Synopsis

Through Oprah Winfrey’s remarkable influence, motivational speaker and author Eckhart Tolle’s teachings have become a staple for the spiritually hungry. Tolle’s message, however, consists of an eclectic mix of ideas from Eastern Religions (e.g., Buddhism and Hinduism), the Mind Sciences, and the New Age Movement, which he weaves together into a unique belief system. Central to his teaching is the belief that the ego (rational thoughts, emotions, memories, perceptions, and self) is an illusion hiding us from the truth that all is one and all is God (monistic pantheism). This “truth,” in Tolle’s view, is not discerned through objective means, but through subjective experience and is not exclusive to a single religion. Tolle teaches that one discerns the core of truth in all religions by a subjective “inner knowing.”

There are several flaws in Tolle’s teaching. The idea that all is one and all is god is refuted by the clear teaching of the Bible. Subjective spiritual experiences are notoriously unreliable and must be tested in light of the objective standard of Holy Scripture. Contrary to Tolle’s belief, the world’s religions at their core are not compatible with one another. Finally, the spiritual counsel Tolle offers leads to absurd solutions to real-life problems.

Imagine being set free from nagging thoughts that well up feelings of shame. Or imagine experiencing a connection with a cosmic reality greater than yourself that offers safety, security, and self-improvement. Eckhart Tolle, spiritual teacher and author of bestsellers The Power of Now: A Spiritual Guide to En­light­enment¹ and A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose,² claims to have realized such desirable states of being and seeks to pass on his spiritual wisdom to others. Tolle believes, further, that the spiritual awakening that he hopes to induce in others constitutes “the next step in human evolution”³ and is “the key to ending conflict and suffering throughout the world.”⁴ In reality, however, the spiritual teaching of Tolle is like a cosmic hot fudge sundae with extra nuts, whipped cream, and maraschino cherries laced with arsenic—certainly tantalizing, but nutritionally impotent and ultimately toxic.

Born in Germany, Tolle graduated from the University of London and studied at Cambridge University. At the age of twenty-nine he experienced “a profound inner trans­form­a­tion,” which altered the course of his life.⁵ He came to realize that the “self” by which he identified himself, which he thoroughly loathed, was not his true identity; and through this realization he experienced a psychological release wherein his false sense of self gave way to his true identity, which he describes as “pure consciousness.” Here is how he tells of this awakening:

I was deeply identified with a very unhappy, egoic entity I believed was “me.” For years I lived in depression and continuous anxiety. One night I couldn’t stand it anymore. The thought came into my mind, “I cannot live with myself any longer.” Then I saw that my thought contained a subject and an object: I and myself. I stood back from the thought and asked, “Who is the self that I cannot live with? There must be two here. Who am I, and who is the self that is impossible to live with?” In that moment, that mind-based sense of self collapsed. What remained was I—not the form “I,” not the story-based “I,” the mental story of me—but a deeper sense of being, of presence. I died that night psychologically. The mind-made entity died. I knew myself as pure consciousness, prior to form before it becomes something, before it becomes a thought, before it becomes a life-form: the One Life, the One Consciousness that is prior to egoic identity. Then came enormous peace.⁶

After his spiritual epiphany, Tolle devoted a few years to “understanding, integrating and deepening that trans­form­ation,” which eventually led him into his career as a spiritual advisor to others.⁷ Since the publication of his first book, The Power of Now, he has gained a significant following, with his most renowned disciple being Oprah Winfrey. Actress Meg Ryan initially gave the New Age matriarch The Power of Now, which Oprah found to be “life changing.” In reading A New Earth, Oprah purports to have experienced many more spirit­ual “aha” moments.⁸ Through Oprah’s unsettling influence, Tolle’s teachings have spread like wildfire, as she has promoted A New Earth via her book club and has hosted a massively attended online class with Tolle as the instructor.

One cannot deny that something profound happened to Tolle. As tested by the teachings of the Bible, however, what Tolle discovered is not ultimate truth. Despite the prevalence of Christian terms (e.g., Jesus, sin, and salvation) and biblical passages in his writings, an examination of the core of his message reveals an eclectic mix of ideas from Eastern Religions (e.g., Buddhism and Hinduism), the Mind Sciences, and the New Age Movement, which are woven together into a belief system that has no resemblance to true Christianity. Indeed, in reading Tolle, one must learn to scale a language barrier as he redefines Christian terms and concepts in light of esoteric Eastern spirituality. Some of the more troubling aspects of his teachings include monism, pantheism, pluralism, and relativism.

MONISM

Tolle’s belief system begins with the notion that within every­one is the “ego” or the “illusory self.”⁹ As mentioned, this ego is not one’s true identity, but a distortion, and the ego forms the basis for all misinterpretation of reality.¹⁰ In order to attain spiritual awakening, then, one must identify the complex way the “ego” functions¹¹ and perceive the false reality generated by it. He writes,

When forms that you identified with, that gave you your sense of self, collapse or are taken away, it can lead to a collapse of the ego, since ego is identification with form. When there is nothing to identify with anymore, who are you? When forms around you die or death approaches, your sense of Beingness, of I Am, is freed from its entanglement with form: Spirit is released from its imprisonment in matter. You realize your essential identity as formless, as an all-pervasive Presence, of Being prior to all forms, all identifications. You realize your true identity as consciousness itself, rather than what consciousness had identified with. That’s the peace of God. The ultimate truth of who you are is not I am this or I am that, but I Am.¹²

According to Tolle, the entire universe, despite the appear­ance of seemingly infinite forms, is essentially one thing. This is known philosophically as monism—the view that all is one. Such diverse and wondrous things, then, as “flowers, crystals, precious stones, and birds” are simply “temporary manifestations of the underlying one Life, one Consciousness.”¹³ In other words, the myriad perceived forms are manifestations of the same reality. It is the mind that creates “an opaque screen of concepts, labels, images, words, judgments, and definitions that blocks all true relationship,” which gives the appearance that an individual is distinct from the rest of the universe; but this is ultimately “the illusion of separateness.”¹⁴

The monism of Tolle, however, is contrary to Scripture. The problem becomes clear when one carefully considers what it means in the orthodox Christian view for God to be both immanent¹⁵ and transcendent.¹⁶ God and creation are in intimate relationship with one another but ontologically (essentially or substantially) separate from each other. God, according to Scripture, sustains and interacts person­ally with creation (Gen. 2:7; Exod. 29:45; Matt. 10:29; Acts 17:27; Col. 1:17; Heb. 1:3, 10); He also, however, transcends crea­tion (Deut. 4:39; 10:14; 1 Kings 8:27; Ps. 113:5, 6; Acts 17:24–25; Eph. 4:6). He is not the creation, nor is the creation a part of His being. Tolle, however, believes intimacy between God and man exists because there is no ontological difference between the two; they are ultimately the same, and any observed differences are, in his opinion, just an illusion.

Tolle’s monism, moreover, renders certain virtues worthless. If the universe is just one thing, then virtues such as love and tolerance become meaningless. Since an aspect of love involves one person performing an act of selfless compassion toward another person, and inasmuch as monism denies love’s prerequisite of the existence of two distinct persons, monism is incompatible with real love. Monism is also incompatible with tolerance, since this virtue involves one person putting up with the conflicting beliefs and/or practices of another person. Love and tolerance, then, are virtues that presuppose a universe with multiple beings and cannot exist in a universe of only one being. Oprah, ironically, would be hard-pressed to find in Tolle’s universe any value for her acts of philanthropy, since she would not be showing compassion to a distinct other person. Her acts of kindness are really a remnant of the Christian worldview in which she was raised.

PANTHEISM

A corollary to Tolle’s monistic universe is the belief in a pantheistic deity. Pantheism is the idea that all is God and God is all.¹⁷ After quoting from the Upanishads (part of the Hindu scriptures), Tolle declares, “God, the scripture is saying, is formless consciousness and the essence of who you are.”¹⁸ He also explains that conscious­ness “is the unmanifested, the eternal….Consciousness itself is timeless and therefore does not evolve. It was never born and does not die.”¹⁹ Again he writes, “Being is the eternal, ever-present One Life beyond the myriad forms of life that are subject to birth and death. However, Being is not only beyond but also deep within every form as its innermost invisible and indestructible essence. This means that it is accessible to you now as your own deepest self, your true nature.”²⁰ Tolle, therefore, not only understands the universe to be one thing, but believes that that one thing is conscious Being.

Tolle also prefers not to use the word “God,” because he believes it is an inadequate term to use when referring to an infinitely transcendent being. He explains that “God has become empty of meaning through thousands of years of misuse.” It is also a “closed concept” that leads one to create “a mental representation of someone or something outside…almost inevitably a male some­one or something.” Although Tolle thinks “God” and “Being” are both inadequate words, he opts for the latter because it is an “open concept” and “does not reduce the infinite invisible to a finite entity.”²¹ Whether we use the word “God” or “Being,” however, in Tolle’s view each represents that which is ultimately indistinguishable from the universe.

Pantheism logically leads to absurdity, particularly given the idea that people can come to the realization that they are, in reality, God or Being. As we have seen, Tolle teaches that God or Being is infinite, timeless, and changeless consciousness and also that in our true essence or nature we, too, are infinite, timeless, and changeless consciousness. If we come to realize this truth, however, as Tolle did at twenty-nine years of age, then we have changed. We, therefore, cannot be actually infinite, timeless, and changeless consciousness in our essence, and Tolle is mistaken in believing that his spiritual experience was a glimpse into his own true identity as Being.²²

That God is infinite means not only that He is endless in terms of existence, but that He is boundless in terms of all of His attributes; He is not constrained by any limitations. He is, therefore, eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent, and omnipresent.²³ God does not change with respect to these attributes. This is the nature of an infinite God. He cannot age, for He is eternal with no beginning or end. He cannot grow tired or be hindered by an obstacle, because He is all-powerful. He cannot be ignorant of anything or need an education, because He knows all things. His love never fails. He cannot be confined to a location or move from one place to another, for He is immediately present to all things.

