Communes and
Groups
You've come a long way, yogi!
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi — founder of the Transcendental Meditation Program (1957) — has indeed come a long way from the day he came West in the late 1950s to teach his popular and simplified version of Hindu meditation, later trademarked under the initials TM. The bearded, white-robed yogi, who studied under the famed Guru Dev, is founder of the Science of Creative Intelligence (1971), founder of Maharishi International University (1971), and founder of the Maharishi Technology of the Unified Field (1982).
By far the most successful and largest of the meditation groups, TM has been dubbed by author Adam Smith "the McDonald's of meditation." It offers a good basic meditation to chew on, says Smith.1
The TM organization and its affiliates have had lots to chew on in the intervening years since the diminutive Himalayan holy man hired PR agents, appeared on major talk shows, and courted sports, screen, and music celebrities, including the Beatles, Mia Farrow, and Joe Namath. In 1977, a federal court in New Jersey ruled — over Maharishi's strong objections — that the practice of Transcendental Meditation was really a religious exercise and therefore could not be taught in public schools. Although more than a million people had already
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taken the basic TM course, the decision slowed enrollments. (The courses are now taught under private auspices.)
In 1982, Maharishi announced the World Plan: The overall strategy is to set up 3,600 centers, one for each million people on Earth; each center is to have one TM teacher per 1000 people in the general population. As soon as 1 percent of the population practices TM, the world will be saved from war and strife, the yogi firmly asserts.
Meanwhile, his 700-student Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa — where all students and faculty gather twice a day in the two "Golden Domes of Pure Knowledge" to meditate the TM way — is fully accredited and even offers four Ph.D. programs. Basic is Maharishi's "unified field-based education . . . of natural law, which students experience directly at the deepest level of their own intelligence."2 TMers are promised decreased stress, increased productivity, heightened creativity, and overall peace of mind.
TM's claims to scientific substantiation have been challenged, and its "yogic flying," in which TM adherents apparently levitate from a sitting yoga position, has been debunked as nothing but a physical stunt.
Maharishi U. spokesman Mark Haviland conceded in the summer of 1987 that only "hopping" had been achieved so far, but he confidently predicted "hovering" and "actual flight" soon.3 In any case, TM entrepreneurs in Fairfield were flying high (as we'll see in chapter 16).
While TM may be the most successful of the New Age religious groups to persist in America since the 1960s, the Hare Krishnas have been the most conspicuous — and the most resented.
Hare Krishna
"The International Society for Krishna Consciousness became for many people the symbol of the invasion of Asian religion into American life in the 1970s," observed J. Gordon Melton.4
With their bright saffron robes and shaved heads, chanting devotees pounded drums on street corners and hounded
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travelers in airports with "Back to Godhead" literature proclaiming that the transcendental bliss of Lord Krishna's paradise was the everlasting answer. Although these public displays have been replaced by more conventional lectures, fairs, and the building of ornate temples, Krishna followers still seek to realize the dream of a small holy man named A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada.
When in 1965, at the age of seventy, the former pharmacist from Bengal sailed into New York Harbor on the deck of a tramp steamer, he was the sole embodiment of what burgeoned into a far-reaching fundamentalist Hindu sect. Before his death in 1977, Prabhupada had attracted as many as 10,000 hard-core disciples around the world and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of followers. By 1981, forty Krishna temples had been established in the United States alone.5
Prabhupada's followers — many of them heirs of a counter-culture disillusioned with materialism, and craving inner peace and awareness — embraced a whole new culture, worldview, diet, psychology, and geography foreign to most Westerners. The movement's ascetic essence is derived from accounts of Krishna's life on Earth five thousand years ago as interpreted by the Sanskrit scriptures known as the Vedas. Krishna consciousness aims at ending the cycle of continual birth and death caused by karma, a concept held by many New Age groups. By chanting the names of God, Krishna devotees believe they can attain spiritual bliss and finally break out of the slow and painful cycle and "go back to godhead," or Krishna.
