Cautions and
Dangers
Jeremy Tarcher, head of a major New Age publishing house in Los Angeles, has roundly castigated the media for concentrating on the "carnival sideshow" of the New Age movement rather than the main events in the "big tent." Instead of the fringe stuff — by which he means reincarnation, extraterrestrial contact, crystals, psychic phenomena, channeling, and turning big bucks — Tarcher has pleaded for the press to zero in on the efforts toward personal and social transformation which he feels are the core of New Age.1
His point is not without merit. There is an "up" side to New Age that deserves attention and responsible treatment. We media types are prone to pick up on bizarre and anomalous ideas and behaviors because, as Tarcher correctly acknowledged, they make "good copy."
But there is also a dark side to New Age thinking and practice. This wide zone of twilight — in which weirdness, fakery, loose assumptions, and non sequiturs abound — quickly wedges into darkness. There the universal vision of the divine "Higher Self" fades and blurs into the void.
This descent into darkness can occur subtly, almost imperceptibly, as the helpful and creatively positive give way to the questionable, and the questionable yields to the fallacious, and the fallacious to the dangerous. This too is part of the New Age story. Discernment is essential.
Take the case of the Wellness Workbook, a practical "self-help"
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book about "creating vibrant health" and "alternatives to illness and burnout" that contains many sound principles and exercises that would benefit nearly everyone. The authors warn against destructive habits and analyze good nutrition; they tell the reader how to relax and how to breathe and sit properly. They present insights about dealing with anger and fear; emphasize the importance of play, laughter, and listening skills; discuss how to prevent burnout and, ultimately, prepare for death.
So far, so good. But by page 69, consider this advice on "making medicine": "Fill a glass or bottle with water and place it on a window sill of your house where it will receive the first rays of the rising sun. Before you retire for bed, sit with the water, telling it what you need for your increased health and well-being. In the morning, drink the whole glass. Believe it!"
Harmless, no doubt, although possibly misleading if substituted for needed medication. But notice the progression in the next "exercise," which is titled "baptize yourself."
"This is one of the most beautiful and effective ways of loving yourself. Compose a ceremony in which you use water to symbolically cleanse your body (or the body of a loved one), and your mind and soul from illness, darkness, 'sin,' and painful memories. Make it a beautiful occasion. Take a new or additional name to signify your new life. Be at peace."2
At this point in the book the line has been crossed from health to religion — the religion of self. The New Age universal Oneness assumption has been slipped into place. The individual's Higher Self is "God," so "God" is the agent as well as the recipient of the act. No omnipotent "Other," able to forgive sins, is needed.
This intrusion should be resisted regardless of one's personal religious views because it degrades and cheapens the sacrament of a major religion (Christianity) even as would a "private marriage." Christian baptism is a public, outward affirmation of commitment, the external and visible symbol of an inner reality of God's grace.
Later chapters in the book state a belief in reincarnation and suggest using pendulums, Ouija boards, and crystals for diagnosis or treatment of ailments — "obtain[ing] information directly from a deeper part of yourself that knows what's
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really true for you . . . If you believe laetrile (or a crystal pendulum, or whatever) will work, then it will . . . . And if it works, go ahead and use it!"3
Sound familiar? You create your own reality. You are "God."
New Age worldviews also underlie the "wellness index" used in the workbook to construct a personal "wellness wheel," or profile of health. In the section on "wellness and transcending," the reader is to answer questions that include, "I am aware of that part of me which is greater than my mind, body and emotions," and "I experience a merging of my consciousness with a larger sense of consciousness (universal mind)."
Straight New Age worldview!
To be sure, authors Regina Sara Ryan and John W. Travis post a disclaimer at the beginning of the transcendence section, conceding that it "goes beyond the scope of most generally accepted 'scientific' principles and expresses the values and beliefs of the authors." Readers are told that it's okay to skip over questions that strongly grate against their beliefs, but the wellness index scores are weighted in favor of New Age answers and against the responses of biblical theism.
Another testing instrument called MindMaker6 (a registered trademark) has been developed by Brain Technologies Corporation of Fort Collins, Colorado, to "track . . . the power and opportunities of your world view." The survey measures values and beliefs, and a profile is constructed in which the person tested falls into "systems" defined as kinsperson, loner, loyalist, achiever, involver, and choice seeker. According to David Horner, director of Christian Research Associates in Denver, the theist comes out a loyalist, while persons with a New Age worldview score highest in the choice-seeker category.
Gregg Piburn, public relations manager for the Loveland, Colorado, plant of giant Hewlett-Packard Company (82,000 employees in 78 countries), said personnel management groups within the firm use MindMaker6 "as a tool . . . to understand each other and become more effective and productive."4
Both Horner and Piburn expressed concern about an
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apparent "religious test" being used for company team building.
There truly is a danger if Eastern philosophical views of pantheism are part of a consulting firm's agenda to spread and foster the New Age vision. Worse, in some of the corporate management training programs that we looked at in chapter 16, there is an intent not to simply measure an individual's beliefs and values, but to restructure them. This is hardly "value neutral," as New Age consultants defend and advertise.