Finite creatures such as humans, however, do not possess God’s incommunicable, infinite qualities. Humans are born and experience time. Human existence does extend beyond the grave in everlasting life or everlasting condemnation; however, although human existence has no end, it still has a beginning. God’s existence has neither beginning nor end. Humans have varying degrees of strength, knowledge, and love. As they naturally mature from infancy to adulthood, their capacity of strength, knowledge, and love also matures. Even before the fall, Adam could exercise strength, know­ledge, and love only in accordance with his good but finite nature. Humans can find faster ways to get from one place to another, but they remain limited by time and space. As mentioned, Tolle cannot be God, since he experiences change and personal growth, which the infinite, eternal, and changeless God does not experience at all.

TRUTH, PLURALISM, AND RELATIVISM

Tolle acknowledges that his oneness view of the universe must account for the diversity of religious ideas we encounter in the world. He attempts to resolve this tension by positing that substantive truth cannot be found in any single religion, though partial truth may be present in many religions. He finds certain concepts taught by other spiritual teachers (Buddha, Jesus, and so forth) to be helpful; however, he states that these teachings were only “precursors” to the ultimate truth, and “their message became largely misunderstood and often greatly distorted. It certainly did not transform human behavior, except in a small minority of people.”²⁴

Tolle declares, moreover, “All religions are equally false and equally true, depending on how you use them. You can use them in the service of the ego, or you can use them in the service of the Truth.”²⁵ This happens, he teaches, because religions may start with truth, but over time they get corrupted.²⁶ In other words, the major religions never effectively recovered “the transformative power of the original teachings.”²⁷ All religions, therefore, Tolle believes, offer only glimpses of truth, and no religion has the total truth.

When dealing with any clear disparity between his teachings and other religions, Tolle notes, “Man made ‘God’ in his own image. The eternal, the infinite, and unnameable was reduced to a mental idol that you had to believe in and worship as ‘my god’ or ‘our god.’”²⁸ The truth, then, according to Tolle, rests in the continuity of ideas that all religions have with one another. Elaborating on the idea of man making God in his own image, he explains,

If you go deep enough in your religion, then you all get to the same place. It’s a question of going deeper, so there’s no conflict here. The important thing is that religion doesn’t become an ideology….the moment you say “only my belief” or “our belief” is true, and you deny other people’s beliefs, then you’ve adopted an ideology. And then religion becomes a closed door. But, potentially, religion can also be an open door.²⁹

Any contradiction between religious beliefs thus, Tolle believes, can be attributed to a manmade construct or ideology, and not to the truth; conversely, any agreement between the beliefs among religions (which there must be, since they are the same, he believes, at their core) is the truth.

In reality, all religions are not the same at their core. Hindu­ism at its core affirms pantheistic monism, in which many gods and human personalities appear to interact with each other, but do no such thing, since they are ultimately just extensions of the one absolute reality of the impersonal Brahman. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, on the other hand, all affirm the existence of a monotheistic God who is ontologically separate from His crea­tion.³⁰ Moreover, Christianity at its core affirms that the one true and living God is triune,³¹ whereas Judaism and Islam teach a strictly Unitarian deity. The list of incompatible core teachings among the world’s religions is extensive.

Quite disparate religions might have externally common features (e.g., the moral imperative to feed the poor), but even at this level it becomes clear on analysis that fundamental differences exist (e.g., why we should feed the poor). The Christian belief in salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ and the good works that follow in response to salvation should not be confused with the Buddhist realization of suffering and its Eightfold Path to eliminate suffering.³²

Pointing out the distinguishing features of religion, moreover, is simply telling the truth, not advocating an “ideology,” as Tolle would have us believe. If when a student answers on her math test that “1 + 1 = 3” and the teacher marks it incorrect, the teacher is not touting an ideology; the teacher is just pointing to truth.

Tolle’s final arbiter of truth, however, is subjective experience. He purports that “the New Testament contains deep spiritual truth as well as distortions,” with the latter occurring because of “a misunderstanding of Jesus’ teaching” or “because people had an agenda,” but teaches that by accessing one’s “inner knowing,” one can “sense what is true and what was added on or distorted.”³³

There are good reasons, however, to believe that the New Testament writers did not distort the teaching of Jesus. Since the writings of the New Testament can be dated prior to AD 70,³⁴ it is not likely that the writers had an opportunity to distort either His teaching, or teachings about Him. Not enough time had elapsed between the events and the writing for that to occur, and many eyewitnesses to the ministry of Jesus would have been around to correct any distortions or myths.³⁵

Tolle is also inconsistent in his own perspective on religion. He argues, on one hand, that those who make absolute truth-claims, like “only my belief” is true, are motivated by a deception of ideology. On the other hand, he asserts many absolute truth-claims in his own writings and teachings, including the truth-claim that those who make truth-claims are motivated by a deception of ideology! Tolle pronounces, moreover, that “millions are now ready to awaken because spiritual awakening is not an option anymore, but a necessity if humanity and the planet are to survive.”³⁶

Tolle certainly has no way of validating the truth-claim that his teaching is the one truth that can bring mass spiritual enlightenment for all humanity. He may have the testimony of his obscure spiritual epiphany, but he has no objective means of verifying his truth-claim. Christians, however, readily point to credible historical evidence for the bodily resurrection of Jesus in support of their belief in Him as God and Messiah. Only Jesus’ resurrection can account for the remarkable New Testament departure of the people of God from observance of the Mosaic Law concerning animal sacrifice.³⁷

SCRIPTURE TWISTING

The principal method Tolle uses to harmonize the Bible and Christian theology with other religions is an esoteric redefinition of terms based on his subjective experience. More directly, Tolle attempts to discern whatever “spiritual truth” is in a biblical passage by relying on an “inner knowing,” and this purely subjective knowing conforms to an Eastern spirituality—ideas drawn from Hinduism, Buddhism, Mind Sciences, and the New Age Movement. For example, the “new earth” (Rev. 21:1; cf. Isa. 65:17) is “the outer forms created by awakened doing.”³⁸ The term “sin” is redefined as “to miss the point of human existence” (emphasis in original).³⁹ Jesus’ words, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), are not a declaration of being humanity’s only means of entering into a relationship with the Almighty, but “the innermost I Am, the essence identity of every man and woman, every life-form, in fact.”⁴⁰ Elsewhere, Tolle teaches on the “transformation of human consciousness” and makes the following error: “In Hindu teachings (and sometimes in Buddhism also), this transformation is called enlightenment. In the teachings of Jesus, it is salvation, and in Buddhism, it is the end of suffering. Liberation and awakening are other terms used to describe this transformation” (emphases in original).⁴¹

Tolle’s method of biblical interpretation is not new, as many cults follow the same pattern of twisting Scripture to accord with their heresies. His method, again, is to interpret whatever biblical text he encounters in such a way as to conform with his subjective views of his own experience, which are influenced by Eastern spirituality. Insofar as his method of biblical interpretation is driven by untestable subjectivity, there is no exegetical warrant to adopt his interpretations. In addressing a concerned student on her observation of discrepancies between his teaching and what she learned being brought up a Catholic, Tolle responds,

Well, religion can be an open doorway into spirituality, and religion can be a closed door. It prevents you from going deeper.…And when I went through this inner transformation, and for the first time accidentally I picked up a copy of the New Testament at my mother’s place.[sic] And I started reading and I immediately recognized the deep truths that is there, and I realize the truth that is deeper, that is expressed in what Jesus said, is much deeper than what you, how the church interprets it.[sic] There’s a depth to it. And it reflects your own depth when you read it. So there’s no conflict between this teaching, which is purely spiritual, and any religion….Because if you go deep enough in your religion, then you all get to the same place. It’s a question of going deeper, so there’s no conflict here.⁴²

Tolle’s method of interpreting the Bible, then, begins with his “inner transformation,” which allows him to discover for the first time deeper truths than what the student or the church has ever understood. This spiritualizing of the text, he believes, prevents the Bible from conflicting with the teachings of other religions.

Sound hermeneutics, by contrast, requires the Bible student to discover the message that the inspired author intended to com­mu­ni­cate to his original audience, which involves under­standing what each passage meant within its original historical and grammatical context. Once the student discovers the objective interpretation, he or she can draw out a personal application.⁴³ The spiritual message Tolle attempts to read into the biblical text, however, is utterly foreign to the first-century Jewish context of Jesus’ teachings and the inspired writings of the New Testament.⁴⁴

AWAKENING TO MISS LIFE’S PURPOSE

Tolle’s teaching in general focuses on practical ways to identify the complex deceptions that the ego allegedly manufactures, offering spiritual exercises to awaken to a true consciousness. These spiritual exercises are not benign; rather, they reaffirm the practitioner’s belief in the erroneous aspects of his metaphysical worldview (e.g., monism, pantheism, and so forth), and consequently lead practitioners into adopting absurd solutions to real-life problems, ultimately missing out on the whole purpose of life in general.

