Remember how Paris Hilton was clutching all those books on spirituality before she went to jail? She had the Bible, The Secret, and some other new age nonsense that she said she was going to read to become a better person? And, oh yea, she was going to try to better the world when she got out, right? Well, she's out now.
Check out the "enlightened" look on her face when Dave asks her - repeatedly - about jail,...
*Looking at the links is a very important part of this post. I will continue adding more updated links over time to make the point even clearer:
"Somehow over the decades there's been a revolution in morals. Deficits, obfuscations and trickeries that were once unthinkable are now the norm."
That's the New York Times's David Brooks discussing politics, but really discussing the influence of NewAge occult thinking on American society as a whole. Don't believe me? Look at this definition of NewAge from the very-Christian Watchman Fellowship:
"Man is not sinful since his true essence is divine and perfect. The only discontinuity between man and 'God' is man's ignorance of his unlimited potential. Man is divine. He creates his own reality. Absolute truth is replaced by relativistic, subjective experience."
And here's one, from Lawrence A. Pile, while commenting on NewAge's effect in the secular world of management:
"There is no ultimate distinction between God and creation, or between one individual and another. The distinctions we see are unreal or illusionary. This means (among other things) that God and man are the same,...if man is God, then man has unlimited potential, able to accomplish anything he desires,...further, if "all is one," then there are not only no distinctions between God and man, there are also no distinctions between truth and falsehood, right and wrong, good and evil. In fact, all distinctions are mere illusion,...thus, the problem of humanity,...is that we have forgotten our own divinity. This lapse of memory must be overcome by undergoing what is called a 'paradigm shift,' a drastic change in the way we view the world around us."
So, pretty much, people are becoming full of themselves, doing whatever they want, without anyone caring about right or wrong, which allows for "deficits, obfuscations and trickeries that were once unthinkable" to occur on a regular basis. And if others get hurt? Well, those people should have joined the I'm Divine And Will Hurt You Party already.
Remember: Because there's no right or wrong in occult thinking, eliminating anyone that can't forget there's a right and wrong is O.K.. Actually, they must be eliminated, otherwise believers could be reminded they do bad things. And they can't have that, can they? They're "divine". Plus, the betrayal of the last occult-inspired good time - The Holocaust - was enough for most people.
Look at the happy Auschwitz workers above. Can you imagine those smiling faces once someone showed up and said "Killing the Jews is wrong"? The Nazis were occultists. Nazis believed in the "ancient" teachings so many feel compelled to study these days. That's what inspired the Steven Spielberg movie Raiders Of The Lost Ark - and it explains why Germans, instinctively, hate cults like Scientology. They've been there already.
The whole "reaching your full potential" route - becoming health-freak "supermen" who will "save the planet" by redefining right and wrong for others - that didn't work out too well. But the Nazis that made it to America brought many of these ideas with them, teaching at the Esalen Institute and Stanford. For instance, former-Nazis, like Carl Jung and Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, brought yoga to the West. NewAgers are on the same occult trip but, this time, without the immediate taint of Nazi violence. "Occult" means "hidden" and these are ideologies with a lot to hide - preferably right under your nose.
"There's a long history of embarrassing siblings, wives, children; candidates ought to be thankful that the public really doesn't care."
- Robert Watson, a political scientist at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida, quoted in the Christian Science Monitor.
"In the Pew polls, the biggest turnoffs in a presidential candidate – atheism and a lack of political experience – had little to do with their divorce count or the number of phone calls they get each week from their children."
- From the same article
See? "The public really doesn't care." So someone betrays the people who loved them most - who cares? There's no right and wrong, and the only people they hurt are the people who they, previously, defined right and wrong for - their wife, kids, and friends. Who cares if they put them in Hell? The occult is all about Hell for anyone who was dumb enough to actually believe what they said - that believed in right and wrong. And that's not you - you don't trust politicians, right? And even Hitler hated atheists.
It's all so simple when seen that way. Those ignorant people, who believe in ethics and morals; they deserve the pain they get at the hands of those who don't.
So who are the NewAgers? It's pretty much anyone who's bought into the culture-covering tapestry of the following:
Astrology, auras, black and white magic, bioenergy, Brahman, Buddhism, chakras, chi energy, Christ-consciousness, Christian Science, Church Universal & Triumphant, crystals, Druidism, Eastern mysticism, ESP, est, extraterrestrials, The Landmark Forum, firewalking, Gaia, gnosticism, Hare Krishna, higher consciousness, Hinduism, Homeopathy, human potential movement, Kaballah, karma, Magick, Mind Science, Native American spirituality, near-death experiences, neo-paganism, nirvana, parapsychology, prana, psi, psychic, reflexology, reiki, reincarnation, Religious Science, shamanism, Silva Mind Control, spiritism, Tai Chi, Taoism, tarot cards, Theosophy, therapeutic touch, trance-channeling, Transcendental Meditation, transpersonal psychology, UFOs, Unity School of Christianity, Witchcraft, yin-yang, Yoga, and Zen.
