies; the Crystal Flute, a "breakthrough . . . under $300" gadget to "empower your dreams and let them change you" by electrically amplifying the "thoughts you program into your quartz crystal."

   Alisha Summers of Angel Fantasy in Langley, Washington, has created special "fabric angel" costumes, presumably for women and girls, that Alisha describes as "a gateway to the Angelic Kingdom, the temple of the most high Goddess within your soul."

   But my favorite is Earthrise Spirulina, sold by "the leader in aquaherbals" in San Rafael, California. Spirulina "talks" to readers in Body Mind Spirit, America's largest-circulation (160,000) New Age magazine.

   I am the immortal descendant of the original photosynthetic life form. Over three billion years ago, blue-green algae produced the earth's oxygen atmosphere so life could evolve . . . . Your own technology and lifestyle threaten you. Pollution, toxic chemicals, radiation, disease, stress, drugs and processed foods attack your immune system. Damage to your body and its cells can cause premature aging and cancer . . .

But my whole food spirulina vitamins and minerals are easily absorbed . . . DNA molecular codes in natural foods contain genetic memories of successful life forms for millions of years. I have rejuvenated myself since the beginning. My three billion years of cell memories can help your body remember its

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powers and renew itself . . . I flourished in the nutrients of the original primordial soup . . .

   So, partake of my immortal body each day. Eat three billion years of cell memory and a concentration of protective nutrients. Renew your health, renew your connection with your sisters and brothers in the Third World, and with your origins of life.26

Quality Control

   Commenting on the "blatant commercialization" of the New Age movement, historian Christopher Lasch quotes the lament of San Francisco philosopher and theologian Jacob Needleman: "There's no Better Business Bureau" for spiritual shoppers. "Let the buyer beware."27

   Needleman's rule: You should be open-minded, but not so open-minded that your brains fall out.

   The New Age Journal, alarmed over the lack of quality control in the psychic supermarket, warned about a New Age version of the old-fashioned pyramid scheme disguised as a seminar in abundance. The Airplane Game, also known as the Infinity Process Seminar, works like a chain letter. And it has what Ravi Dykema called "a New Age veneer that does little to conceal the old-fashioned avarice that drives it."28

   The rules call for "realizing your unlimited possibilities for peace, joy, love and abundance on this planet." But at its peak, according to the New Age Journal and the Boston Globe, some two thousand players spent as much as $2 million to join a "plane" that needs fifteen persons to "take off."

   When the seats are filled, the pilot "pilots out" with the passengers' money and the plane divides, with each copilot in charge of a new plane and each passenger advancing to the rank of crew. The new pilot and crew seek fresh passengers who are told they, too, can pilot out if they have enough "positive energy, belief, cooperation and integrity."29 But winning gets tougher and tougher as more and more people must be persuaded to play in order to keep the game airborne.

   Responsible New Age leaders have warned that this is not the way to fly, adding that the scam tarnishes the nobler goals

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of the movement, such as personal and social transformation, justice, and global harmony.

   That focus on quality of life is apparent in what New Age architect Marilyn Ferguson calls "a new paradigm based on values." In her pace-setting opus, Aquarian Conspiracy, she writes that the shift is reflected "in changing patterns of work, career choice, consumption . . . evolving lifestyles that take advantage of synergy, sharing, barter cooperation, and creativity . . . the transformation of the workplace, in business, industry, professions, the arts, innovations in management and worker participation, including the decentralization of power . . . the rise of a new breed of entrepreneurs . . . the search for 'appropriate technology.' "30

   Ferguson believes this synergy has opened up new sources of goods and services, cooperatives, and mutual-help networks. These are, says she, "modern urban counterparts of quilting bees, barn-raisings, and farmers' co-ops."31

   One of the most visible manifestations of the synergy Ferguson is talking about is in Fairfield, Iowa. Here, the disciples of former Beatles' guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi have produced what Newsweek called "a white-collar boom-town . . . the karma of capitalism."32

   The Transcendental Meditation master, who planted his Maharishi International University in Fairfield, has preached that spiritual enlightenment is the key to corporate success. And by mid 1987, Fairfield was headquarters for nearly 300 disciple-owned businesses, including Fred Gratzon's Great Midwestern Ice Cream Co. (with sales of $3 million in 1986) and Lincoln Norton's Corporate Education Resources, leading maker of computer software for tracking the careers of executives.

   Some non-TM disciples have been coaxed by the town's success, and Iowa Governor Terry Branstad praised Fairfield's unorthodox entrepreneurialism as "an important part of the future of Iowa."