One absurd solution to real-life problems derived from Tolle’s spirituality is the discouragement of rational thought. The quest to understand “Being,” according to Tolle, is already within one’s deepest self. “But don’t seek to grasp it with your mind,” he advises. “Don’t try to understand it. You can know it only when the mind is still. When you are present, when your attention is fully and intensely in the Now, Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally.”⁴⁵ Apparently, thinking is “the root of the ego.”⁴⁶

Another example of Tolle’s absurd solutions to real-life problems is seen in an aspect of the alleged ego called the “pain-body,” which dwells within each person. He teaches that this is a “semi-autonomous psychic entity,” which is formed by “negative emotions that were not faced, accepted, and then let go in the moment they arose” and are “stored in the cells of the body.”⁴⁷ Tolle says there is also a “collective human pain-body containing the pain suffered by countless human beings throughout history.”⁴⁸ He believes the “pain-body” is the source and cause of our negative experiences. For example,

When you realize that pain-bodies unconsciously seek more pain, that is to say, that they want something bad to happen, you will understand that many traffic accidents are caused by drivers whose pain-bodies are active at the time. When two drivers with active pain-bodies arrive at an intersection at the same time, the likelihood of an accident is many times greater than under normal circumstances. Unconsciously they both want the accident to happen.⁴⁹

Tolle also believes that the active “pain-body” energy of one person can be transferred to another. He realized this through experiencing a series of events, which began with an intense counseling session with a female client with lots of emotional baggage. A few minutes after the session had ended and the woman left, a friend came into the room where the counseling took place and blurted, “The energy feels heavy and murky—it almost makes me feel sick. You need to open the windows, burn some incense.” Tolle later had dinner in a restaurant and witnessed an outburst by another patron. He then concluded, “I suspected that the universal human pain-body had come back to tell me, ‘You thought you defeated me. Look, I’m still here.’ I also considered the possibility that the released energy field left behind after our session followed me to the restaurant and attached itself to the one person in whom it found a compatible vibrational frequency, that is to say, a heavy pain-body.”⁵⁰

If one grants the plausibility of a worldview like Tolle’s in which God is indistinguishable from the universe, perhaps something like a pain-body hypothesis has some explanatory power. As we have seen, however, such a worldview is wholly incompatible with a biblical worldview and cannot stand up to the harsh light of reason. Without such a pantheistic monism in which to adhere, Tolle’s pain-body hypothesis has no credible rationale to commend it. It seems instead simply fanciful.

The way Tolle describes the activity of the “pain-body” also creates a confusing system of ethics, particularly in the way one determines right and wrong, as well as reward and punishment. After posing the question, “Does this mean that people are not responsible for what they do when possessed by the pain-body?” Tolle answers, “How can they be? How can you be responsible when you are unconscious, when you don’t know what you are doing? However, in the greater scheme of things, human beings are meant to evolve into conscious beings, and those who don’t will suffer the consequences of their unconsciousness. They are out of alignment with the evolutionary impulse of the universe.”⁵¹ Tolle’s answer is a paradox: because people who are governed by the “pain-body” are unconscious of reality, they cannot be held responsible for what the “pain-body” makes them do; nonetheless, they will continue to suffer the consequences of their unconscious actions until they learn their lesson and become conscious.

Tolle therefore sees the “pain-body” playing a role in enlight­en­ment. He reasons, “When you can’t stand the endless cycle of suffering anymore, you begin to awaken. So the pain-body too has its necessary place in the larger picture.”⁵² The “pain-body,” then, is a source of traumatic experiences, but also part of the process of awakening to the truth.

Since Tolle’s monistic and pantheistic universe is untenable, no good reason exists for one to think that life’s purpose is to employ Tolle’s spiritual techniques to detach oneself from the illusion of the self (i.e., one’s thoughts, feelings, memories, individuality, relationships, and social status) to awaken to the ultimate reality of Being. Commitment to his false spiritual quest is missing life’s purpose. The Christian, however, can look to the certainty of the resurrection of Jesus Christ as evidence of the truthfulness of His message. Christ taught that life’s ultimate purpose is to enter by faith into a relationship with God through the way He forged via His own death and resurrection. Becoming a redeemed creation eternally worshipping the Creator is what God intended from the beginning.

Warren G. Nozaki received his M.Div. from Talbot School of Theology and is a research specialist at the Christian Research Institute (CRI). This article was first published in booklet form for CRI under the title of Paradise Still Lost in a New Earth: Exposing the Errors of Eckhart Tolle (Charlotte, NC: Christian Research Institute, 2008).

notes

1 Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Spiritual Guide to Enlightenment (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2004).

2 Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (New York: Plume, 2005).

3 “Biography,” Eckhart Teachings, http://eckharttolle.com/eckhart_biography, accessed March 28, 2008.

4 Tolle, A New Earth, back cover; cf. “Biography,” Eckhart Teachings.

5 “Biography,” Eckhart Teachings.

6 Kathy Juline, “The Presence of Now,” News, Interviews, Eckhart Teachings, http://eckharttolle.com/interviews_74, accessed March 28, 2008.

7 “Biography,” Eckhart Teachings.

8 “A New Earth Online Class: Chapter 1 Transcript,” Book Club, A New Earth, Oprah.com, http://images.oprah.com/images/obc_classic/book/2008/anewearth/ ane_chapter1_transcript.pdf, accessed March 28, 2008. As of this writing, A New Earth is number one on the New York Times Paperback Advice “Best Sellers” list and has been on the list for nine weeks; Tolle’s The Power of Now is number two on the same list and has been on the list for twenty-four weeks (http://www.nytimes.com/ 2008/03/ 30/books/bestseller/0330bestpaperadvice.html, accessed April 10, 2008).

9 Tolle, A New Earth, 27–28.

10 Ibid., 28.

11 Tolle explains in A New Earth that the ego is conditioned by past events consisting of “content” and “structure” (p. 34). The “content” aspect of the ego is conditioned by “environment,” “upbringing, and surrounding culture” (34), whereas the “structure” aspect of the ego brings the self into existence via identification with things (material and immaterial) (35), the body (gender identity, fitness, appearance, etc.) (49–52), and thought forms (thoughts and emotions) (53–54).

12 Tolle, A New Earth, 56–57.

13 Ibid., 3–4.

14 Eckhart Tolle, “You Are Not Your Mind,” News, Interviews, Eckhart Teachings, http://eckharttolle.com/interviews_72, accessed March 28, 2008.

15 God’s immanence refers to His “presence and activity within nature, human nature, and history” (Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology [Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1985], 302).

16 That God is transcendent means that He is superior to, separate from, and independent of creation (Erickson, 312).

17 Pantheism comes from the Greek words pan (all) and theos (God). For a pantheist, “God ‘is all in all.’ God pervades all things, contains all things, subsumes all things, and is found within all things. Nothing exists apart from God, and all things are in some way identified with God. The world is God, and God is the world. But more precisely, in pantheism all is God, and God is all” (Norman Geisler, Encyclopedia of Apologetics [Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999], 580).

18 Tolle, A New Earth, 219.

19 Ibid., 291. Tolle explains that the universe evolves over time and becomes conscious, though consciousness itself underlies the universe and is timeless and unchanging.

20 Tolle, “You Are Not Your Mind.”

21 Ibid.

22 See Tolle, A New Earth, 56–57.

23 The Scriptures attest to these attributes of God. He created the universe (Gen. 1:1; John 1:1–4), He is eternal (Col. 1:17), He is all-powerful (Ps. 147:5; Job. 11:7–9), He is all-knowing (Rom. 11:33), He is all-loving (1 John 4:7–10), and He is everywhere present (1 Kings 8:27; Isa. 40:12; 55:8–9; 66:1–2).

24 Tolle, A New Earth, 6.

25 Ibid., 70.

26 Ibid., 14–15.

27 Ibid., 16–17. Tolle also appears to incorporate terms and concepts from other world religions to describe the meticulous architecture of his belief system; however, he often abandons their original meaning (see discussion under “Scripture Twisting”).

28 Ibid., 15.

29 “A New Earth Online Class: Chapter 1 Transcript,” Oprah.com.

30 Monotheism holds that there is only one infinite, transcendent, eternal, almighty, perfect, and personal God, who alone created and sustains the world. Though God transcends the creation, He is also immanent in that He interacts with the creation.

31 Within the Being of the one true God exist three eternally distinct and coequal Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. These three Persons are the one true God.

32 For more on the incompatibility among the teachings of world religions, see Hank Hanegraaff, The Bible Answer Book (Nashville: J. Countryman, 2004); and James Sire, The Universe Next Door, 4th ed. (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004).

33 “Dear Eckhart,” Eckhart Teachings, http://eckharttolle.com/dear_eckhart_28, accessed March 28, 2008.

34 Cf. John A. T. Robinson, Redating the New Testament (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2000).

35 For more on the reliability of the New Testament, see Gary Habermas, The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence for the Life of Christ (Joplin, MO: College Press, 1996), Darrell L. Bock, Jesus according to Scripture: Restoring the Portrait from the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2002), and Michael J. Wilkins and J. P. Moreland, Jesus under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents the Historical Jesus (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995).

36 Eckhart Tolle, “The One Thing,” Books, A New Earth, Eckhart Teachings, http://eckharttolle.com/a_new_earth, accessed March 28, 2008.

37 See Hank Hanegraaff, Resurrection (Nashville: Word Publishing, 2000).

38 Kathy Juline, “Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose,” News, Interviews, Eckhart Teachings, http://eckharttolle.com/interviews_68, accessed March 28, 2008.

39 Tolle, A New Earth, 9.

40 Ibid., 71.

41 Ibid., 13.

42 “A New Earth Online Class: Chapter 1 Transcript.”

43 For further study, see Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003); Walter Russell, Playing with Fire: How the Bible Ignites Change in Your Soul (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2000); and R. C. Sproul, Knowing Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1977). See also Hank Hanegraaff, The Apocalypse Code (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2007).