Although Prabhupada planned for an orderly administration of the vast empire at his death, his passing provoked a leadership crisis and several abortive schisms led by guru underlings. Fewer new members were joining up in the mid-1980s, and Kirtinanda Swami Bhaktipada, head of the movement's palatial New Vrindaban Temple — a premier West Virginia tourist attraction — was investigated for arson, conspiracy, and mail fraud. He was ousted from the movement in 1987, and lesser devotees and former Krishnas were charged with crimes ranging from murder to drug running.
If TM and Hare Krishna are Indian imports, Scientology bears a definite "made in America" label.
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Scientology
Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, a man of mystery born in Montana in 1911, became well-known for both science fiction writing and his system called Dianetics. The latter evolved into the Church of Scientology, which he incorporated in the mid-1950s.
Photos of the reclusive Hubbard, who died in 1986, hang in every Scientology center. "The face," as described by religion analysts Robert Ellwood and Harry Partin, "is fairly ordinary save for tiny, sharp eyes embedded in kindly crinkles. But from out of the mind behind those intense blue eyes has grown an initiatory procedure of fantastic complexity and effectiveness, a technique which challenges orthodox psychology, and a worldwide organization."6
The church of Scientology (which claims a worldwide membership of 6.5 million) offers near magical powers and the increase of mental and emotional achievement mediated through pop psychotherapy, Eastern philosophy, applied religious technology, and scientific-sounding jargon.
Hubbard, says new religions-watcher Brooks Alexander, "stripped away the gongs, incense, shaved heads and other culturally alien trappings and replaced them with business suits, electronic gadgetry and the jargon of self-improvement. At the same time, he retained the core values of the Eastern/occult worldview. Hubbard made the first systematic attempt to unite the search for self with the search for ultimate reality, and to present it in a Western technological package."7
Scientology, based on Hubbard's writings, teaches that all humans are Thetans — uncreated "gods" who are repeatedly reincarnated. But by the time they had evolved into human beings, they had forgotten who they were. Through costly counseling programs, Scientologists can eradicate the negative engrams accumulated from prior-life traumas and return to their true identity as "operating Thetans."
In recent years, Scientology has been immersed in legal hassles, and church operatives say enemies have infringed upon Scientology's religious freedom. In 1983, Hubbard's wife and eight other Scientologists were jailed for burglarizing offices of the IRS and other government agencies. Since
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then, the church has lost (and appealed) other major court cases and agreed to pay millions of dollars in out-of-court settlements.
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles-based group is pushing Hubbard's best-selling Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, and moving into corporate management consulting through subsidiaries WISE and Sterling Management.8
Other New Age human potential groups have borrowed heavily from Scientology concepts: notably, est, Lifespring, and MSIA (Church of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness — pronounced "Messiah").
EST
Between 1971 and 1984, Werner Erhard, whom the Wall Street Journal has called "a guru of the Me generation,"9 had enrolled nearly a half-million followers in his sixty-hour personal growth weekend training seminars. In 1985, est (Erhard Seminars Training) "underwent cosmetic changes and emerged as the Forum, designed for people who 'got it together' in the 70s and who are interested in 'making it happen' in the 80s," said sociologist Ron Enroth.10 "Ested" personalities include Yoko Ono, Carly Simon, Diana Ross, and John Denver.11
The basic pattern is to jam large groups of people into one room for fifteen hours at a time with limited food and toilet breaks. Through a marathon of draconian "processes," including verbal abuse, trainees are caused to question and even dislodge their assumptions about every system of meaning. Exercises in visualization and self-hypnosis follow.
"When you get in touch with yourself . . . you will experience yourself as the creator of your own circumstance," says Erhard.12 But Berkeley, California, psychologist Karen Hoyt analyzed est techniques and concluded they produced "a thought-reform program" resulting in "the loss of self, the loss of the human and the loss of freedom."13
Some of the more confrontive aspects of est have apparently been toned down in the Forum, and another 1984 Erhard spin-off, Transformational Technologies Inc., has become popular on the management training circuit (see
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chapter 15). But the metaphysical component still lurks just below the surface despite a "nonreligious" billing. Erhard, who began dabbling in yoga at age eleven, has said Scientology and Zen Buddhism were the most influential forces in est.14
Lifespring and MSIA
Lifespring, founded by John Hanley in 1974, is another human potentials and management training group that tears down the previous belief system of trainees. More than 250,000 Americans have taken Lifespring's five-day training course.
