If you want to understand the blind alley NewAge leads you down, first you have to understand the landscape:
As Fleming reiterates about this period, “The mainstream of European thought was not materialist but sacramental. In the sacramental view, the material and visible world paralleled another that was immaterial and invisible.” Science, magic, religion — they are all attempts to understand what is hidden from us, and sometimes the three blur together. Isaac Newton, as is well known, left hundreds of pages of notes on alchemy and astrology. Benjamin Franklin was a member of an elite Freemason Lodge called “The Nine Sisters.”
“The basic premise of occult knowledge is that a search for hidden causes in nature may lead towards something higher than nature: absolute wisdom, supernatural power or the divine.” Naturally such an ambition can readily verge on the heterodox, not to say the diabolical, given its echo of the serpent’s insidious promise, “You shall be as gods.”
Which we've heard from Oprah, Shirley MacLain, J.Z. Knight, Rhonda Byrne - all of 'em. And while everyone's laughing, they're taking our money - and believing it. Oprah's ruling. Get it?
You will if you add a dose of this guy for seasoning,...
In case you're thinking that I'm not blogging very much lately, you're right, and there's two reasons:
1) I'm having a ball working on my new album.
2) This is an "I Don't Care" election, so there's no point in my trying to engage anyone.
The Evil Blogger Lady has posted a great video that features cult leader J.Z. Knight, and it ends with Knight saying:
"I worked really hard so we can have a bad reputation. You know why? So we can do anything out here and nobody cares."
When it comes to cults, politics, and the public, I couldn't have put it better myself. Check it out:
With people being so stupid, I can barely keep typing. I can barely keep breathing. It's all so wrong.
For instance, I like The Evil Blogger Lady - smart cow - but look at even the logic he/she is using:
Swearing in politics - and during an election season - is bad.
Forget the people JZ Knight has deceived, rippid-off and killed, forget the mass produced "What The Bleep" indoctrination films that drew the suckers into Knight's cult like crazy (literally) forget all that - BAD LANGUAGE is EBL's line in the sand. And you should know that ol' Ramtha's a Democrat who crossed it, because this is an election year, you see. This terrible swearing is happening NOW, while all that other *less important stuff* - the murders, con jobs, brainwashing, lying - that's been happening over multiple decades, right under EBL's nose, during boring times, and influencing no one's vote, so have been deemed unworthy of EBL's mention or action. Or Ann Althouse's, or Glenn Reynolds', or anybody else's really.
Sure, Knight and Romney are both in cults, but "pish-posh" to all that. J.Z. Knight's in the wrong one - there's video evidence her cult swears and openly thinks bad thoughts. Romney's cult doesn't swear, so video evidence THEY WANT TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD is irrelevant and not worth mentioning. They're "nice." I've told you:
This moral mind field of a mindfuck is exactly how the NewAge "works":
GDFKXHGH!
I'm sorry - forgive me:
That wasn't cussing, but me losing control and hitting my head on the keyboard again.
I really like reading your blog, though I'm still trying to keep up the same level of harsh that you do. It wears me out, man. You are an inspiration, but an exhausting one.
Love you, Anga! (So much like "anger"!) I have repeatedly made the argument that NewAge is Naziism and believers get away with their crimes because they seem "nice" to others (and I will continue to make that argument) but now there's a new book in France that makes my argument for me:
The history of French collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II is still a very sensitive subject in Gallic literary and political circles. Bestselling novelist Alexandre Jardin has learned this the hard way with the publication of "Des Gens Très Bien" (or "Very Nice People"), a startling exposé of his famous family's association with Nazism under the Vichy government of Marshal Philippe Pétain.
Mr. Jardin's new book, published in January by Grasset and available only in French, mixes the confessional genre with biography, history and narrative, and has sold hundreds of thousands of copies since its release. The author now finds himself accosted daily by perturbed readers desperate to unburden themselves about their own "collabos" ancestors. Yet critical reactions in the Parisian press have veered from occasional plaudits to often vicious attacks from across the ideological spectrum. The trouble for these academics and baby boomers alike is that in his work, Mr. Jardin not only denounces his respected paternal grandfather, but by extension all the other "very nice people" of wartime France.