44 For further study, see Habermas, The Historical Jesus; Bock, Jesus according to Scripture; and Wilkins and Moreland, Jesus under Fire.

45 Tolle, “You Are Not Your Mind.”

46 Tolle, A New Earth, 55.

47 “A New Earth Online Class: Chapter 2 Transcript,” Book Club, A New Earth, Oprah.com, http://images.oprah.com/images/obc_classic/book/2008/anewearth/ ane_chapter2_transcript.pdf, accessed March 28, 2008.

48 Juline, “Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose.”

49 Tolle, A New Earth, 162–63.

50 Ibid., 164–68.

51 Ibid., 163.

52 Ibid., 164.

SYNOPSIS

Promoted on The Oprah Winfrey Show and other media venues, The Secret has become the latest self-help phenomenon. It was initially available for viewing online and later became a bestselling DVD and book by Rhonda Byrne. Featuring two-dozen contributors, The Secret claims to solve all of life’s challenges through the power of thought.

The foundation of The Secret is the law of attraction, which states that our thoughts transmit like radio waves, throughout the universe, drawing either positive or negative experiences into our lives, allowing us to create our own reality. Thinking positively results in our drawing joy, financial prosperity, and good health, for example, into our lives.

The worldview of The Secret is monistic pantheism—all is one, all is divine. Everything is interconnected energy. Our positive thoughts tap into this energy and produce positive results in our lives. Our negative thoughts, conversely, bring negativity into our lives. As a result, The Secret is in the precarious position of stating that experiences such as rape and child molestation are the result of the thoughts of those who have suffered such horrors.

The Secret claims compatibility with Christianity, but it is anything but Christian. Jesus taught belief in a transcendent, personal, holy God who is distinct from His creation. Human beings are fallen and in need of radical redemption that involves real repentance before God for sins committed against His perfect law, and through belief in the death and resurrection of Christ, His Son, who was a sinless sacrifice on their behalf. We are not perfect divine beings with unlimited potential.

I feel it—that so many people are hungry for guidance and meaning in their lives, and The Secret offers some of that. It is the law of attraction. It says that the energy, that the thoughts and the feelings that you put out into the world, both good and bad, are exactly what is always coming back to you, so you have the life that you have created. I’ve been talking about this for years on my show, I just never called it The Secret.¹

So said Oprah Winfrey about the latest self-help phenomenon, The Secret. Initially released via the Internet (March 2006) as a pay-per-view video stream, and making its way to DVD as an “extended edition” (October 2006), The Secret² has since captured the attention of millions of people the world over. Followed by a bestselling book of the same title, The Secret is the result of the efforts of Rhonda Byrne, an Australian television writer and producer.

Perhaps the most pertinent questions for Christians are: What is The Secret? How does it claim to work? Is it compatible with Christianity?

What Is the Secret?

The Secret is a self-help technique founded on a principle called the law of attraction that is rooted in pantheism and designed to be applied to finances, relationships, health, spirituality—virtually every aspect of life. Featuring two-dozen contributors,³ The Secret claims to offer the means to a fulfilled life.

The Law of Attraction

The foundation of The Secret is the law of attraction—an impersonal force that individuals can manipulate with their thoughts in order to achieve what they want in their lives. “It is,” writes Byrne, “the law that determines the complete order in the Universe, every moment of your life, and every single thing you experience in your life…the law of attraction is forming your entire life experience, and this all-powerful law is doing that through your thoughts.”⁴

The Secret of the law of attraction has supposedly been known throughout the centuries by numerous individuals—such as Socrates, Plato, Newton, Beethoven, and Einstein—and religions—such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hermetic traditions.⁵

Several advocates of The Secret define the law of attraction similarly. “Thoughts become things,”⁶ explains author Mike Dooley. Entrepreneur John Assaraf says, “Thought has a frequency.”⁷ Michael Beckwith, cofounder of the Association for Global New Thought, elaborates on how thoughts create reality: “Every time an individual has a thought…they’re in the creation process. Something is going to manifest out of those thoughts.”⁸ Prentice Mulford (1834‑1891), a pioneer of New Thought (see explanation below), is quoted in support of the law of attraction: “Every thought of yours is a real thing—a force.”⁹ Those who accumulate wealth are said to know The Secret, whether “consciously or unconsciously. They think thoughts of abundance and wealth….It is the law of attraction in action.”¹⁰

The Secret repeats the theme, “Thoughts are magnetic, and thoughts have a frequency….You are a human transmission tower”¹¹ throughout. Mastering life, then, is a matter of mastering thoughts. Once one understands the law of attraction, putting it into action will result in health, wealth, love, joy—anything positive one may desire. All of this is built on a worldview foundation that is clearly at odds with theism.

Everything is Energy

Like many of the Mind Science religions, as well as forms of Hinduism, The Secret is based on pantheism, which sees everything as divine. In opposition to Christianity, which distinguishes between a transcendent God and created beings, The Secret is monistic, viewing all reality as one. The interconnectedness of all reality is also an aspect of the underlying worldview of The Secret.

Byrne writes, “We are all connected, and we are all part of the One Energy Field, or the One Supreme Mind, or the One Consciousness, or the One Creative Source…we are all One.”¹² Later she adds, “You are God in a physical body. You are Spirit in the flesh. You are Eternal Life expressing itself as You. You are a cosmic being. You are all power. You are all wisdom. You are all intelligence. You are perfection. You are magnificence. You are the creator, and you are creating the creation of You on this planet.”¹³ James Arthur Ray comments, “That means you have God potential and power to create your world.”¹⁴

Other contributors to The Secret agree. “Everything is energy,”¹⁵ explains Ben Johnson, a practitioner of energy-based medicine. “You’re not a finite body,” adds Ray, “you’re an energy field.”¹⁶ Assaraf concurs, noting, “We’re all connected…everything in the universe is connected, it’s just one energy field.”¹⁷ Author Lisa Nichols draws the typical New Age conclusion: “You’re source energy. You are God manifested in human form, made to perfection.”¹⁸

Ask and It Will Be Given

Byrne explains how one implements the law of attraction: “The Creative Process used in The Secret, which was taken from the New Testament in the Bible, is an easy guideline for you to create what you want in three simple steps.”¹⁹ What are the steps? Ask, believe, receive.

The “ask” step is really a command to the impersonal universe, which Ray likens to the story of Aladdin and the lamp.²⁰ Simply ask the genie for what you want and you’ve placed an order to the universe. The second step involves belief, which, according to Nichols, involves “unwavering faith,”²¹ although faith in what is never clarified. Byrne claims, “You must believe that you have received.”²² Continuing with the “genie” illustration, Byrne adds, “The Genie [i.e., the universe] is responding to your predominant thoughts all the time….That’s why after you’ve asked, you must continue to believe and know. Have faith. Your belief that you have it…is your greatest power.”²³ Finally, sit back, feel good, and receive what the law of attraction delivers.

THE ROOTS OF THE SECRET

If much of The Secret appears familiar, that’s because it is not new (or secret). The Secret is actually an amalgam of past teachings. The Secret lends itself to comparison to recent Word of Faith/Positive Confession teachings. Its techniques are reminiscent of those of Napoleon Hill (1883–1970), author of Think and Grow Rich (1937), and Norman Vincent Peale (1898‑1993), author of The Power of Positive Thinking (1952).

Mind Science

The Secret, most notably, however, is based on the Mind Science groups of the nineteenth century, which have much in common with each other. Significantly influenced by Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802‑1866), the Mind Science religions of the nineteenth century and beyond included the New Thought movement, which emphasized positive thinking (new thought) rather than negative thinking (old thought). Two prominent groups today that originated in that movement are Religious Science (founded by Ernest Holmes) and Unity School of Christianity (founded by Charles Fillmore). Another major Mind Science group is Christian Science (Mary Baker Eddy). Mind Science teachings contributed to what commonly was termed the New Age Movement in the 1970s and ‘80s and currently is referred to as the “new spirituality” or simply “spirituality.”

Byrne notes Charles Fillmore, the cofounder of Unity School, multiple times as an authority on the law of attraction.²⁴ Fillmore believed that the teachings of Unity School would provide health, wealth, and happiness to its adherents. Byrne’s “secret” makes similar claims based on similar beliefs.

The law of attraction, as promoted by The Secret, is derived from the teachings of New Thought. New Thought, not surprisingly, also adhered to pantheism, referring to the universe with such phrases as Universal Life Force. Since everything is divine, New Thought proponents believed in the divinity of every human being. Sin, however, being negative, is dismissed as illusory. Salvation or, more accurately, enlightenment, is the result of correcting our thinking.

This perspective, shared by The Secret, rips the heart out of the biblical view of Jesus Christ. It negates His Incarnation, His atoning sacrifice for human sins, and His provision of redemption, which is available only through Him. After all, if the concepts found in Mind Science religions, including New Thought and The Secret, are correct, then there really is no such thing as sin in a biblical sense, which is an affront to a holy, transcendent, personal God. New Thought reinterprets every aspect of Christian theology, particularly the nature of Christ. Jesus, consequently, is now separate from “the Christ,” or Christ consciousness, which everyone can attain by right thinking (using the law of attraction).

These Mind Science roots directly influenced advocates of The Secret. Byrne, for example, came to adopt this worldview when she was given a copy of the book The Science of Getting Rich (1910) by Wallace Wattles (1860‑1911), whose ideas were influenced by New Thought.