An offspring of Lifespring is MSIA, which enforces strict discipline during six-day courses. Students must not be late but cannot wear watches. They must abstain from alcohol, coffee, and sex throughout the week. Vomit bags are placed on the backs of the chairs where training is conducted.15
MSIA is led by the Mystical Traveler Consciousness — i.e., Sri John-Roger Hinkins, an educator-clergyman who founded the group in 1968 and an early leader in the Eckankar movement. By having "total awareness of all levels of consciousness," John-Roger "helps each person into a consciousness of his soul's perfection . . . Such soul transcendence frees one from the wheel of incarnations."16
In 1984, MSIA claimed 250 centers in the United States, and Hinkins appeared regularly on national cable TV. New Age healing techniques, including "aura and polarity balancing," were a part of his related Baraka Holistic Center in Santa Monica, California. Barbara Streisand and other film personalities have boosted MSIA-related Insight Transformational Seminars.
Eckankar
There are more interconnections: MSIA adheres to the basic Eckankar teachings of the Sant Mat tradition of India. And Eckankar founder Paul Twitchell was a regular writer for a Scientology magazine, once worked for Ron Hubbard, and
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was among the first to achieve the Scientology level of "clear."17
"What is most controversial about Twitchell's involvement with Scientology, though," declares David Christopher Lane, an Eck defector turned anti-cultist, "is the fact that he blatantly plagiarized from L. Ron Hubbard's works."18 Lane then provides convincing comparative samples.
Eckankar, "the ancient science of soul travel" and "astral projection," has a special connection also with India and Tibet. Twitchell, who died in 1971, claimed to have been taught by Tibetan lamas and to have been initiated by a neo-Sikh, Kirpal Singh.19
So maybe whatever goes around comes around. In any case, Twitchell's "rod of power" passed on to Darwin Gross, whose leadership of the growing organization ended in controversy. Meanwhile, earthly world headquarters for Eckankar's "soul travelers" — estimated to have dropped from a 1970s worldwide high of 50,000 to about 20,000 — moved from Las Vegas to Menlo Park, California, and then to Minneapolis.20 In 1981 Harold Klemp took over as the 973d Living ECK Master.
Self-Realization Fellowship
Another Hindu religious group whose popular founder brought it to Los Angeles in 1920 is the Self-Realization Fellowship, which looks to the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita and the Autobiography of a Yogi as its basic texts. Lately, the organization of the late Paramahansa Yogananda, which had forty-four U.S. centers in 1987, was pitching to New Age clientele, advertising that it teaches "scientific methods of meditation and life-energy" to harness the powers of the mind and achieve union with God in pure bliss.
Sounding very New Agey, the ad in OMNI magazine declared: " 'Mind is the creator of everything,' explained Paramahansa Yogananda. 'If you cling to a certain thought with dynamic will power, it finally assumes a tangible outward form. When you are able to employ your will always for constructive purposes, you become the controller of your destiny.' "
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In 1968, Swami Kriyananda, a former disciple of Yogananda, formed his own unique New Age community called Ananda Cooperative Fellowship. Nestled on 800 acres in the Sierra Nevada foothills northeast of Sacramento, California, the yoga-centered community unsuccessfully sought incorporation as a separate, theocratic city in 1982. It is one of the few religious and utopian communal experiments that has survived from the hippie heyday of idealistic flower children. The village of 40 homes housed 300 adults and 100 children in the summer of 1988 and was self-supporting. About 30 of its private and community-owned small businesses were thriving. Ananda members, who believe God dreamed the whole universe into temporary manifestations of nature, seek "superconscious attunement with infinite consciousness" through yoga exercises and meditation, vegetarianism, and simple, cooperative lifestyles. Kriyananda, also known as J. Donald Walters, is a prolific writer and musician-composer; he markets his books and tapes through Ananda's Crystal Clarity Publishers and Ananda satellite centers in six cities.