C'mon - you're in there somewhere - you planet-saving, yoga-using, Buddhist health-freak you.
No, these are not just the tin-foil hat crowd. They're as common as Catholics. They're the people who are always suggesting one should "keep an open mind" - but not so open you can think they might be wrong or don't know what they're talking about:
And, obviously, such people seem to be everywhere now. Listen to this description of Hana, on the east coast of Maui, Hawaii:
"This remote fleck of paradise some 52 miles, 617 hairpin curves and 56 one-lane bridges away from the nearest city possesses mana, “a life energy,” an unseen spiritual force,...recent émigrés like Woody Harrelson, Kris Kristofferson and George Harrison. Most recently there is Oprah the Divine,...Paul Fagan, a paternalistic San Francisco zillionaire,...various Gettys, Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco (above) and other A-list haole." "Oprah the Divine". Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? (Courtesy of the New York Times.) It does sound good, as long as you ignore the fact that she promotes every bad idea under the sun and causes great harm to people by doing so. Oprah keeps "an open mind" about everything. And she's everywhere - America's highest paid celebrity - which is all that matters. She can do no "wrong" because there is no "wrong" to do in her world of "find your own truth.". My point is, despite their ubiquitousness, there are places believers gather. They call them "power spots". In America, they're mostly well-known places like Mount Shasta, Sedona, Arizona, Boulder, Colorado, and (of course) Burning Man. In politics, there's Bill Clinton's Global Initiative and many other places where people gather to decide what to do with the rest of us. Listen to Bill discussing raising our "higher consciousness" at Davos (yes, I've shown this clip before, but I love it):
It's all so tacky. So much hubris. A man who openly cheated on his wife (giving others the impression it's cool to betray your loved ones) while letting Osama bin Laden freely kill Americans (but now complains the president isn't going after him correctly) and who now hangs out with con men like Tony Robbins (above) is also deciding he knows, along with his rich friends, what's best for the rest of us. That takes balls.
But, since he and "Saint Hillary" are NewAgers (she even helps bad-mouth his lovers) it's all "relativistic, subjective experience" that counts, so - in Bill's own NewAge mind - they're A-O.K.. Until - just like the Nazis - somebody calls them on it.
So, being the political beast that I am, I'm calling them on it. I'm calling all the NewAgers on it. It's time for this nonsense to stop before more people (or our country) gets hurt - just as Germany did - by occult ideas.
As we should have learned after WWII, ideologies are dangerous things. They don't conform to reality, that's why so many are demanding we conform to the occult ideas they - no matter what their stripe - decide to embrace.
San Francisco, of course, is a power spot. And a quick look at today's San Francisco Chronicle reads like primer - with my links as an expose - on popular occult ideas and how they fit in real life:
This is good because Supervisor Carmen Chu (above) just hours after being appointed by the NewAge mayor, Gavin Newsom, admitted she got the job though "I don't presume to know much about District 4."
Because we all know how important words from the "great mystics" (from the year 1207) are to us all. Why it's enough to make you think Osama bin Laden's 13th century philosophy is right on target, right? I mean, NewAgers always say "People are free to believe what they want to believe." And - since nobody's actually thinking - who needs their head for that?
But, when it comes to politics, you do need your head. You do need to make distinctions. You have to make choices, between good and bad, right and wrong. You have to learn to separate your beliefs from reality because your beliefs aren't reality:
They're just your beliefs.
And - in the serious business of politics - forgetting that can get us all killed.
"The climate crisis,...offers us the chance to experience what very few generations in history have had the privilege of knowing: a generational mission; the exhilaration of a compelling moral purpose; a shared and unifying cause; the thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside the pettiness and conflict that so often stifle the restless human need for transcendence; the opportunity to rise. . . . When we rise, we will experience an epiphany as we discover that this crisis is not really about politics at all. It is a moral and spiritual challenge."
-- Al Gore, showing exactly how to offend me so much I'd never join his cause.
"[Al Gore] has a 'holistic, even mystical fervor' that reminds Schlesinger of one of FDR's vice presidents, Henry Wallace, known for his weakness for gurus."
-- From Newsweek magazine, reporting on the late Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr's diaries
"Gore's sermon is not one that will stand scrutiny."