NewAgers are proponents of the concept of "duality", where there is no right or wrong (as long as they're happy!) and they maintain this through delusion, or an escape from reality - but there is no escape:
"After 70 years I thought we could start to recognize the reality of our families and how they behaved during the war," Mr. Jardin tells me in an interview from Paris. "The core of the problem is that I have not spoken about monsters. My grandfather was not a monster. I have spoken about what 'very nice people' did in France when they accepted collaboration with Nazism. I did not realize I would provoke such anger. So long as we were putting authentic monsters on trial—like Maurice Papon for example—no one was worried. But to lift the lid on the question of the responsibility of people who were 'moral' during the collaboration has totally panicked French society."
The reaction to Mr. Jardin's book tells us as much about France as does the work itself. As Mr. Jardin observes, "It expressed something very powerful inside French society: the desire to protect the honor of our families, while in reality the large majority in France were behind Pétain during the Second World War. . . . With the liberation, France threw herself behind Gaullism with such fervor because we were ashamed of our behavior. He [de Gaulle] offered us his glory. . . it seemed to me that 70 years on we could tear up this pact and come to terms with reality. But this has provoked incredible emotion."
Most historians, and renowned Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, remain unmoved, pointing to Mr. Jardin's lack of archival proof. But Mr. Jardin has at least one powerful supporter for his claim that Jean was fully aware of the atrocity of July 1942.
"A few weeks ago I found myself around a table at the Elysée with [French President Nicolas] Sarkozy, at a lunch with three writers and a journalist and a historian," Mr. Jardin recounts. "The historian suddenly said to me: 'But you don't have a lot of proof against your grandfather; [Mr.] Sarkozy got up out of his chair, cut her off and said 'Madame, I have had a lot of chiefs of staff.' He gave her a lesson explaining that a chief of staff was nothing like a government departmental head. It was evident listening to [Mr.] Sarkozy that the prime minister's chief of staff could not but be intimately associated with the decision.
All the same, in Mr. Jardin's telling, the historian insisted that "'that did not constitute proof.'" Then, "[Mr.] Sarkozy's temperature rose and he said something incredible which came from his gut: 'Madame if I asked [French Interior Minister and Mr. Sarkozy's former chief of staff] Claude Guéant to organize a round-up of 13,000 Jews next week in Paris, whatever the circumstances, I know Claude would resign. His [Mr. Jardin's] grandfather did not resign.' Then [Mr.] Sarkozy turned to me and said: 'I don't understand why there is a polemic.'"
As Mr. Jardin sees it, a certain moral code, exemplified by his "loyal" grandfather, was crucial to the Vichy machine. "In the end it was not at all necessary to be a monster to participate in the worst. There was an anti-Semitism of the state. Men like my grandfather were prepared to do absolutely anything to preserve a little fragment of national sovereignty," Mr. Jardin observes. "They preferred that the French police came to arrest Jewish families rather than let the German police do it. It is disturbing. In any case in my family there has not been any [feeling of] guilt after the war. My grandfather had the feeling of having done good. It is incredible."
Incredible, indeed. And this is what we live with today - with the Oprah's and the Ellen's,Huffington's and Knight's, the Deepak's and Hay's and the Ray's and Maclaine's - the unending idea that, no matter what harm they and their "beliefs" have brought to other's lives, they are somehow doing good. Hell, even psychics who are busted in crimes, red handed, claim as much. But, one day, this, too, will all be exposed as a lie.
And, like France, the entire society that protected and promoted them will be determined to be complicit.
So enjoy it while it lasts, people - smile! These are the good times!
Look, the Hacienda Restaurant messed up by being too direct with the advertising. All they have to do now is quietly hook up with Cafe' Gratitude (or Panda Express) and this stuff will blow over in no time. The trick in the 2011 world of American restaurants is to make cultism's mystic mayhem™ of murder and madness a normal part of the atmosphere. For instance, next time, the Hacienda might want to advertise their poisoned Kool-Aid as a "free" drink.
"How many of us could survive for 48 hours away from prepared food, shelter and a tarred road?"
The answer was six days, in the case of French fugitives Dr Philippe Meniere and his partner Agnes Jardel, who died at their Karoo hide-out this week.
Among the reclusive couple's belongings was Don't Die in the Bundu, an ex-Rhodesian army survival guide published in 1967, which opens with the question about survival.