Sufis
Another commune within the New Age orbit is the Abode of the Message, founded by Pir Vilayat Khan of the Sufi Order. Pir Vilayat Khan conceived the Cosmic Mass to demonstrate the unity of all religions. Founder of eighty-eight Sufi centers in America, he is a respected speaker on the New Age circuit.
The syncretistic Sufis trace their roots both to Hinduism and to Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. Sufism stresses meditative techniques and dance movements (remember the whirling dervishes?) to open up the mind to cosmic dimensions and achieve union with the Absolute Being (God).21
The late Meher Baba, the "silent" guru who claimed to be "God personified" and made a hit with movie starts and counterculture kids of the 1960s, was firmly within the Sufi tradition, and scattered groups of "Friends of Meher Baba" persist today.22 Baha'i, an activist faith of Persian background, began among the Sufis in the mid-nineteenth century. Enjoying
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a resurgence in America, Baha'i counts about 1000 U.S. Assemblies.23
And More
Among other communes identifying with the New Age movement are the Renaissance Community, also called the Fellowship of Friends. This reclusive metaphysical group in Northern California is led by Robert Burton, a devotee of Russian philosophers Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1872-1949) and Peter D. Ouspensky (1878-1947). There is The Farm, Stephen Gaskin's group in Summertown, Tennessee, rooted in Buddhist-Taoism. Then the movable commune of Da (Bubba) Free John, alias Franklin Jones, whose Dawn Horse Communion, then Free Communion Church, then Laughing Man Institute, then Persimmon — all located north of San Francisco Bay — was finally ensconced on Bubba's private Fijian island. And there is the 3HO Foundation (formerly the Healthy-Happy-Holy Organization), whose followers live the Sikh Dharma lifestyle of turban-wearing yoga master Yogi Bhajan. The largest 3HO concentration is in West Los Angeles, where Bhajan has his headquarters. An estimated total of 2,500 followers live in 125 ashrams and a rural retreat in New Mexico.
The Naropa Institute of Boulder, Colorado, and the Tibetan Buddhism of the late Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche (1939-87), should also be mentioned. Only his Vajradhatu organization — one of many among the various schools of Tibetan Buddhism established in the United States during the 1970s — has built a national network with local centers. Called Dharmadatus, they house several thousand students.
Unification Church
The eclectic-syncretistic Unification Church, founded by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, received intense media attention during the 1970s and mid-1980s. The spotlight focused on controversial "Moonie" recruiting and fundraising activities, their involvement in conservative political and economic affairs, and the jailing of the North-Korea-born
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Moon for tax evasion. While Moon aims to unify all religions in a restored "New Age," the group does not fit the New Age mold as easily as do other American new religions we have referred to above.
Unification Church theology reflects elements of both Oriental mysticism and traditional Christianity. But Moon's exposition of the "Lord of the Second Advent" in the group's guiding text, Divine Principle, is more an aberrant Christian teaching and reinterpretation of the Bible than the credo of an alternative religious movement. Devout disciples consider Moon the new Messiah of the Coming Advent who will achieve the salvation of the human race, which they believe Jesus failed to do.
The biggest theological upheaval in the church's thirty-four-year-history occurred in the spring of 1988 when Moon was reported to believe that one of his followers from Zimbabwe was the reincarnation of Moon's son, Heung Jin Nim, who was killed in an automobile accident in 1984. According to the Washington Post, the Zimbabwean was believed to be hearing and relaying messages from "Lord" Heung, and was traveling to church parishes worldwide, severely disciplining church members and elders by slapping and beating them.24
Christian Science and Mormons
While neither the Church of Jesus Christ, Scientist (Christian Science) nor the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) is, strictly speaking, a product of the New Age movement, they do share common ground with present New Age thought.
