Absolute
Relativity
"Every age," intoned Pope John Paul II from the front of cavernous St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco, "poses new challenges and new temptations for the people of God on their pilgrimage, and our own is no exception."
The pontiff was speaking to 3000 delegates representing several hundred U.S. Roman Catholic lay groups, and he was sounding a note he repeated often during his ten-day pastoral visit to the United States in September 1987: America, with unprecedented material wealth and blessings, was all but suffocating in a secular materialism that threatened to snuff out spiritual development and stifle the joy of serving the less fortunate.
In his slow, accented English, the Polish pope continued his message:
We face a growing secularism that tries to exclude God and religious truth from human affairs. We face an insidious relativism that undermines the absolute truth of Christ and the truths of faith, and tempts believers to think of them as merely one set of beliefs or opinions among others. We face a materialistic consumerism that offers superficially attractive but empty promises conferring material comfort at the price of inner emptiness. We face an alluring hedonism that offers a whole series of pleasures that will never satisfy the human heart. All these attitudes can influence our sense of good and evil at the very moment when social and scientific progress
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requires strong ethical guidance. Once alienated from Christian faith and practice by these and other deceptions, people often commit themselves to passing fads, or to bizarre beliefs that are either shallow or fanatical.1
The high-vaulted cathedral resounded with applause when this warm and charismatic but most orthodox pope drove home his point: "Christ's message must live in you and in the way you live and in the way you refuse to live."
Meanwhile, Baptist Carl F.H. Henry, a foremost evangelical theologian, was sending out similar signals in a round of lectures during the summer and fall of 1987. The bottom line: Western civilization, nurtured by biblical notions of moral absolutes, purpose, and the ultimate triumph of good over evil, is now wallowing in a swamp of neopaganism.
"The West has lost its moral compass," Henry said. The culture thus sinks in a neopagan naturalism that says "nature alone is real, that man is essentially only a complex animal, that distinctions of truth and good are temporary and changing."2
Henry told gatherings of evangelical intellectuals that this reduction of reality to "impersonal, purposeless processes" and man to the "accidental product of a cosmic explosion" who himself "defines and redefines" good, left ethical standards in a shambles. And, he added, it sacrificed the metaphysical underpinnings that make sense of moral absolutes.
Orthodox religious leaders are not the only ones recoiling from the moral relativism that is eroding American values. Political and social scientists as well as secular educators have sounded similar alarms about collapsing moral standards and ethical disarray.
Pollster George Gallup has observed that the United States faces a "moral and ethical crisis of the first dimension."
During a July 1987 Prayer Breakfast in St. Paul, Minnesota, Gallup, an Episcopal layman, referred to a "deep spiritual malaise" and the "corrupting power of money and material success . . . . at all levels of society." This was evident, he said, in widespread cheating on taxes, extra-marital affairs of "epidemic proportions," fraudulent telephone charges, pilferage
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costing department stores $4 billion a year, and defaulting on educational loans by many students.
People need to learn how to bring biblical principles into their lives, admonished Gallup.3
Indeed, many Americans feel a need to reevaluate the basis of morality and rebuild a structure of values. In a poll conducted for TIME magazine by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman, "more than 90% of the respondents agreed that morals have fallen because parents fail to take responsibility for their children or to imbue them with decent moral standards; 76% saw lack of ethics in businessmen as contributing to tumbling moral standards; and 74% decried failure by political leaders to set a good example."4
Michael Gelven, professor of philosophy at Northern Illinois University, summarized beliefs underlying what he calls a trendy kind of American cultural nihilism (which denies meaning to everything): "Granting all opinions equal status, the true one counts no more than the false one. Indeed, the belief only in opinions admits of no truth at all. And the fear of being wrong is replaced by the fear of being right and appearing to be an ideologue."5
Gelven's analysis was made in the context of reviewing The Closing of the American Mind, the landmark book by the late Allan Bloom. This surprising best-seller outlines trends in American higher education that have led to a breakdown of discernible moral norms and a crumbling of the belief that truth exists — or that it matters.