Meniere, 60, and Jardel, 55, evaded capture by nearly 100 police with tracker dogs and helicopters on a 3000ha farm in the Northern Cape in a six-day drama which gripped the country.
They covered the soles of their hiking boots with cloth to disguise their tracks and carried a small arsenal of weapons.
Rough terrain and windy conditions contributed to the length of time it took to find the couple, said the man who headed the search, Colonel Tip Brink.
In the end it was thermal imaging equipment fitted to a helicopter and a tip-off from a resident which led police to their hide-out - a building just 500m from the farm house where they had lived rent free for a decade, and prepared for the end of the world.
Hawks spokesman McIntosh Polela said yesterday that a postmortem would take place in Kimberley this week. Officials from the French Embassy were tracing people in Paris - where Meniere practised before registering as a general practitioner in South Africa in 1983 - to help identify the bodies.
Investigations are under way to determine whether the couple committed suicide or were killed by police.
When Meniere and Jardel moved to Sutherland, they were heeding the word of Ramtha, a man they believed lived 35000 years ago. They stockpiled food and had a collection of guns, ammunition, survival books and literature from the Ramtha School of Enlightenment. They joined the school in 1997 and attended seminars held in Johannesburg in 2004.
A US woman, JZ Knight, has claimed that Ramtha channels his wisdom through her; she has persuaded thousands of people around the world to join the school. Knight this week scrambled to distance herself from Meniere and Jardel, saying they had had no contact with her school since 2004.
"To link the two is preposterous," she said. "RSE is not a survival doomsday cult."
But the school's website tells a different story. Teachings from Ramtha on the site include:
• "One should not live in the cities ... in the days to come not only are the plagues to run rampant ... there will be murderers on the street who will rob your cupboards and slay you for only a sliver of bread";
• "You should learn to plant seeds, grow and harvest your own food without chemicals, and then prepare food storage for at least two years and more";
• "You will find storms that unleash a violence that you have never seen before ... seek dry ground, higher ground, away from that which is called the oceans"; and
• "Put up food and become sovereign and have lots of water ... work towards a point that regardless of what would happen with the world, you could continue to sustain yourself".
The school is advertising retreats in Rustenburg in North West in May and October, at a cost of up to $1350 a head.
Well it's a good thing J.Z. Knight's Ramtha School of Enlightenment isn't "a survival doomsday cult" - as opposed to just an ordinary cult - or else the old broad might have something to answer for. As long as it's just a cult, then everybody can relax and go back to whatever "perfectly normal" thing they were doing before all this started - like watching Oprah sell "The Secret", or movies that attempt to get you worried about the world ending in 2012.
A French couple being evicted from a Sutherland farm allegedly shot dead a policeman, wounded another, then chased a third policeman and the farmer’s sons in a bakkie through the bush for four kilometres.
The couple, heavily armed, slender, and believed to be wearing khaki or camouflage, have fled on foot into the hills.
Two helicopters, police trackers and a large police ground crew are searching for them.
Philippe and Agnis Neniere are believed to be survival experts. They are said to belong to the Ramtha School of Enlightenment, a cult started in 1988 in rural Yelm, Washington State in the US.
The couple – he in his 60s and she in her 50s – had lived on the farm Hardie about 35km from Sutherland for 12 years but were being evicted by owner Gerhardus du Plessis because of their bizarre behaviour.
"Their bizarre behaviour." See? No schizophrenia, no weird political views, no nothin'. Just a culture of narcissism, coupled with a hefty dose of mind-bending nonsense, and - viola! - we got some more dead folks!
Except, this time, the dead and wounded are just a cop and some ordinary people (not a judge and a 9-year old girl, with a congresswoman shot in head) so y'all can go back to ignoring NewAge like always, thinking it's "harmless" and applauding Oprah for promoting it - now over an entire network!
Yes indeedie, this is just the way life's supposed to be with NewAge/Nazi beliefs,...Hammer Time!
We love the search terms that bring people to this blog - especially when we consider what they're finding once they arrive. (Anyone looking for "Lovely Rielle Hunter" is definitely in for a surprise!) Here's some of todays - with "big ups" to the Louise Hay haters out there - y'all's learning:
This is the image most people have when they hear the words "cult" or "cultists" - but we know most cultists aren't that obvious - so what's the indicator a person is a cultist?