-- Christopher C. Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism
Whoo-boy! As you can see from the photo above (poor kid!) the loons are having a party!
It seems there was a widely reported German study that claimed acupuncture works for low-back pain. Not surprisingly, even medical sites were pumping it, making my crazy "Student of the Occult" ex-wife's words ("We're in the hospitals - we're getting legit - you'd better 'get it' before it's too late!") positively prescient. Unfortunately, the reports are also a crock - and the results of the study are the best argument against acupuncture yet. Follow me, Kids:
According to the researchers from Ruhr-University Bochum, fake or "sham" acupuncture worked just as well as "true" acupuncture. Here's exactly what they said:
"The superiority of both forms of acupuncture suggests a common underlying mechanism that may act on pain generation, transmission of pain signals, or processing of pain signals by the central nervous system and that is stronger than the action mechanism of conventional therapy."
But, since true acupuncture supposedly works by placing needles in specific places - along routes called "meridians" - to effect your (highly superstitious) "chi", then getting a positive response from placing needles just any ol' where proves there are no meridians or chi to be effected. Sticking needles in a person - anywhere - will produce a response. It's just like hitting yourself in the foot to relieve a headache. TMR's conclusion - which isn't likely to change anytime soon:
This is also further proof the media, especially the BBC, is totally lame - and totally gullible - when it comes to stories on alternative medicine and NewAge beliefs. You might as well do like Brian Eno said and stick a needle in a camel`s eye:
The Maitre Hospice has a Reiki cult that claims they can stop the dying A woman told me she could walk through walls I said "Show me" She then stopped trying
One Taste will get you by selling sex once you climb up the Yoga Tree Mind/Body/Spirit? Please, tell me: what's left? If I live and just want to be me?
Nobody talks about killing each other No, they talk about what you believe How something gets stronger diluted in water and wishing cures heart disease
Black people are leaving The City in droves Why? Doesn't seem so simple: Where are they going? Nobody knows Nobody leaves The People's Temple.
"About a thousand years ago, there was this brief period of about 11 or 12 minutes, that is now referred to as the sixties, a hated time, an intoxicating time. I enjoyed myself thoroughly for five or six minutes. It has become a kind of black hole in the sociological cosmos, a kind of Bermuda Triangle, into which all the noblest and worthwhile ideas disappeared forever. A seductive moment; however, being the gloomy chap that you know me to be, I was able to resist it. I think it was back in 1971 when it reached its most acute phase; it was then that I was inspired to write this mournful and bitter ditty in response to all the flabby liars of the Aquarian Age."
-- Leonard Cohen, in his introduction to the song, There Is A War
According to Bloomberg.com, Democratic Representative Peter Visclosky, who has met numerous times with the peace and anti war community, put a $2 million earmark into the House of Representatives' defense-spending bill for what Keith Ashdown, chief investigator at Taxpayers for Common Sense, calls a "new-age health group" that is "researching yoga, 'bioenergy', and alternative medicines," as well homeopathy, which the National Institute of Health says "has seen high levels of controversy.'' (I'll say, considering it's just water.) The money is supposed to go to billionaire (and Anaheim Ducks owner) Henry Samueli's Samueli Institute for Information Biology in Virginia. Call me stupid but I've got a question:
Why does a NewAge billionaire need our nation's defense money?
Virginia Democrat James Moran (who seems to have serious issues with jews) wants another $1 million for the Center for Research on Integrative Medicine in the Military. (Remember: Virginia is where Samueli's institute is,...) Call me stupid, again, but is it a good idea to give water to our soldiers as medicine?
Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin - who got $61,700 from Hillary Clinton's pyramid scheme pal, Norman Hsu - wants $5 million from the Senate defense bill for "complementary and alternative medicine research", also for Samueli, who got $5.6 million in the 2005 defense bill. According to Bloomberg, those earlier "earmarks were usually described in cryptic reports that gave little clue about who requested the money or who benefited from it."
This isn't unusual for Harkin, since he got then-president Bill Clinton to start the whole new wage alternative medicine ball rolling in Washington. Listen to Clinton:
No one is answering phone calls or returning e-mails. All of the politicians involved have received huge amounts of money from Samueli. His wife, "Susan Samueli (above) chairwoman of the [Sumueli] institute's board, has a diploma from the British Institute of Homeopathy. Wayne Jonas, the president, headed the NIH's alternative-medicine office in the 1990s. His 2005 institute salary, $414,032, was more than twice the $151,556 in average compensation the heads of health- related charities reported earning in 2007,...Jonas earned another $58,000 in 2005 consulting for the Samueli Foundation in California."