   Though bankruptcies and lawsuits have involved a few Sidha (TM) executives, personal income in the once economically depressed region rose 55% between 1980 and 1984. More than twenty meditators made fortunes, and Fairfield remained "bullish on the maharishi effect" — the TM belief that if enough meditators do their thing simultaneously, they

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create a powerful force that can accomplish anything from ushering in world peace to driving up the stock market.

   Businesspeople comprise the group most receptive to New Age transformation and human potentials techniques, believes Marilyn Ferguson. Top executives seem to have a gut knowledge of what's involved in transformation, she says, adding that an impact in the business sector "would seem to have a huge portent for the society as a whole."

   Speaking to an interviewer for New Age magazine, Ferguson declared:

   [W]hen businesspeople come in and start opening up to the process, there's nobody who changes faster, and I think there are several reasons for this. First of all, when you're dealing with top-level executives . . . these are people who have entrepreneurial minds, which means they are risk takers. Also, various studies have shown that business executives tend to be right-brained, or at least quite spontaneous, creative and intuitive in their thinking. And they are also extremely pragmatic: They're interested in anything that works.33

   One entrepreneur who has made New Age tech work big is Chris Majer, founder of a multi-million-dollar Seattle corporation called Sportsmind. And herein lies a tale of how the theology of "creating unlimited potential" is sweeping the management training ranks of corporate America.

Chapter 16  ||  Table of Contents

1. Otto Friedrich et al., "New Age Harmonies" (cover story), TIME, 7 December 1987, 62.

2. Katharine Lowry, "Channelers," OMNI (October 1987): 48.

3. Friedrich, "New Age Harmonies," 64.

4. Nina Easton, "Shirley MacLaine's Mysticism for the Masses," Los Angeles Times Magazine, 6 September 1987, 7.

5. Rose Marie Staubs, "Andrews's Sisters," OMNI (October 1987): 28.

6. Carol McGraw, "Seekers of Self Now Herald the New Age," Los Angeles Times, 17 February 1987, pt. 1, 3.

7. David Tuller, "New Age," Publishers Weekly, 25 September 1987, 29.

8. According to an advertisement in Life Times Magazine, no. 3, 28.

9. Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg and Edward Giltenan, "Mainstream Metaphysics," Forbes Magazine, 1 June 1987, 156.

10. Martin Marty, "An Old New Age in Publishing (Editorial)," Christian Century, 18 November 1987, 1019.

11. "New Age on Tape," Publishers Weekly, 25 September 1987, 65.

12. "A User's Manual to the Brain, Mind and Spirit," OMNI WholeMind Newsletter (October 1987): 127.

13. Advertisement in OMNI (October 1987): 165.

14. Tom Spain, "New Media for a New Age," Publishers Weekly, 25 September 1987, 61.

15. Lowry, "Channelers," 50.

16. Karen Hoyt et al., New Age Rage (Old Tappan, N.J.: Revell, 1987), 44.

17. McGraw, "Seekers of Self Now Herald the New Age," pt. 1, 3.

18. Steve Chawkins, "Pyramids and Crystals Take Real Estate Firm into 'New Age," Los Angeles Times [Valley ed.], 21 June 1987, pt. 2, 6.

19. Friedrich, "New Age Harmonies," 69.

20. Laura Torbet, "Wall Street Psychics," OMNI Wholemind Newsletter (October 1987): 131.

21. According to an advertisement in New Age Journal (November–December 1987): 91.

22. Mystic Trader (catalog), Spring 1987, 19.

23. According to an advertisement in Daybreak Magazine (Autumn 1987).

24. Janie Gabbet, "Not Just a Vacation," Life Times Magazine, no. 3, 51.

25. Pat Linse and Al Seckel, "A Garden of Cosmic Delights – The New Age Marketplace," LASER [Los Angeles Skeptics Evaluative Report] (Summer 1988): 3.

26. Advertisement in New Age Magazine (April 1988): 43.

27. Christopher Lasch, "Soul of a New Age," OMNI (October 1987): 79.

28. Ravi Dykema, "Flying for Dollars," New Age Journal (November–December 1987): 14.

29. Ibid.; Boston Globe, 31 August 1987.

30. Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy, Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s (Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, 1980), 324.

31. Ibid., 332.

32. Patricia King and Penelope Wang, "The Karma of Capitalism," Newsweek, 3 August 1987, 44.

33. Peggy Taylor, "Life at the Leading Edge: A New Age Interview with Marilyn Ferguson," New Age Magazine (August 1982): 34.

Chapter 16  ||  Table of Contents