Christian Science, as we discuss later, sprang from the Transcendental and New Thought movements. The Christian Science emphasis on "the overcoming of faith in matter" and "mortal mind" — and relying instead on the reality of "divine Mind" — is right in step with New Age metaphysics.25
Mormons insist their faith is thoroughly within the Christian tradition; and indeed, the Book of Mormon appears to be a kind of "Christian romance."26 But the revelations of founder Joseph Smith (1805-44) developed in the Book of Mormon
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were mediated through the occultic use of "seer stones." Smith said the stones were buried with the golden plates the Angel Moroni told him to unearth and translate. Jerald and Sandra Tanner of Salt Lake City, scholarly critics of Mormonism, have dug up a bonanza of historical material documenting that "glass looker" Smith "not only engaged in money-digging but also . . . in the magical practice of divining with a seer stone."27
Mormonism's attachment to an essentially magic worldview — together with its teaching that "men may become gods" and, with many goddess wives, populate an infinity of spiritual planets — smacks of New Age esotericism rather than orthodox Christianity.
But, mysterious and exotic as the beliefs and practices of many New Age groups may be, it's hard to top the eerie phenomenon known as channeling. Let's tune in . . .
Chapter 9 || Table of Contents
1. Quoted in Russell Chandler, "A Sampler's Directory to Meditation Groups," Los Angeles Times, 13 February 1977, pt. 2, 1.
2. 1987 Maharishi International University catalog, 3.
3. "Group Claims TM Movement Is a Cult," Washington Post, 2 July 1987.
4. J. Gordon Melton, Encyclopedic Handbook of Cults in America (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1986), 159.
5. Russell Chandler and Evan Maxwell, "Krishnas – A Kingdom in Disarray," Los Angeles Times, 15 February 1981, pt. 1, 1.
6. Robert S. Ellwood and Harry B. Partin, Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1988), 141.
7. Brooks Alexander, "Scientology: Human Potential Bellwether," Spiritual Counterfeits Project Journal 4, no. 1 (Winter 1981–82): 27.
8. Jeremy Main, "Trying to Bend Managers' Minds," Fortune Magazine, 23 November 1987, 104.
9.Robert S. Greenberger, "East Meets Est: The Soviets Discover Werner Erhard," Wall Street Journal, 3 December 1986.
10. Ronald Enroth, Lure of the Cults & New Religions (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1986), 24.
11. Joh Leo et al., "A Holy Furor" (cover story), TIME, 15 August 1988, 36.
12. Quoted in Alice Lawhead and Stephen Lawhead, Pilgrim's Guide to the New Age (Batavia, Ill.: Lion Publishing Corp., 1986), 30.
13. Karen Hoyt, "The Use of Thought Reform in Large Group Awareness Trainings with Specific Focus on est," M.A. thesis, John P. Kennedy University, Orinda, California, 1985.
14. "Americans Get Religion in the New Age," Christianity Today, 16 May 1986, 21.
15. Main, "Trying to Bend Managers' Minds," 104.
16. J. Gordon Melton, Encyclopedia of American Religions, 2d ed. (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1987), 740.
17. Melton, Encyclopedic Handbook of Cults in America, 146.
18. David Christopher Lane, "The Scientology Connection: Paul Twitchell and L. Ron Hubbard," in Understanding Cults and Spiritual Movements (Del mar, Calif.: Del Mar Press, 1987), 14–15.
19. Ellwood and Partin, Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America, 220.
20. "Soul Travelers' Move," San Jose Mercury News, 24 August 1986.
21. Jerry Isamu Yamamoto, "Expanding Sufi Horizons," Spiritual Counterfeits Project Tract, Berkeley, Calif., 1983, 1–4.
22. Ellwood and Partin, Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America, 216–20.
23. Enroth, Lure of the Cults & New Religions, 32.
24. "Moon Believes a Follower Is Son Reincarnated," Washington Post, 30 March 1988.
25. Robert Peel, Spiritual Healing in a Scientific Age (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 34–35.
26. Irving Hexham and Karla Poewe, Understanding Cults and New Religions (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 82–83.
27. "Magic in Mormonism," Salt Lake City Messenger no. 65 (November 1987): 1–8.