Listen to Britain's Homeopathy spokesperson, Melanie Oxley, when questioned about the homeopathic health claims regarding malaria:
Peter Visclosky, the chair of the spending committee, was also recently asked about $1 million for something called the Center for Instrumented Critical Infrastructure, but he claimed he didn't know what it was. When asked if it even existed, he replied "At this time, I do not know, but if it does not exist, the monies could not go to it.”
*Looking at the links is a very important part of this post. I will continue adding more updated links over time to make the point even clearer:
"Somehow over the decades there's been a revolution in morals. Deficits, obfuscations and trickeries that were once unthinkable are now the norm."
"Man is not sinful since his true essence is divine and perfect. The only discontinuity between man and 'God' is man's ignorance of his unlimited potential. Man is divine. He creates his own reality. Absolute truth is replaced by relativistic, subjective experience."
And here's one, from Lawrence A. Pile, while commenting on NewAge's effect in the secular world of management:
"There is no ultimate distinction between God and creation, or between one individual and another. The distinctions we see are unreal or illusionary. This means (among other things) that God and man are the same,...if man is God, then man has unlimited potential, able to accomplish anything he desires,...further, if "all is one," then there are not only no distinctions between God and man, there are also no distinctions between truth and falsehood, right and wrong, good and evil. In fact, all distinctions are mere illusion,...thus, the problem of humanity,...is that we have forgotten our own divinity. This lapse of memory must be overcome by undergoing what is called a 'paradigm shift,' a drastic change in the way we view the world around us."
So, pretty much, people are becoming full of themselves, doing whatever they want, without anyone caring about right or wrong, which allows for "deficits, obfuscations and trickeries that were once unthinkable" to occur on a regular basis. And if others get hurt? Well, those people should have joined the I'm Divine And Will Hurt You Party already. 
Look at the happy Auschwitz workers above. Can you imagine those smiling faces once someone showed up and said "Killing the Jews is wrong"? The Nazis were occultists. Nazis believed in the "ancient" teachings so many feel compelled to study these days. That's what inspired the Steven Spielberg movie Raiders Of The Lost Ark - and it explains why Germans, instinctively, hate cults like Scientology. They've been there already. 
"There's a long history of embarrassing siblings, wives, children; candidates ought to be thankful that the public really doesn't care."
"In the Pew polls, the biggest turnoffs in a presidential candidate – atheism and a lack of political experience – had little to do with their divorce count or the number of phone calls they get each week from their children."
See? "The public really doesn't care." So someone betrays the people who loved them most - who cares? There's no right and wrong, and the only people they hurt are the people who they, previously, defined right and wrong for - their wife, kids, and friends. Who cares if they put them in Hell? The occult is all about Hell for anyone who was dumb enough to actually believe what they said - that believed in right and wrong. And that's not you - you don't trust politicians, right? And even Hitler hated atheists. 
Astrology, auras, black and white magic, bioenergy, Brahman, Buddhism, chakras, chi energy, Christ-consciousness, Christian Science, Church Universal & Triumphant, crystals, Druidism, Eastern mysticism, ESP, est, extraterrestrials, The Landmark Forum, firewalking, Gaia, gnosticism, Hare Krishna, higher consciousness, Hinduism, Homeopathy, human potential movement, Kaballah, karma, Magick, Mind Science, Native American spirituality, near-death experiences, neo-paganism, nirvana, parapsychology, prana, psi, psychic, reflexology, reiki, reincarnation, Religious Science, shamanism, Silva Mind Control, spiritism, Tai Chi, Taoism, tarot cards, Theosophy, therapeutic touch, trance-channeling, Transcendental Meditation, transpersonal psychology, UFOs, Unity School of Christianity, Witchcraft, yin-yang, Yoga, and Zen.
No, these are not just the tin-foil hat crowd. They're as common as Catholics. They're the people who are always suggesting one should "keep an open mind" - but not so open you can think they might be wrong or don't know what they're talking about:
"This remote fleck of paradise some 52 miles, 617 hairpin curves and 56 one-lane bridges away from the nearest city possesses mana, “a life energy,” an unseen spiritual force,...recent émigrés like Woody Harrelson, Kris Kristofferson and George Harrison. Most recently there is Oprah the Divine,...Paul Fagan, a paternalistic San Francisco zillionaire,...various Gettys, Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco (above) and other A-list haole."
"Oprah the Divine". Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? (Courtesy of the New York Times.) It does sound good, as long as you ignore the fact that she promotes every bad idea under the sun and causes great harm to people by doing so. Oprah keeps "an open mind" about everything. And she's everywhere - America's highest paid celebrity - which is all that matters. She can do no "wrong" because there is no "wrong" to do in her world of "find your own truth.".