ASSESSING THE SECRET: PROSECUTING THE LAW OF ATTRACTION

Some may argue that the law of attraction is based on biblical principles. After all, we are told in 2Corinthians10:5 to “take captive every thought” and Philippians4:8 calls us to “think about” things that are “true,” “noble,” “right,” “pure,” “lovely,” and “admirable.” These passages, however, must be interpreted in the context of the Christian worldview. Second Corinthians10:5, for instance, reads, “Take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ,” while the Philippians passage, in context, is addressing God’s peace as found in a Christian framework, with the Christian view of God: a personal being, not an impersonal force.

The Secret aims to utilize thoughts in order to gain fulfillment and is used as a technique. Christianity, on the other hand, recognizes the reality of a holy God to whom we must answer and, as a result, pursues a relationship with God through Christ not as a technique, but because we are fallen beings in need of redemption and a restored relationship with our Creator.

Like any worldview founded on monistic pantheism, The Secret falls short of adequately accounting for personality, moral standards, and the reality of evil. The god of pantheism is an impersonal force or energy, incapable of expressing feelings such as love that Byrne and contributors to The Secret are so fond of noting.²⁵ If all is one, moreover, there is no basis for distinguishing right from wrong, good from evil, or moral from immoral.

Despite the impersonal underpinnings of the worldview of The Secret, Byrne wants it both ways—an impersonal universe that is somehow also personal. If our thoughts really do transmit on certain frequencies, as The Secret repeatedly claims, and through those frequencies they directly can communicate with the universe, then, for them to be recognized or understood, something in the universe at large must be personal. The worldview of The Secret, however, cannot support personality, much less personal interactions, without inherently contradicting its view that all is energy and that the law of attraction is impersonal and invariable.

The Secret and Science

Is The Secret scientific? According to the contributors, it is. As Ray puts it, “It’s a time where spiritual traditions and science are now in total agreement.”²⁶ Beckwith adds, “It’s scientific. It’s real.”²⁷ Author Bob Doyle claims, “the Law of Attraction…is a scientific principle.”²⁸ Physicist Fred Alan Wolf continues, commenting on the law of attraction, “Quantum physics really begins to point to this discovery.”²⁹ Jack Canfield, popular as cocreator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books, also calls on quantum physics to support The Secret: “If you go to quantum physics, we realize everything is energy, and what controls the flow of energy is thought and feeling.”³⁰

Does quantum physics really support the teachings of The Secret? Hardly. Quantum physics routinely is hijacked by those in the new spirituality in order to support their concept that everything is interconnected energy in a pantheistic, religious sense. As professor of physics and astronomy Victor Stenger³¹ puts it,

Quantum mechanics, the centerpiece of modern physics, is misinterpreted as implying that the human mind controls reality and that the universe is one connected whole that cannot be understood by the usual reduction to parts. However, no compelling argument or evidence requires that quantum mechanics plays a central role in human consciousness or provides instantaneous, holistic connections across the universe. Modern physics, including quantum mechanics, remains completely materialistic and reductionistic while being consistent with all scientific observations.³²

The Secret and Christianity

The Secret claims compatibility with the Bible, but, as we’ve seen, the underpinnings of its philosophy are anything but Christian. In a section extolling the virtues of “praise” and “blessing,” Byrne remarks, “Praise and bless everything in your life! When you are praising or blessing you are on the highest frequency of love.”³³ She then misinterprets a biblical view of praise and blessing, which is rooted in the reality of a transcendent and loving God, and writes, “In the Bible the Hebrews used the act of blessing to bring forth health, wealth, and happiness. They knew the power of blessing.”³⁴ Given the arduous trials that the Jews faced, as documented in the Old Testament, such as persecution and enslavement, it is difficult to see how they supposedly had mastered The Secret’s law of attraction.

Byrne also misappropriates the New Testament, implying that Jesus also knew The Secret: “The Creative Process used in The Secret, which was taken from the New Testament in the Bible, is an easy guideline for you to create what you want in three simple steps [ask, believe, receive].”³⁵ By implying that Jesus and, in turn, His followers, knew The Secret, Byrne again commits the error she made with her claim that the Hebrews knew The Secret. Jesus hardly could have used The Secret if He was persecuted, beaten, and ultimately executed for His beliefs. His followers fared no better, meeting untimely deaths as martyrs. These, moreover, were not wealthy individuals, despite the claims of The Secret for creating wealth (e.g., in 1Tim.6:8, Paul wrote, “But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that” (NIV).

Byrne’s biblical blunders continue when she later quotes the words of Jesus as found in Mark11:24 and alleges that they are teaching how to use the law of attraction:³⁶ “Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them” (KJV). Much like Word of Faith proponents, Byrne makes a mistake in the interpretation of this passage. It does not teach the law of attraction, which Byrne herself admits is impersonal;³⁷ instead it speaks of personal communion and interaction with the transcendent God of the universe—the loving, holy, and just Creator. Properly interpreted in light of other relevant passages (e.g., 1John5:14), Mark11:24 does not teach us to manipulate the law of attraction to gain health, wealth, and happiness.

Byrne’s greatest error of interpretation in referencing the Bible involves what Christian apologist James Sire calls “world-view confusion,” which occurs “whenever a reader of Scripture fails to interpret the Bible within the intellectual and broadly cultural framework of the Bible itself and uses instead a foreign frame of reference. In other words, rather than seeing a statement of Scripture as part of the whole biblical scheme of things, the reader or interpreter views it from a different standpoint and thus distorts the Bible, perhaps seriously, sometimes even reversing the meaning”³⁸ (emphasis in original). Byrne reads Mark11:24 through the lens of the law of attraction, rather than through the proper first-century lens of theistic Judaism.

The Secret On Evil and Suffering

Perhaps the greatest flaw in The Secret is its inability to adequately solve the problem of evil and suffering. If everything that comes into our lives is the result of our creating our own reality with our thoughts, then what is the explanation for those who have been raped, tortured, or worse? It is logical, according to the principles of The Secret, to conclude that even children who have been sexually abused or brutally murdered have brought these things on themselves. Such a view is, frankly, both monstrous and absurd; yet, The Secret affirms that suffering in our lives is our fault.

Metaphysician and hypnotherapist Joe Vitale explains:

Everything that’s around you right now in your life, including the things you’re complaining about, you’ve attracted. Now I know at first blush that’s gonna be something that you hate to hear. You’re gonna immediately say I didn’t attract the car accident, I didn’t attract this particular client….I’m here to be a little bit in your face and to say yes, you did attract it. And this is one of the hardest concepts to get, but once you’ve accepted it, it’s life transforming. This is part of the overall giant Secret here.³⁹

DOES THE SECRET WORK?

Despite the many flaws in The Secret, there are those who will remain committed to it because, in their view, it works. This pragmatic approach to The Secret is troubling because it speaks to the lack of discernment in our culture. The fact that someone claims that something “works” is supposedly a substitute for evidence, a substitute for testing everything and holding on to the good (1Thess.5:21). The question of truth is entirely avoided. It is this question of truth, however—whether or not The Secret corresponds to reality—that is paramount.

Does The Secret work? Some who have practiced its principles may have had success, but countless others have not and will not. For these people, The Secret will result in spiritual bondage because they will think the problem is with them when in reality the problem is with the system of The Secret and its many flaws.

Does It Matter whether The Secret Works?

It is true that, as Oprah Winfrey said on her program about The Secret, “so many people are hungry for guidance and meaning in their lives.” The Secret, however, is not the answer. Knowledge of the law of attraction is supposed to equip individuals to gain an abundance of health, wealth, and happiness. As Christ emphasized, however, our eternal destiny is far more important than the accumulation of worldly possessions: “What good will it be for you to gain the whole world, yet forfeit your soul?” (Matt.16:26 TNIV).

The true secret to a meaningful life is no secret at all, but is revealed openly in the pages of the Bible: God came to us in human form, died for our sins, and was bodily resurrected so that we would humble ourselves before Him, repent, and receive His gift of salvation. That gift is not mere temporal health and wealth, but eternal life in a relationship with the one true God.

notes

1. Oprah Winfrey, “One Week Later: The Huge Reaction to The Secret,” February 16, 2007, The Oprah Winfrey Show.

2. In this article, The Secret (neither italicized nor in quotations) refers to the general teachings while The Secret refers to the book and DVD, the latter being specified to avoid confusion.

3. A table has been prepared to supplement this article that lists the contributors to The Secret and provides relevant background information about them. It can be accessed at http://www.equip.org/atf/cf/{9c4ee03a-f988-4091-84bd-f8e70a3b0215}/ FATHESECRETCHART.PDF.

4. Rhonda Byrne, The Secret (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 5.

5. Ibid., 4.

6. Mike Dooley, The Secret DVD

7. John Assaraf, The Secret DVD.

8. Michael Beckwith, The Secret DVD.

9. Prentice Mulford, quoted in Byrne, The Secret DVD, 4.

10. Byrne, The Secret, 6.

11. Ibid., 10; see also, e.g., ix, x, 7, 10, 11, 25.

12. Ibid., 162.

13. Ibid., 164.

14. James Arthur Ray, in The Secret, 164.

15. Ben Johnson, The Secret DVD.

16. Ray, The Secret DVD.

17. Assaraf, The Secret DVD.

18. Lisa Nichols, The Secret DVD.

19. Byrne, The Secret, 47.

20. Ray, The Secret DVD.

21. Nichols, in The Secret, 48.

22. Byrne, The Secret,49.

23. Ibid., 50.

24. Ibid. See, e.g., xiv, 103, and 161.

25. Ibid., 30–33.

26. James Ray, “The Secret, The Oprah Winfrey Show, 8 February 2007.

27. Michael Beckwith, “The Secret, The Oprah Winfrey Show, 8 February 2007..

28. Bob Doyle, http://www.wealthbeyondreason.com.

29. Fred Alan Wolf, The Secret DVD.

30. Jack Canfield, “The Secret,” 8 February 2007, The Oprah Winfrey Show.

31. Although Stenger is an atheist, his insights into the misappropriation of quantum physics by those in the new spirituality are dead on.