The students, said Bloom, come from a potpourri of backgrounds and are unified only in their relativism and allegiance to equality:
And the two are related in a moral intention. The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it. They have all been equipped with this framework early on, and it is the modern replacement for the inalienable natural rights that used to be the traditional American grounds for a free society. That it is a moral issue for students is revealed by the character of their responses when challenged — a combination of disbelief and indignation: "Are you an absolutist?" the only alternative they know, uttered in the same tone as "Are you a monarchist?" or "Do you really believe in witches?" . . . the danger they have
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been taught to fear from absolutism is not error but intolerance. Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than 50 years has dedicated itself to inculcating . . . . The true believer is the real danger.6
Arguing that few students wrestle with what is good, what is true, or what is right, Bloom said the self has displaced the soul, and "openness" and autonomy have usurped authority.
Openness, writes Bloom, "used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason's power . . . . True openness is the accompaniment of the desire to know, hence our awareness of ignorance. To deny the possibility of knowing good and bad is to suppress true openness . . . [R]elativism has extinguished the real motive of education, the search for a good life."7
Bryn Mawr political scientist Stephen Salkever, quoted in TIME magazine's May 25, 1987, cover story, "What Ever Happened to Ethics," notes that once there was a traditional language of public discourse based partly on biblical sources and partly on republican sources. But that language, fallen into disuse, leaves American society with "no moral lingua franca."8
It is difficult to set a moral agenda in the prevailing American intellectual climate.
One lucid example: In November 1986, Cornell University president Frank Rhodes suggested to a Harvard audience that the nation's academic centers needed to pay serious attention to students' "intellectual and moral well-being." Catcalls from both faculty and students interrupted his address, and applause greeted a heckler who inquired just who would provide moral instruction for others and whose morality would be promoted.9
Bloom and others insist the problem of relativism is not inherent in democracy but stems from a misreading of our nation's forefathers.
The United States was founded upon a twin commitment to inalienable human rights and to the Calvinistic belief in an ultimate and divinely revealed moral right and the obligation of sinful beings to follow right conduct. These faith principles
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were incorporated into both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
Charles Colson, well-known author who served as special counsel to President Richard Nixon before pleading guilty in 1974 to conspiracy charges related to the Watergate scandal, has observed that the "belief that law must be grounded in the transcendent truth that comes from God's revelation has been a cornerstone of American democracy for 200 years. Rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, it has been the principal bulwark to protect the weak and the powerless, and to preserve free institutions."10
And Bloom has noted that "The Constitution was not just a set of rules of government but implied a moral order that was to be enforced throughout the entire Union."11 To Bloom, truth is the rationally discernible moral norms evident in natural law.
C.S. Lewis described natural law as that law beyond man which endures and is often contrary to humankind's desires and intent. Natural law must have some divine origin or it couldn't have survived, Lewis reasoned.
Things went wrong, said Bloom, in the poisonous subjectivism introduced by the German philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Max Weber (1864-1920), and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). According to Bloom's analysis these Teutonic thinkers exported the seeds of modern nihilism to American shores at the same time that they pulled up the roots of truth.
Gelven summarizes Bloom's view in his insightful critique of The Closing of the American Mind:
When "values" are substituted for "virtues," "commitments" for "morals," "life-styles" for "social behavior" and "alternatives" for "truth," not only is the English language weakened but the very foundation of all sensible action and thought is undermined.
For then we may easily substitute things that are variable and temporary for that which is steady and constant: the truth. The loveliest, strongest plant in the world plucked from its soil and roots, no matter how splendid its blossoms, withers and dies. If any philosophical analysis is uprooted from the rich soil of truth, it too will die.12
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These values are only a "cut-flower remnant" of the biblical heritage, asserts Henry, who believes that universal morality is not produced by natural law in itself but requires special divine revelation.13
Colson, in Kingdoms in Conflict, his "religious equivalent" of Bloom's book, adds the ideas of Freud and naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-82) to those of Nietzsche, proposing that together they formed a "destructive philosophic trend" that gripped American intellectuals and became the long fuse that finally set off an explosion of relativism: "All moral distinctions were equally valid and equally invalid since all were equally subjective," Colson says.14
"God remains dead," Nietzsche wrote. "How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it?"15
That looks, sounds, feels, and tastes suspiciously like New Age philosophy!
Mix in the increasingly popular Eastern monistic thought that anything is permissible if God is everything and therefore beyond the distinctions of good and evil; there is no such thing as right or wrong, or coincidence, or guilt, or victimization — you choose your reality.