My point is, despite their ubiquitousness, there are places believers gather. They call them "power spots". In America, they're mostly well-known places like Mount Shasta, Sedona, Arizona, Boulder, Colorado, and (of course) Burning Man. In politics, there's Bill Clinton's Global Initiative and many other places where people gather to decide what to do with the rest of us. Listen to Bill discussing raising our "higher consciousness" at Davos (yes, I've shown this clip before, but I love it):
So, being the political beast that I am, I'm calling them on it. I'm calling all the NewAgers on it. It's time for this nonsense to stop before more people (or our country) gets hurt - just as Germany did - by occult ideas.
As we should have learned after WWII, ideologies are dangerous things. They don't conform to reality, that's why so many are demanding we conform to the occult ideas they - no matter what their stripe - decide to embrace.
San Francisco, of course, is a power spot. And a quick look at today's San Francisco Chronicle reads like primer - with my links as an expose - on popular occult ideas and how they fit in real life:
Just another wild ride at 15th anniversary of Critical Mass in S.F. 
President's switch on climate criticized as lacking new policy. 
The Sunset District's new supervisor meets the people. 
Nourishing souls with the poems of a great mystic. 
But, when it comes to politics, you do need your head. You do need to make distinctions. You have to make choices, between good and bad, right and wrong. You have to learn to separate your beliefs from reality because your beliefs aren't reality: 
They're just your beliefs.
I wrote recently of Frank Shallenberger, a homeopathic "doctor" in Nevada, who claims, oh so sympathetically, that it's a "clash of medical belief systems" that is the cause of Susan Gallagher's distress - not the fact he killed her sister. (Homeopaths do show much more concern than regular doctors, right?) Well, the story gets better:
Senator Ann O'Connell (above) who knew homeopathic medicine is widely accepted in England and is the medicine of choice by the Royal Family. But didn't know homeopathy is just that little bottle of water on her desk.
Whoo-boy! As you can see from the photo above (poor kid!) the loons are having a party!
At the end of the '70s 
Well, now we're getting somewhere:
"What I know about Scientology is that it is a pagan belief comparable to the old Germanic religion,..."
It has been said that Ken Wilber (above) is a cult leader. Some say a destructive cult leader. He counts Bill and Hillary Clinton as followers. Bill Clinton has quoted him. Hillary responded enthusiastically, when asked if she was trying to find Wilber's Theory of Everything, “That’s right, that’s exactly right!” 
Ken Wilber has said he admires Adi Da or Free John (above) and the Clinton's admire Ken Wilber. 
This is weirder than the claim that Hillary Clinton's presidential run is "a form of feminism meets 21st century new-age thinking" - O.K., maybe that's a true statement, but this is still weird:
According to Bloomberg.com, Democratic Representative Peter Visclosky, who has met numerous times with the peace and anti war community, put a $2 million earmark into the House of Representatives' defense-spending bill for what Keith Ashdown, chief investigator at Taxpayers for Common Sense, calls a "new-age health group" that is "researching yoga, 'bioenergy', and alternative medicines," as well homeopathy, which the National Institute of Health says "has seen high levels of controversy.'' (I'll say, considering it's just water.) The money is supposed to go to billionaire (and Anaheim Ducks owner) Henry Samueli's Samueli Institute for Information Biology in Virginia. Call me stupid but I've got a question: 
Virginia Democrat James Moran (who seems to have serious issues with jews) wants another $1 million for the Center for Research on Integrative Medicine in the Military. (Remember: Virginia is where Samueli's institute is,...) Call me stupid, again, but is it a good idea to give water to our soldiers as medicine?
Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin - who got $61,700 from Hillary Clinton's pyramid scheme pal, Norman Hsu - wants $5 million from the Senate defense bill for "complementary and alternative medicine research", also for Samueli, who got $5.6 million in the 2005 defense bill. According to Bloomberg, those earlier "earmarks were usually described in cryptic reports that gave little clue about who requested the money or who benefited from it." 
No one is answering phone calls or returning e-mails. All of the politicians involved have received huge amounts of money from Samueli. His wife, "Susan Samueli (above) chairwoman of the [Sumueli] institute's board, has a diploma from the British Institute of Homeopathy. Wayne Jonas, the president, headed the NIH's alternative-medicine office in the 1990s. His 2005 institute salary, $414,032, was more than twice the $151,556 in average compensation the heads of health- related charities reported earning in 2007,...Jonas earned another $58,000 in 2005 consulting for the Samueli Foundation in California."