"Techniques that depend on protocols that command the learners to project themselves into some 'other' reality and then to experience themselves as being one with all things, including God, are hardly neutral," observed senior editor Ron Zemke in Training magazine. "They are certainly not neutral to Christians whose faith rests on the concept of God as an entity outside of themselves.
"In other words, there can be no such thing as a centered, self-hypnotizing, yoga-practicing meditator who is also a Bible-believing Christian. You're one or the other."5
Zemke, also critical of New Age techniques being "slipped" into training programs, makes the point that if New Age is based on respect for the rights and dignity of individuals, the right to be told the truth should be paramount.
Adds Richard Watring, the former personnel director for Budget Rent-a-Car Systems in Chicago: "Private corporations that are not church-related should neither attempt to change the basic belief systems of their employees nor should they promote the use of techniques (i.e., altered consciousness) that accelerate such change; and while spiritual growth is important, corporations should not prescribe the methods whereby employees grow spiritually."6
Tom Brandon of the Christian Legal Society has advised workers who object to such job-related seminars to ask their employers to substitute nonobjectionable programs that do not violate the employee's religious convictions. Failing this, Brandon said, legal recourse is open because employers are prohibited from discriminating against employees' religious principles and are required to make reasonable accommodations.7
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Surely not all techniques used by New Age advocates are objectionable, some might say. What about yoga, hypnosis, visualization, and positive imaging, among others?
My advice is: cautious discernment — for several reasons.
First, there is no conclusive proof that biofeedback and other exotic methods for alleviating stress, improving memory, and accelerating learning work any better than conventional techniques, according to a recent $425,000 study by the National Academy of Sciences.8 There is, however, some indication that the mental practice of physical skills and athletic events may reinforce learning and enhance performance. So some "unconventional" methods, if not tied to an unacceptable worldview, may be appropriate, even helpful.
Second, visualization could be defined simply as the use of imagination and the formation of pictures in the mind. Indeed, thinking is almost impossible without visualization. (Try describing a tree without mentally picturing one.) On the other hand, visualization — which is common to meditation, inner healing (also known as the healing of memories), dream analysis, and other therapies (such as "journaling") used by both New Age and Christian practitioners — can be described as the intention to "manipulate reality or evoke the appearance and help of Deity."9
There's an important distinction between thinking or remembering, which involves mental images, points out Eric Pement of Cornerstone magazine, "and dwelling on those images for their own sake, believing that thought forms by themselves will bring things into being . . . . New Agers have co-opted visualization because they believe the universe is a form of consciousness, and reality exists by common consent."10
Pement goes on to say that, for Christians, a problem with using visualizations for inner healing may be the idea that thought or the power of suggestion does the healing, rather than a transcendent God.
I agree with Dave Hunt's and T.A. McMahon's assessment at this point: "If reality can actually be created or manipulated by visualization, this would allow everyone to play God with the universe. What would happen when competing realities were being visualized by different persons? If visualization taps into some power inherent within the
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universe and available to anyone, it would be the ultimate weapon to hand over to human egos; and the result would not be paradise, but hell on earth."11
A third practice requiring discernment is yoga. It is frequently claimed that yoga, or meditative practices derived from it, involves no religious beliefs. Yoga, in this view, is simply a "neutral" and healthy way of relaxing. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Beatles' ertswhile guru whom we met in earlier pages, is the leading advocate of this position. Yet, observes Professor Irving Hexham, it seems certain yoga cannot be practiced in isolation from other Indian beliefs.
"The whole concept of yoga is based upon a carefully worked out theory of beliefs about the human condition. The terminology used to explain the practice itself involves acceptance of presuppositions with religious origins.
"This is not to deny that many people practice yoga because they honestly believe it to be healthy and value free. But as time passes, such people very gradually and imperceptibly begin to accept other concepts which involve definite religious convictions."12
With so many excellent physical fitness and relaxation practices available, why risk one aligned with Hinduism and altered consciousness?
A warning label must also be attached to psychedelic drugs, which are approved by many New Agers as the "entry level" for altered states.
Even Marilyn Ferguson, who could hardly be considered a wild-eyed New Age radical, noted (in 1980) that "It is impossible to overestimate the historic role of psychedelics as an entry point drawing people into other transformational technologies. For tens of thousands of 'left-brained' engineers, chemists, psychologists, and medical students who never before understood their more spontaneous, imaginative right-brained brethren, the drugs were a pass to Xanadu."13
Or a pass to a mental hospital for the "fried-brained."
By the late 1980s, there was growing experimentation and "research" with "high-tech . . . designer" psychedelic drugs among the "accelerated information and quantum reality culture," called Yummies — young upwardly mobile mutants — according to OMNI WholeMind Newsletter.14
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That's part of the story about New Age transformational technologies, too, Mr. Tarcher.
Warnings about opening up the mind to hallucinations and "sinister entities" are regularly sounded by critics of the New Age. The alarms include the dangers of fantasy role-playing and imagination games like Dungeons & Dragons TM, which swept through the youth culture several years ago.