32. Victor Stenger, “Quantum Quackery,” Skeptical Inquirer, January–February 1997, www.csicop.org/si/9701/quantum-quackery.html; accessed October 3, 2007. See also, Paul Reisser, Dale Mabe, and Robert Velarde, Examining Alternative Medicine (InterVarsity Press, 2001), 182–87.

33. Byrne, The Secret, 151.

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid., 47.

36. Ibid., 47ff., 54.

37. Ibid., 13, 27.

38. James Sire, Scripture Twisting (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1980), 26.

39. Joe Vitale, The Secret DVD.

Was I a New Ager? Technically speaking, the answer is No, since I became a Christian in 1970, and, as I explained in my article “What Is the New Age Movement?” (Forward, Summer 1985), the “New Age movement” did not take form until the mid 1970s when several distinct movements converged.

On the other hand, as I also pointed out in that article, one of those forerunning movements was the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s, and I was intensely (though briefly) involved with the New Age aspect of that. So I do believe that I understand today’s New Age movement from the inside out, and feel that in many ways my own experience typifies that of a generation. Perhaps you will agree after I share my story with you.

“BLESS ME FATHER, FOR I HAVE SINNED”

Until the age of seven I attended Sunday School in my Baptist grandparents’ church, and I remember having a warm feeling toward Jesus when I said my nightly prayers. Then my Catholic mother repented of her backslidden ways, insisted that the entire family attend Mass on Sundays, and enrolled me in Catholic School.

I believed what I was taught there, but amid the pre-Vatican II Latin liturgy, the perpetual standing and kneeling, and the stern glances of somber nuns, my heart turned cold.

“Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It has been one week since my last Confession. Since that time I have had impure thoughts six times.” As I reached the age of puberty such reports to the parish priests (the Catholic sacrament of “Confession”) became increasingly provocative, and therefore difficult to make. At last I lost all hope of piety, and resigned myself to eternal damnation.

The week before I started eighth grade I convinced my parents to let me return to public school, and in my science class that year I was first exposed to the theory of evolution. Like a “domino effect,” the following conclusions fell upon my mind in their turn: No Adam and Eve. No infallible Bible. No God. No hell. Freedom!

In the years that followed pleasure became my god, and I lost all sense of guilt about it. I realized that I could not prove or disprove anything positively, but there was positively no God in the universe as I experienced it.

Because I had been profoundly influenced by the anti-establishment lyrics of mid-60s “protest songs,” when the “hippies” first received national publicity in early 1967, I found myself identifying with them. My handful of friends and I, who had not fit in with any of the preexisting social groupings in our Long Beach, California high school, derived a new and exciting sense of belonging by joining a group of hippies that emerged during our junior year (1967-68).

I followed the crowd in smoking marijuana, “hanging out” on the streets of Hollywood and nearby Huntington Beach, and even participating in a high school branch of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). But toward the end of the spring semester the thrill was gone. I could see that we hippies were no less “plastic” (phony) and conformist than the “straights” we disdained. I withdrew, seeking to establish my own independent identity and life direction.

COSMIC TORTURE

During my senior year I would sit alone during lunch hour reflecting on every aspect of life. Little questions led to big questions until I found myself wrestling with the ultimate issues.

As I thought about death I realized that my youth was only an illusory barrier against its reach. Just as surely as my once-distant 18th birthday was now arriving, so, one day, would death. This realization incited a new urgency within me to find some meaning in life.

In my first year of college I looked to the philosophers for answers only to find that each successive school of philosophy was refuted by the one which followed it. If truth was that difficult to discern, how could one ever know if he was right? Could there even be any real purpose in a randomly evolving universe?

As these thoughts weighed heavily upon me I would lay awake at night tortured by the insanity of being a purpose-seeking creature in a universe which either lacked purpose, or whose purpose was beyond finding out.

Out of this torment a deep hunger for truth and meaning grew within me, taking precedence over the hedonism that had governed me before. My search for an independent identity was evolving into a quest for the truth, but first I needed encouragement that truth could be found. Surprisingly, this would come through drugs.

DOORS OF PERCEPTION?

After I broke away from my hippie peer group, I adopted the view that drug use was stupid and dangerous. I was therefore disappointed when a friend who had shared this view began to experiment with “psychedelic” (mind manifesting) drugs like mescaline and LSD. For nine months I refused Scott’s persistent beckonings to jump into this river of unfamiliar experience. However, in the fall of 1969 he enticed me to read Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Koolaid Acid Test, which told the story of the original San Francisco hippies. Wolfe’s intriguing description of their surrealistic drug experiences and a quote from Aldous Huxley gave me hope that the psychedelic might open “doors of perception” that would enable me to penetrate the mysteries of life.

In his family’s mountain cabin, Scott guided me through my first mescaline “trip.” After some initial pleasantries, like a “mind blowing” walk underneath a blanket of stars, my “good trip” became a “bummer” as my awareness turned to myself. I was faced with what might best be called my own wretchedness (insecurities, hypocrisy, insignificance) in ways I’d never allowed myself to be before, and I couldn’t turn the picture off. Weeping and unable to speak, I wrote on a piece of paper: “I will never do this again.”

Two weeks later I was doing it again. Having seen these disturbing truths about myself, I couldn’t just “sweep them under the rug.” I decided the best way to change myself was to confront these areas of my psyche head-on. As I began to work on myself subsequent mescaline experiences were more positive, leaving me with a taste for more. Before I knew it I was smoking marijuana (which is mildly psychedelic) on a daily basis and taking mescaline about every two weeks (I never approved of the nonpsychedelic drugs like cocaine).

In altered states of consciousness my continuing philosophical inquiry took some radical turns. Habitual patterns of thought were interrupted, enabling me to see things in new ways. Like a tyrannical king whose claim to the throne is suddenly found to be spurious, some of my most fundamental and unwanted perceptions and beliefs lost their power as truisms in my mind. I began to challenge everything I had once taken for granted, especially the “sacred cows” of the Establishment.

While sitting “stoned” alongside a river in California’s beautiful Big Sur, the evidence for some kind of intelligence behind creation suddenly came crashing through my evolutionary biases. Without entirely rejecting evolution, I was now once again a believer in God.

This revelation led me on to pantheism (“God is everything”) instead of back to Christianity, though, partly because of a strong naturalistic bias—I could not conceive of anything beyond the universe and so if there was a God He must be the universe.

Also, the drugs themselves led me to pantheism because on them I experienced a loss of ego or self-image boundaries. I began to feel intrinsically connected to the universe as my larger and more real self—an infinite consciousness into which my finite consciousness was merging. Thus, if I was the universe and the universe was God, I was God! With very little outside help I’d seemingly gone through all the classic mystical experiences and come to all the standard pantheistic conclusions.

I began to receive “revelations” from an Inner Voice, which on one occasion I committed to writing. One such revelation was that love was the fundamental principle of the universe. In response to this truth I developed my own unconventional brand of religiosity. For the first time being a good person was an important goal in my life.

It may sound as though out of desperation for answers I threw all judgment to the wind, and was now ready to believe anything. But I must stress that throughout these experiences I reserved a portion of my mind to function as a “critical observer.” It’s just that as a skeptic of the supernatural I had been ill-prepared for two things I encountered in altered states. The first was a very real sensation of expanding awareness which made my old skepticisms seem like blind prejudices. The second “proof” was the occurrence of external corroboration in my new-found psychic abilities—telepathy (knowing what people were thinking) and precognition (knowing events before they occurred).

These experiences gradually persuaded even my “critical observer” that something paranormal was going on. Though I was being increasingly attracted to pantheism as the explanation, I remained open to all interpretations that could account for the phenomena. My desire for truth remained strong, and I was optimistic that I would find it. I reasoned that whatever Ultimate Reality was, it was probably loving (since love was the highest expression of being), and would “meet me half way” if I sought It with my whole being.

TUNE IN, TURN ON, DROP OUT

By this time I was involved in what could be called my “genuine hippie phase.” I was not now, as before, imitating the life-style of the hippies. I had rather gone through the same inner changes that produced that life-style in the first place. I could no longer relate to the prospects of school, career, and compliant participation in the “System.” Without consciously following the adage of hippie “guru” Timothy Leary, I had “tuned in” and “turned on” and was now ready to “drop out.”

In August of 1970 I hitchhiked up to Portland to attend a “Woodstock”-like festival called “Vortex I.” While there I decided to join a group of people who were forming a commune.

After only a few days of commune experience a lost contact lens forced me to return temporarily to Southern California. While there I maintained contact with the commune by telephone and learned that they had settled outside of Grant’s Pass in Southern Oregon.

I shared my experiences “up north” and plans to move there with my close circle of friends, and with my friend Rick and his wife I also shared the relatively pure LSD I had brought down with me from Oregon.

All of my friends respected me for acting on the values that we all espoused. But under the influence of LSD Rick’s respect turned to a holy dread. As I was reading to him from my private “revelations” he had a “vision” (hallucination): “My God, Elliot, you’ve turned into Christ!”

For several minutes Rick kept insisting that I was the Second Coming of Christ. Laughing I assured him that I was not Christ, though I allowed that I might be a prophet, since I was receiving these revelations.

After a two-week wait my new contact lens was finally ready. This meant I could drive again. To celebrate, I decided to drive to some natural setting and “drop” (ingest) a capsule of organic mescaline that I’d also brought down with me.