Add the barren existentialist writings of Albert Camus (1913-60) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80), which captivated American college campuses during the 1950s and 1960s. And top it all off with the hard drugs, easy sex, and "do-your-own-thing" subculture of the 1960s.
The recipe's yield? A mind-set, a worldview, solidified. Notes Gelven: "The silliness has abated, the tear gas has long been dispersed by the winds, but the thinking is still nihilistic to the core and far more insidious because of its subtlety and quiet acceptability. The quiet victories won by the 60s are the most deadly, and they include confusing equality with egalitarianism, freedom with license, and truth with opinion."16
Three hundred years earlier, French scientist-philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-62) had foreseen it. In a values vacuum, he said, humanity will pursue one of two goals: we will imagine that we ourselves are gods or we will seek gratification through our senses.
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And thus we enter the reign of relativity! This is the appeal — and the Achilles' heel — of the New Age movement.
Relativism is appealing because, as Gelven, Bloom, and Henry point out, this is an age when "objective" truths are considered passé and "bad manners," if not divisive. Religion is supposed to traffic only in options: my karma is as good as your dogma (unless in the traffic my karma runs over your dogma!).
"To deny everyone else's gods violates public piety and its approval of the plural gods," remarks Carl Henry.17 Or, in the words of New Age writer Margot Adler, "[D]iversity in the spiritual world will mark the health of the human community. The polytheistic vision doesn't preclude monotheism as an appropriate individual path, but it does insist that the larger vision is multiform — that the universe is too rich and large and varied to be captured so easily by a single prophet, system or holy book."18
That goes over well in a do-as-you-please society where suave politeness, tempering bigot zeal, changes "I believe," to "I think I feel." Like the ancient Romans, our culture adds one deity after another to its modern pantheon. As Henry says, "The issue [is] not whether religious sentiment is true, but whether religious feelings are useful."19
New Age relativism also appeals because of its optimistic view of human nature and concomitant rejection of guilt and the need of atonement for sin.
"Christianity is portrayed [by New Agers] as narrow-minded, unrealistic, negative," commented Douglas Groothuis, author of Unmasking the New Age, during our interview in Seattle. "The New Age movement has no God to sin against . . . [It] is utopian, thinking we can create a utopia by our own efforts."20
That view remains fashionable on television, in newspaper editorials, even in some church pulpits. It is essentially a man-made religion, brimming with optimism about human capacities, but it flies in the face of a century filled with terror and depravity.21
Moral foundations crumble and chaos descends when everyone does "whatever is right in his own eyes" (Deut. 12:8, NASB; see also Judges 17:6; 21:25; and Proverbs 21:2).
As we accelerate down the road where New Age moral
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relativity takes us, there is, as F. LaGard Smith puts it, "no absolute truth, no center stripe down the highway of life."22
The Landscape of Relativity
"[T]he evolution of the race is for man to learn not how to obey the law but how to be the law," says David Spangler, one of New Age's major spokesmen and a founder of the New Age Findhorn Community in Scotland. "There is a vast, vast difference. If you are the law it means that you are at one with the whole. For divine law simply exists . . . . When a person understands this, when he begins to have that attunement, when he is the law, he is not going to act in any way that will disturb or distort the true balance of the true wholeness . . . The New Age is an age where there is needed that group of people who through attunement can be self-governing, act as the law, as the divine, as the right, as the love."23
Unfortunately, Spangler's presumption of an intrinsically good human nature sets the stage for dictatorship or anarchy — or both. Like all Gnostic elitist corps, Spangler's enlightened "seers" would use their new self-knowledge to decide for the rest which patterns and relationships would benefit the whole, for only those crowned with cosmic consciousness are fit to lead the planet into the New Age.
But the New Age philosophy is a morally unfit vehicle for political leadership because "it lacks any absolute standard that would tell us that the outcome of the great transformation would be more good than evil," Groothuis declares.24
Relativism — plugged into reincarnation theory — denigrates the value of human life by reducing all life to the lowest level. John F. DeVries, president of Bibles for India, graphically makes this point in the Indian Journal: "In India, human babies are no more important than rats! Rats may not be killed because they are expressions of the same universal energy that characterizes man. As a result, rodents and other animals eat 20% of India's grain crop every year — food that could be available for starving children."