Dungeons & Dragons is a doorway to the occult, charge critics. Don't be silly, counter advocates. It's only a game.
Although fantasy itself can be used positively as escapism, games like Dungeons & Dragons are laced with references to magic, occult wisdom, violence, and power.
Declares critic Stanley Dokupil, a former researcher with the Spiritual Counterfeits Project: "Mediumship or occultic powers may be acquired [in Dungeons & Dragons] through a process of visualization in which the individual imagines himself or herself in actual possession of such powers. At some point in the process the dividing line between the purely imagined and the real disintegrates; the process completes itself and the individual enters the world of unseen occultic forces."15
Not everyone who plays gets hung up in a morbid fantasy land, of course, and D & D isn't "the catechism of the New Age" as maintained by Peter Leithart and George Grant.16
Cautions are in order, however, just as they are for trance channeling, where there is always the danger of getting so caught up in mediumship that one begins to adopt the understanding of God, humanity, and reality that one's "entity" teaches.
Artist Joe Szimhart of Santa Fe, New Mexico, tells of "deprogramming" six followers of Ramtha who lost their ability to question because of just such a channeling lifestyle. They shifted their worldview to themselves, Szimhart said, attached to their past instead of present lives, and let go of committed relationships when they hit hard times.17
Outspoken as always, Carl Raschke calls channeling "a form of pseudo-religion that performs the same function as drugs.
"What we're seeing," he says, "is an attempt to harness a segment of society that's never had much religion to create an alternate religious worldview. In my view, it is a kind of
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pathology, and the more fascinated a person gets with it, the more likely it is that they can become mentally imbalanced by the process itself. Autohypnosis is a powerful tool not totally understood. It can lead to manipulation."18
The dangers lurk in all forms of what Aldous Huxley called "the Perennial Philosophy": the worldview that Nature — the Ultimate All — is all that is and all there is.
Beware! Whether it is a Scott Peck enthralling readers with his belief that they only need to look within themselves to find wisdom greater than their own and "become the ego of God";19 a channeled entity informing distraught parents that they chose to have their child die; or a "Jesus" of the Course in Miracles admonishing telepathically that as one develops "true perception" he or she saves the world — from sin, "for sin does not exist."20
Be suspicious! Especially if a therapy, course, or teaching:
(a) is explained in terms of manipulating, balancing, or polarizing energies;
(b) deprecates the value of the mind or critical thinking;
(c) is supported only by testimonial anecdotes of the committed rather than by solid evidence and outside evaluation; or
(d) is based on "secret" esoteric knowledge revealed only to an inner elite.
As the Jesus of history exhorts us: "discern the signs of the times" (Matthew 16:3).
Chapter 28 || Table of Contents
1. Jeremy P. Tarcher, "New Age as Perennial Philosophy," Los Angeles Times Book Review, 7 February 1988, 15.
2. Regina Sara Ryan and John W. Travis, Wellness Workbook (Berkeley, Calif.: Ten Speed Press, 1981), 69.
3. Ibid., 211–12.
4. Gregg Piburn, telephone interview with author, 12 March 1988.
5. Ron Zemke, "What's New in the New Age?" (cover story), Training Magazine (September 1987): 30.
6. Richard L. Watring, "New Age Training in Business: Mind Control in Upper Management?" Eternity Magazine (February 1988): 32.
7. Cited in Elliot Miller, "Tracking the Aquarian Conspiracy," Forward (Fall 1986): 27.
8. Robert Gillette, "Exotic Ways to Learn Doubted by U.S. Study," Los Angeles Times, 4 December 1987, pt. 1, 1.
9. Dave Hunt and T.A. McMahon, Seduction of Christianity: Spiritual Discernment in the Last Days (Eugene, Oreg.: Harvest House Publishers, 1985), 173.
10. "Under Fire: Two Christian Leaders Respond to Accusations of New Age Mysticism," Christianity Today, 18 September 1987, 17.
11. Hunt and McMahon, Seduction of Christianity, 148.
12. Irving Hexham, "Yoga, UFOs, and Cult Membership," Update: A Quarterly Journal of New Religious Movements 10, no. 3 (September 1986): 6.
13. Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy, Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s (Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, 1980), 89.
14. Judith Hooper, "A User's Manual to the Brain, Mind and Spirit," OMNI WholeMind Newsletter (October 1987): 125, 132.
15. Stanley Dokupil, "Dungeons and Dragons: Fantasy Role-Playing and the Occult," Spiritual Counterfeits Project, 1928, 4.
16. See Peter Leithard and George Grant, A Christian Response to Dungeons & Dragons (Fort Worth, Tex.: Dominion Press, 1987).
17. Cited in Hilary Abramson, "Altered States," Sacramento Bee Magazine, 25 October 1987.
18. Quoted in ibid.
19. M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), 283.
20. "The Scribe," A Course in Miracles, 3 vols. (Tiburon, Calif.: Foundation for Inner Peace, 1976), 1:81.