As I stood alone in my family’s kitchen formulating this plan, I suddenly received a powerful premonition that in the midst of this drug experience a new truth would be revealed to me. By this time I’d learned from experience that when such “intuitive knowings” came on so strongly, I should pay serious attention to them.

My immediate response was excitement, since I’d devoted my entire life to seeking truth. But then the premonition was expanded—there was a sense of challenge attached to it. What if this new truth could not be followed without my giving up certain things that I held dear? I saw clearly that I could not be consistent with my truth-seeking profession without being willing to make whatever changes truth might require. And so I resolved within myself to “flow with” and not resist whatever truth might be revealed to me that day, or ever.

A STATE OF SUSPENDED IDENTITY

Driving south on Pacific Coast Highway I ended up on a somewhat isolated beach in Laguna Beach, a “hippie haven” in conservative Orange County. By sunset I was all alone, experiencing an exceptionally pleasant “trip.” Feeling as though I was in perfect harmony with the universe, I waited patiently for my new revelation.

After some time my privacy was broken. About fifty feet in front of me a couple my own age were making their way along the rocky shore. I strongly sensed that their appearance was not an accident. They didn’t seem to notice me sitting there in the dark, and so I greeted them. The girl came over and sat in front of me, silently smiling. “Wow, I’m really stoned,” I said—hoping for an understanding response. “Jesus really loves you, brother,” she replied.

My mind reeled. Was this the “new truth” that would challenge my commitment to follow truth? For years I had been thoroughly convinced that no one who really understood modern knowledge could believe in a supernatural Jesus. Furthermore, the Christian life-style seemed as unattractive as any I could think of. I was therefore both confounded and shaken by this revelation. How far was I to take it?

Joining us, the girl’s boyfriend expounded the same old evangelistic “pitch” I’d heard many times before from the mouths of “Jesus Freaks”—young converts mostly from the drug culture. In the past I’d been impossible for them to reach. When he asked me to pray with him and receive Jesus into my heart, I remembered my commitment to flow with and not resist whatever happened that day. So I joined him in prayer, and whereas I’d been “peaking” on the drug a few minutes earlier, its effects were now almost imperceptible.

I was still so shaken that when they started to leave me I asked them not to. We talked further as they took me for a drive. They suggested I visit Calvary Chapel, a church in Costa Mesa which was an “epicenter” for the up-and-coming Jesus Movement among the young. Trying to get a grasp on how “straight” I was going to have to become, I asked, “Does anyone at Calvary smoke marijuana?” For whatever reason, the young man responded by asking his friend, “Doesn’t [so-and-so] smoke marijuana?” From this I wrongly gathered that although smoking marijuana was not the most popular practice, it was still tolerated.

After they dropped me off I returned to the beach. Whereas earlier I’d serenely sat there in the yogic “full lotus” position, I was now on my knees, beseeching God to reveal to me the significance of the evening’s events.

In the days that followed my thinking was a confused mixture of Christian and New Age notions. This reflected a state of suspended identity; was I now a Jesus Freak or some kind of “cosmic Christian”? The answer, of which I was painfully unsure, all depended on whether the revelation on the beach was compatible with the spirituality I had previously developed in altered states.

I tried reading our gigantic family Bible, but didn’t make it past the genealogies in Genesis chapter five. I couldn’t remember where the couple said Calvary Chapel was. Because I had not been flatly told to abstain from drugs, I continued using them, but I now had an uneasy conscience about it.

While visiting Bob, an outwardly straight “pothead” who enjoyed getting stoned with me, I recounted what happened in Laguna, expressing my uncertainty as to its significance. He straightfacedly replied that its significance was very clear: just as Jesus had gone out into the desert and there realized he was the Son of God, so I had gone down to the beach and there realized I was the Son of God—the Second Coming of Christ! I laughed, informing him that Rick had suggested the same preposterous thing. “Out of billions of people you’re telling me I’m going to play that role? Come on!”

Afterwards I drove to another friend’s home and waited for him to return in my car. While sitting there Bob’s words came back into my mind. This time I sensed a great power in this suggestion, sucking me into itself. “You are the Son of God. You are the Son of God,” a voice repeated ever-louder in my mind. I felt some kind of spiritual presence pressing in heavily upon me. Fearing that I might go “off the deep end” I grabbed hold of myself and fought this delusion off.

In early October two other friends dropped me off at a freeway entrance for my return trip to Oregon. Already hitchhiking at that spot were a couple of “Jesus Freaks” who lived in a commune in Berkeley associated with the Christian World Liberation Front. They invited me to spend a night there when I passed through, and it turned out I was able to take them up on their offer.

Because of my experience on the beach I identified myself as a Christian, and so I was accepted as such and not evangelized by the commune members. Things went smoothly enough until the next morning when a Christian sister brought my inner conflict to the surface by making an unfavorable reference to drugs. I argued in reply that drugs could make one more conscious of God, and pressed her to tell me exactly what was wrong with them. “We don’t need drugs,” she responded, “Jesus makes us high.”

This pat reply was intellectually unsatisfying, and so I refused to give up drugs on the basis of it. Nonetheless, her disapproval intensified the “illogical” (as I told myself then) pangs of conscience I was already experiencing.

After several days and adventures on the road, I finally tracked down the commune only to find that it had deteriorated into two small groups of no more than six people each. What was worse, all of the remaining people were individuals I had previously discerned to be mystically “unaware.” (Most hippies were not nearly as spiritually inclined as I now was).

Before the full weight of my disappointing discovery could sink in, some hippies from another commune in Cave Junction (about a half hour away) drove up in a truck, “turned us on” to some mescaline, and took me with them to spend the night at their place.

“THERE IS NO CONFLICT”

When we arrived I thought I had finally made it to Paradise—it was everything I’d hoped to find in Oregon. There were over 40 people residing on a large acreage in the woods. Not your stereotypically lazy hippies, they were industriously striving to forge an alternative culture to that of the straight society.

Evening fell. I sat on the floor in a large cabin coming on heavily to the mescaline. Several men were sitting around a table discussing spiritual things. I could tell that for the first time I’d found a group of people who were actively pursuing the same kind of spirituality I had been. They were literally talking my language—using terms to describe spiritual concepts and experiences I had previously either thought of on my own or received from my Inner Voice. This proved to me that what I’d been going through was not my own private creation, but a universal spiritual experience, presumably grounded in an Ultimate Reality. The force of this realization was electrifying.

In spite of this seeming confirmation for my drug experiences, the unanswered questions raised in Laguna refused to leave me alone. Finally I got up and joined them at the table. “I can really relate to what you guys are talking about,” I began, “but I’m going through a conflict.” After I rehearsed what had happened to me, Charlie, the communal family’s unofficial spiritual leader, replied: “There’s no conflict if you want to pray to Jesus, and he [another at the table] wants to meditate on Buddha, and I want to smoke a joint. We’re all experiencing the same God.”

After Charlie finished speaking his words continued to reverberate in my mind: “It’s all the same God. It’s all the same God.” Somehow this common conception hit me like a new revelation. Could it really be that beneath the outward quibbling the Jesus Freaks and the hippies were all experiencing the same God?

Immediately, as though in confirmation of what Charlie said, I had a visionary experience more powerful than any I’d had before. I lost all consciousness of the room and the people in it. I felt as though I’d transcended all finite boundaries. I could hear very distinct, audible voices speaking to me in the most intimate and reassuring manner. Intuitively I “knew” who they belonged to—people from distant points in space and time. The explanation for such “long-distance communication” seemed to be that we were all “plugged into” the same Universal Mind.

I also had a vision of a blue or positive energy, which I sensed represented God, and a red or negative energy, signifying the devil (which, like God, was impersonal). The blue energy was drawing me to enlightenment and peace—the transcendence of this unnecessary conflict I’d been going through. The red energy was seeking to keep me locked into ignorance and self-destructive ego patterns, and was using this conflict to do so.

Once my consciousness returned to my body I felt moved to go outside. Emotionally overwhelmed, I looked up at the stars and thanked God for answering my prayer. My inner conflict was now entirely gone.

That first night in Cave Junction had a transforming effect on me. I now had a seemingly unshakeable confidence in my mystical experiences and the validity of using drugs to achieve them. Nevertheless, drugs were no longer so necessary to have such experiences. To some extent I was always in a state of “cosmic consciousness” now. Also, my psychic abilities now seemed five times stronger. Telepathy and precognition (often verified) were almost becoming daily parts of my experience. And I was becoming increasingly aware of “spiritual presences” hovering around me, especially as I’d lie in bed at night.

I was led to believe by a few members of the commune that I was welcome to stay on and join the family. A month later I would find out that was not the majority verdict. There were too many people to fit comfortably in a large two-story structure that had recently been completed. Those who had not contributed to its construction were to move on for the winter. But during the month I was there I had what could have under different circumstances been several years’ worth of spiritual experiences.

ONE OF MANY CHRISTS

Truly, the belief that “there is no conflict” was foundational to the commune’s spirituality. Eastern mystical scriptures, occult books, tarot cards and other occult paraphernalia, drugs, and unself-conscious nudity were combined with an abundance of well-read Bibles, Christian art and symbols, and frequent, reverential references to Jesus.

The commune’s “Christian” orientation made it easy for me to reason that I was being true to the revelation given me at the beach. Jesus could be integrated with my drug-based spirituality, I’d concluded, and God had brought me here so I could learn how to do it.

The significance of my beach revelation was particularly “explained” to me by one of the books on hand at the commune, “Levi’s” The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ (a turn-of-the century work). Its account of Jesus’ life and mission (based on the ethereal “Akashic Records” which only special psychics like Levi can read) was similar enough to seem consistent with the familiar Gospel story, and yet the Jesus depicted there was a mystical master who spoke of the very kinds of “realities” I had encountered during my drug experiences.