With this mind-set that all life forms are equal, DeVries continues, "one can picture the ludicrous scene of an injured
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man and a wounded cat sharing the same hospital emergency room! The eventual results of such a belief are obvious."25
Applied to the politics of "deep ecology," the New Age assertion that all life has equal value produces "the ultimate consequence of relativity," one that is morally false and completely untrue, according to Kevin Kelly, a writer for the Whole Earth Review. "What is true is that a human counts more than a flea. Simple," Kelly declares (emphasis added).26
Relativism scores no higher when it comes to abortion, murder, and sexual ethics.
Reincarnation is the engine that drives much New Age opinion on such matters — the machine of moral relativism. For example, psychiatrist Helen Wambach uses reincarnationism logic to conclude there's nothing morally wrong about abortion: it's only the body, not the soul, that is killed, she declares; and if a fetus is aborted the soul can choose to enter another fetus.27
With this logic, suicide becomes simply a decision not to go ahead with a life plan but instead recycle to another to complete one's karma. J.Z. Knight, channel for Cro-Magnon entity Ramtha, says that murder isn't really wrong or evil. "If you believe in the continuation of life [reincarnation] it's a different story," she said on ABC's "20/20."28
Ritual murderer Charles Manson, while disowned by responsible New Agers, was involved with several pantheistic groups and studied occult literature. This apparently led him to believe that he had reached a mystical state of consciousness in which he transcended death and slipped beyond the confines of good and evil. If, in the All is One, good and evil are reconciled, then one can do nothing bad; thus Manson was only acting logically.29 As Groothuis has noted, the fact that Manson's followers knew him as both Satan and Christ highlights the collapse of distinctions between good and evil under moral relativity.
Another prime example of moral relativity, propped up by monism and fed by notions that whatever one does is right, is the teaching of Indian mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. James S. Gordon of Georgetown University Medical School, who initially found much to admire in Rajneesh, came to this chilling assessment of the master manipulator on the final page of his book, The Golden Guru:
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In the end, Rajneesh became the kind of man, the kind of religious leader, he had always derided. If indeed his ego had once dissolved and melted like a drop into the ocean, it seemed over the years to have renewed and enlarged, and in his isolation it grew gross with his attachment to power and luxury and position . . .
On his ranch, surrounded by armed guards, dressed up and doped up, imperious and imperial, he resembled Jim Jones far more than Buddha or Krishna or Jesus. He was unwilling to learn or change, or to admit that there was anything to be learned or to change.30
Rajneesh, like many New Age leaders, lifts the limits on sexual expression. In New Age morality, monogamy is often seen as inhibiting needed "deep interpersonal relationship" with many persons.31 If All is One, then — unless violence is used — no form of sexual activity violates another person's sanctity. Even the homosexual lifestyle is valid.
"So if love is as natural as breathing, and eating, and working and playing," wrote Ryan and Travis in the Wellness Workbook, "it is as natural as 'sexing' besides. If love becomes our 'life-support system,' then every decision we make, sex included, will be guided by it. We will choose to have sex with one another if it enhances our experiences of unification with all that is."32
New Age relativism also decimates traditional categories of religion. As Carl Henry has remarked: "Naturalism grants Christianity no ontological credentials superior to the legendary and mythological gods of the Babylonians, Greeks, or Romans, and no more metaphysical legitimacy than Hinduism or Taoism. In whatever guise it appears, naturalism is the metaphysical nullification of the God of the Bible."33
Henry's observation is not just theoretical. New Age author Spangler has written: "We can take all the scriptures and all the teachings, and all the tablets, and all the laws, and all the marshmallows and have a jolly good bonfire and marshmallow roast, because that's all they are worth. Once you are the law, once you are the truth, you do not need it externally represented for you."34
And George Craig McMillan, describing Laya Yoga and enlightenment in the New Age magazine, Life Times, says "belief in God or non-belief in God means nothing because
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you are part of that process [of enlightenment], generating, organizing, destroying, continually."35
The United Nations meditation room, where New Ager Sri Chinmoy gives chapel services, is also a memorial to no god at all and a fitting symbol of New Age relativism. As Charles Colson describes it: "Lights in the ceiling create bright spots of illumination on the front wall. One focuses on a piece of modern art: steel squares and ovals. Beyond the abstract shapes, there is nothing in those bright circles of light. They are focused on a void. And it is in that void that the visitor suddenly sees the soul of the brave new world."36