Let's take a look at a few of the most well-known cultists and see if you can spot it:
“[Glen Cunningham] said he decided to do the interview as a way to help people.
'There’s a lot of people who have approached me about their decision to get out of the [Ramtha] school,' Cunningham said. 'I tell them my stories and it helps them.'
'(Knight) is a very charismatic person,' he said. 'You want to be around her until you get to know her.'
'(But) she’s a drama queen; she likes to have drama in her life.'
...Cunningham also said that he considers RSE to be a cult.
'It’s just like any other cult,' he said. 'All the things they do now are cult activities.'
'I saw 1,200 people who would drink the Kool-Aid,' he said in the online video.
Since leaving RSE, Cunningham has kept fairly quiet on his experience.
Occasionally he warns people how it is so they 'don’t waste their money.'
'I think people have been disenchanted with things,' Cunningham said. 'There are too many dead people who came here to get cured.'
He recalls when a woman suffering from cancer arrived at the school hoping to be cured. In front of everyone, Ramtha hugged her and told her she was free of the disease.
'The whole school is a lie and she’s dead,' he said. 'I saw a lot of them that thought this was going to be their answer, but it wasn’t.'
Through all his experiences, Cunningham doesn’t hold any harsh feelings towards Knight.
He refutes claims made by Knight supporters that he hates the channeler.
“I don’t, because she’s a very brilliant woman,' Cunningham said.
'I just feel sorry for her.'
'She’s got herself in this thing to where she can’t get out. It’s the rest of her life.'”
-- Glen Cunningham, J.Z. Knight's former bodyguard, backing up everything J.Z. Knight's ex-husband said, to Megan Hansen of the Nisqually Valley News.
Yes, kids, once again, little by little, it's all starting to unravel. And this should speak volumes about Knight's chief competitor, the evil Shirley MacLaine, and everyone who helped Knight make those two stupid movies, "What The Bleep Do We Know?", and "What The Bleep Do We Know?: Down The Rabbit Hole," too. It's all a lie - especially the claim to love others.
I remember my ex-wife went to see those movies, and though she wasn't swept away by them, she still returned a changed woman, emboldened by knowing this was a mass cult phenomena, and determined to disrupt everything around her - especially me. (I had no idea what was going on, which was the whole manipulative point.) That's all this stuff is about. That's all it's ever been: pick your level and fuck with the innocents. Just as Cunningham describes here, my ex-wife, too, started compulsively listening to mind control tapes on headphones, and, eventually, became convinced she - a secretary with massive gold fillings in her teeth, and who needed glasses so badly she didn't feel comfortable driving at night - was somehow a god. As you can tell from watching this video, things tend to get very weird when someone gets into cultish thinking, but that's nothing compared to what it's like for those of us who aren't in it. I mean, I knew my wife had lost her mind, I just never had any idea how or why. Now, I'm practically an expert on these subjects, but then? I knew nothing except I wasn't into it.
Anyway, we're divorced now - and my life has finally been disrupted beyond my wildest dreams. In that, they have (all) been successful. They've "changed the vibration of the planet" - so I'm a conservative now, determined to rock their world. I hope they're happy.
The normal-looking guy above is Jeff Knight, former husband of J.Z. Knight, the cult leader whose bullshit fuels the hit movies What The Bleep Do We Know? and What The Bleep Do We Know?: Down The Rabbit Hole. This is an interview he did in 1992, after his divorce and realization he had been involved in a cult.
Check out the crazy scene he paints for us: How he was told he and J.Z. were "soul mates" - by her then-current husband. ("Soul mates" is a cult phrase that's wound it's way into the larger culture's vocabulary.) How he actually believed she could channel "Ramtha" (or "Ram") a 35,000 year old space being who could predict events on earth. How she brainwashed him and took away his business. How she cheated on him, lied to him, divorced him, and then left him with nothing but her delusional ideas. How she, and Shirley MacLaine, talk of peace while viciously competing for followers. How, years later, he still couldn't "move on".
Check out the crazy scene he paints for us. And then ask yourself:
Why are filmmakers trying to spread J.Z. Knight's influence in What The Bleep Do We Know? and What The Bleep Do We Know?: Down The Rabbit Hole?