Looking for God within the self makes truth personal, say trance channelers Verna Yater and Ellwood Babbit. What one person perceives is considered truth, even if it conflicts with another's perception. When a reporter asked them if there was any room for absolute truth, Babbitt said: "The absolute truth is that we are all gods in our own rights."37
Process theology, which views God as being incomplete in some respects and a companion of humanity in creative transition toward perfection, fits nicely with New Age relativism. Process theology headwaters spring from philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), who drew together the growing belief in evolution and the concept of relativity in his 1929 book, Process and Reality. God, say some process theologians, is "the inescapable energy that moves through all things."38
But the changing process is unworthy of worship, according to Neoorthodox theologian Emil Brunner: "Were God one who is 'becoming,' then everything would founder on the morass of relativism. We can measure nothing by changing standards: changeable norms are no norms at all; a God who is constantly changing is not a God whom we can worship. He is a mythological being for whom we can only feel sorry."39
In laying out the New Age ideal of an education curriculum that fosters autonomy, Marilyn Ferguson clearly shows the direction relativity can take. [I]f our children are to be free," she says, "they must be free even from us — from our limiting beliefs and our acquired tastes and habits. At times this means teaching for healthy, appropriate rebellion, not conformity .Maturity brings with it a morality that derives from
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the innermost self, not from mere obedience to the culture's mores."40
Freedom to think and seek truth, unfettered by sterile preconceptions — this much I accept. But morality derived from the inner self? In New Age thought the self is the One, which is the impersonal, relativized "Force." There are no standards of right and wrong; good and evil are interchangeable. What instructs the self, or, as Roman Catholic theologians would say, informs the conscience?
That was a question that gnawed away at Bill Coulson, who for nearly twenty-five years considered humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers his hero as well as his mentor. Coulson finally parted company with Rogerian concepts and the Center for Studies of the Person in La Jolla, California, which the two men had founded in the 1960s. As we saw in chapter 19 on the human potentials movement, Rogers started with the premise that human beings were essentially good and could act correctly without being told to do so — or how to do so.
But Coulson gradually came to the conclusion that Rogers had made a tragic mistake in generalizing beyond his therapeutic insights. "We went from the fine distinctions that can be made about therapy and the scientific evidences that supported it to something that was insupportable. We made it gross," Coulson said recently.41
Now Coulson is saying it's a grievous error to tell youngsters they must make up their own minds. In 1987 testimony before a Michigan legislative committee conducting hearings into juvenile delinquency prevention, Coulson declared: "Culturally, societally, we've got to tell children, 'Yeah, make up your own mind — but by all means, make it up the right way!' And there are some things we know that are right, and some things that are wrong."42
In an interview with Jeannette DeWyze for San Diego's Reader magazine, Coulson followed up on his crusade against allowing children unbridled free choice.
"I think we have to charm our children into doing the right thing," he said, "because otherwise, somebody else is going to try to charm them into doing the wrong thing." As an example, Coulson cited a booklet put out by the Tobacco Institute. Its underlying strategy, he concluded, was teaching
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parents to tell children, nonjudgmentally, that they must make up their own minds about cigarette smoking. But this leaves youngsters completely vulnerable to unabashed arguments that smoking is good — that is, it leaves them vulnerable to cigarette industry advertisements, Coulson fumed.43
Allan Bloom scanned the educational wasteland and perceived that what students lacked is so "simple and yet so elusive that only the more gifted teachers can spot its absence," observes Michael Gelven. "What these students lack is truth. I do not mean that their beliefs are false. I mean that the idea of truth is simply not there — that truth exists and can inform and even replace opinions. The belief that truth exists causes us to inquire after it in the first place: moreover, it is the true ground for our respect for others' opinions, recognizing the possibility that others have the truth that we may lack."44
The foundational error of the New Age worldview is the assumption that there is no absolute truth "out there" that need concern us. Sadly, this perception has spread widely in this land, as even the visiting pope from Rome could discern. The loss of objective authority and a transcendent morality has infected our national ethical foundations with a sickness nigh unto death.
New Agers, writes new religions critic Elliot Miller, hold that "there should be nothing absolute or fixed about any particular system — including their own."45 But there is a joker in that deck: New Agers essentially contradict this very belief by tenaciously embracing monism as the only system that makes relativism possible. But absolute relativity is an absurdity!
Thus, New Age's most dangerous trait is also its most vulnerable flaw.
Chapter 31 || Table of Contents
1. John Paul II, 18 September 1987, San Francisco, Calif.; text of address provided by the Vatican via the U.S. Catholic Conference, Washington, D.C.
2. Quoted in George W. Cornell, "Paganism Seen Ruin of Western Civilization," Los Angeles Times, 11 July 1987, pt. 2, 6.
3. Quoted in George W. Cornell, "U.S. Is Undergoing 'Spiritual Malaise,' Pollster Finds," Los Angeles Times, 18 July 1987.
4. Ezra Bowen, "Ethics: Looking to Its Roots," TIME, 25 May 1987, 26.
5. Michael Gelven, "Book World Review: Why Johnny Can't Think," World & I (July 1987): 410.
6. Allan Bloom, Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 25–26.
7. Ibid., 38, 40, 34.
8. Bowen, "Ethics," 26.
9. Quoted in Carl F.H. Henry, "Uneasy Conscience Revisited" (speech), 3 November 1987, fortieth anniversary of Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, Calif., 9.
10. Evangelical Press News Service, 28 August 1987 (reprinted from Christianity Today, by permission of Prison Fellowship).
11. Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, 32.
12. Gelven, "Why Johnny Can't Think," 415.
13. Carl F.H. Henry, interview with author, Monrovia, Calif., 2 November 1987.
14. Charles Colson, with Ellen Santilli Vaughn, Kingdoms in Conflict (New York: William Morrow; Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1987), 212.
15. Quoted in ibid., 185.
16. Gelven, "Why Johnny Can't Think," 417.
17. Henry, "Uneasy Conscience Revisited," 20.
18. Margot Adler, "A Modern Pagan Spiritual View," World (September–October 1987): 10.
19. Quoted in Cornell, "Paganism Seen Ruin of Western Civilization."
20. Douglas R. Groothuis, interview with author, Seattle, Wash., 21 December 1987.
21. Colson, Kingdoms in Conflict, 231.
22. F. LaGard Smith, Out on a Broken Limb (Eugene, Oreg.: Harvest House Publishers, 1986), 34.
23. David Spangler, Relationship & Identity (Forres, Scotland: Findhorn Publications, 1978), 89, 91, 93.
24. Douglas R. Groothuis, Unmasking the New Age (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1986), 126.
25. John F. DeVries, "Spiritual Danger in Holistic Medicine," India Journal (September 1984): 7.
26. Kevin Kelly, "Deep Ecology as Religion," Utne Reader (October–November 1985): 69; excerpted from Whole Earth Review (May 1985).
27. Cited in Smith, Out on a Broken Limb, 191.
28. Segment from "20/20" presented at Trinity United Presbyterian Church, Santa Ana, Calif., 25 October 1987.
29. See R.C. Zaehner, Our Savage God: The Perverse Use of Eastern Thought (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1974), 69–71.
30. James S. Gordon, Golden Guru: The Strange Journey of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Lexington, Mass.: Stephen Greene Press, 1987), 245.
31. Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy, Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s (Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, 1980), 397, 398n.
32. Regina Sara Ryan and John W. Travis, Wellness Workbook (Berkeley, Calif.: Ten Speed Press, 1981), 192.
33. Henry, "Uneasy Conscience Revisited," 15.
34. David Spangler, Emergence: Rebirth of the Sacred (Forres, Scotland: Findhorn Publications, n.d.), 144; cited in Passport Magazine (October–November 1987): 6.
35. George Craig McMillan, "Laya Yoga and Enlightenment," Life Times vol. 1, no. 3, 43.
36. Colson, Kingdoms in Conflict, 183.
37. Steve Berta, "Getting in Touch with the 'All-knowing Self,' " Montecito Life, 12 November 1987, 17.
38. Gordon R. Lewis and Bruce A. Demarest, Integrative Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1987), 1:204.
39. Emil Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of God (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1950), 269.
40. Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy, 316.
41. Jeannette DeWyze, "An Encounter with Bill Coulson," Reader [San Diego], 20 August 1987.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Gelven, "Why Johnny Can't Think," 412.
45. Elliot Miller, "The New Myth," Forward (Winter 1986): 11.