The Aquarian Gospel’s Introduction explains that we are now in a transition phase from the Piscean to the Aquarian Age. In the New Age the level of consciousness manifested by Jesus (“Christ consciousness”) will become widespread, making it an era of enlightenment and peace.

This scenario seemed to explain the rash of people like myself in the inchoate New Age movement who were suddenly experiencing cosmic consciousness. We were the forerunners of a new age and a new phase in evolution.

Whereas I had not been able to accept the suggestion that I was the Second Coming of Christ, I did find acceptable the idea that I was becoming one of many Christs, sort of a collective Second Coming. It now seemed that the experience in Laguna was God’s way of moving me in this direction, and so achieving Christ consciousness became a major objective of my spiritual life.

During that month I read from several other books as well, including Eastern and Western scriptures. Each seemed to confirm my spiritual experiences, including the Bible. For instance, I understood John 3:3 (“You must be born again”) to be speaking of the mystical “ego death” I was going through.

“Ego death” was a critical aspect of my experience. Even when not on drugs my consciousness was to some degree in what mystics term “the Now”—very aware of my immediate surroundings and of an interpenetrating spiritual dimension, but very out of touch with my past and a normal sense of self. Increasingly I identified myself with the God within rather than the Elliot Miller without.

In spite of such feelings of high attainment, during my stay in Cave Junction it seemed I could not quite achieve Christ consciousness as I understood it. My ego refused to remain completely dead. Instead, I found myself going through moments or even hours in which the most painful pieces of my past would flash back and torment me. I was struggling to find a way to completely extinguish Elliot Miller so that Christ could fully “incarnate” in me (as I imagined Jesus successfully did at the time of his baptism).

When I was asked to leave the commune I went through a brief emotional upheaval. Although I understood and respected their decision, it still hurt. I had felt like I was already a part of the family, but obviously the majority did not share that sentiment. And, had not God brought me here? I’d assumed this was my ultimate destination—my own ideally-suited environment.

Pacing back and forth in a nearby grove, I got hold of myself. “Surely, God is in control of this turn of events as much as the previous ones. He must have lessons for me to learn that I can’t learn here.” My faith once again grew strong, and I committed myself to God to take me wherever He wanted me between Cave Junction and Long Beach.

SURRENDERING CONTROL TO “GOD”

Completely triumphant over this uprising of “ego,” the next day I packed up my things and was driven in a huge van to Interstate 5 in Grant’s Pass. As I quietly sat thinking about my spiritual struggles, my Inner Voice distinctly sounded within my mind: “The reason you keep having battles with your ego is because you’re afraid to let go of it. If you want to become a Christ you must die in your mind and let me take over.”

This guidance seemed reasonable enough; like the next logical step on my spiritual path. And so, without reservation I began at once to surrender control of my entire being to “God.” I found that it was a gradual process that would take perhaps hours to complete. But within minutes there were already dramatic results.

By the time I was let out of the van, I felt like I was surging with power. It was raining, and so I decided to put my new power to a test. Based on the belief that all reality is one Mind, and that a Christ is so connected to that Mind that he can control external reality (as Jesus did with his miracles), I looked up at the completely overcast sky and confidently commanded the rain to stop and the sun to shine. Immediately, the clouds parted and the afternoon became sunny and dry.

My “power surge” continued to accelerate. In spite of uncertain circumstances, I had no fear in the world; nor had I any doubts about what I was experiencing. This was the consummation of my spiritual quest—God had ordered everything I had gone through before to bring me to this moment.

The spot where I was dropped off turned out to be a miserable place to catch a ride; there was absolutely no traffic. So I decided to use my new power again. I simply willed for someone to come by and pick me up. Again, “nature’s” response was immediate. I was picked up and driven south to Ashland, 20 miles north of the California border, where I was dropped off at the crossing of Highway 5 and a road going west into Ashland.

I stood there hitchhiking south for a couple of hours. The process of possession continued, and I felt as high as if I’d taken LSD, though I was now under the influence of no drug.

Suddenly, my euphoria turned to alarm. I strongly sensed that my soul was in great danger, as though something evil was trying to consume me. I began to resist the entity taking possession of me, but then the thought crossed my mind: “This is just your ego putting up its last fight for survival. God is good! He wouldn’t do anything to hurt you.” Satisfied with this explanation, I yielded again. The negative sensation was now gone, and it began to feel as though I was fading out and something else was moving into my place.

As I stood there hitchhiking I watched a steady succession of cars heading west toward Ashland. For no earthly reason, one of those cars off in the distance caught my attention. Intuitively I knew that they were going to stop and ask me to get in, even though I was hitchhiking in a different direction! I further sensed that this car would take me to the place God wanted me.

Not surprisingly (by now) as they approached the driver slowed down, rolled down his window, and asked me if I’d like to have dinner. “Sure,” I replied, telling myself as I headed toward the car: “When I get in they’ll be talking about God, because these are God’s people.” I opened the door and the driver greeted me with the words: “Praise God!” “Praise God!”, I replied, “God told me you were going to pick me up.”

A MOMENT OF TRUTH

We pulled up to a two-story home in a residential area called the “Shiloh House,” a commune as large as the one I’d just left, only its long-haired members were clearly Jesus Freaks. Now convinced that there was no conflict, I no longer felt uncomfortable in this kind of atmosphere—Jesus Freaks, too, knew God.

As I sat down in the living room my mind was throbbing with so much energy that it felt like it was pressing against the walls. After identifying myself as a Christian, I proceeded to extol the insights of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. The more informed and discerning in the room no doubt recognized that they had a less-than-orthodox “Christian” on their hands.

One particularly discerning observer, named Ed, came over and engaged me in a one-on-one discussion. As I expressed my peculiar views about God, Christ, and drugs, Ed would calmly but firmly correct me with the biblical view (e.g., “God is no more the universe than the maker of that chair is the chair”).

The more we talked, the more I “lost my cool,” annoyed that I would have to butt heads with another narrow-minded Jesus Freak during this moment of personal triumph. “When will these Christians stop being so bigoted?”, I asked myself. “Why can’t they accept the validity of other people’s spiritual experiences?”

In the midst of my arguing, a realization came over me like a tidal wave. God had clearly brought me to this house. But if his goal was to possess me, and everything I’d gone through was intended to bring me to this point of surrender, then why during his moment of success would he bring me here? Why at such a critical time would God bring me to a place where I’d be told, in effect, that what I thought was God was a demon, unless the entity that was possessing me was a demon, and that’s what God wanted me to hear?

Within a couple of minutes my entire perspective had “done a 180.” Instead of seeing my life as a continual progression toward Christhood, I saw it as a spiritual battleground, particularly since I’d been searching for the truth. Because I was not yet fully aligned with either side of the battle, I’d remained wide open to the influences of both. Through messengers and direct messages (e.g., giving me advance notice of crucial events) God had indeed “met me half-way”—pointing me to Jesus as the only way to Him. But Satan also was using messengers and direct messages—pointing me to myself and reinterpreting God’s unique revelation in Jesus as a revelation of my own Christ potential.

Since I’d been completely happy on my mystical path and had no desire to be a Jesus Freak, I was now facing a real moment of crisis. It was also a moment of truth. The first thoughts that came into my mind were: “Go back on that freeway and start hitchhiking. Put all of this out of your mind. After all the power and triumph that has come within your grasp today, do you want to start all over again on a new spiritual path? And what of your friends in Southern California? If you become a Jesus Freak they’ll think you flipped out!”

But I knew it could never be the same again. How could I continue my quest for truth if I ignored what happened here? I’d be living a lie. And besides, who would want to go back on that freeway knowing it was the devil he’d be returning to?

At Ed’s suggestion I agreed to stay on a few days and study the Bible. That was the only pronounced “decision” I made—a nonthreatening way of saying “I surrender.” But surrender I had, and simultaneously the spiritual presence that I had been surrendering to disappeared.

But the spiritual battle over my soul did not entirely end that night. For example, during my second day at Shiloh I ran into a fellow alone upstairs (a visitor, but I had thought he was an established member) who engaged me in a metaphysical discussion. After he made reference to “om,” the primordial “hum” of the universe (a Hindu concept), I was at once intrigued and ill-at-ease. “Most people here don’t seem to believe in such things,” I observed. He replied that different people were at different points of advancement. “Hmmm, maybe there’s a place for mysticism after all,” I thought.

At that instant Ed came rushing up the stairs, rebuking the visitor and proclaiming: “The Holy Spirit told me you were stumbling this brother.” The visitor cowered before Ed’s spiritual authority like a bad little boy who had been caught by his mother inciting his friend to steal some cookies.

FALSE PEACE AND FALSE LIGHT

It seemed at every turn I received further confirmation that my decision to follow Jesus and abandon my New Age path had been a moral choice between good and evil. I finally yielded once and for all to this heavenly verdict, but I still had difficulty understanding exactly what had been wrong with my former “sacramental” use of drugs. After all, hadn’t it made me a better, more spiritually-minded person?

After a couple weeks of painful confusion over this, I finally turned to prayer: “God, you know I’ve given up drugs for You and I’m willing never to use them again. But it would really help if I understood why. Please show me what is wrong with them.”

Rising up from prayer I headed downstairs and sat on a couch next to Ed’s fiancée Janette, just in time to overhear her refer to “drugs” in conversation with Ed. “What was that you were saying?” I asked, wondering if my prayer would be instantaneously answered.

“I was just talking to Ed about my sister. She’d accepted the Lord with us before, but has now gone back to smoking marijuana. So I’m writing a letter to warn her not to use drugs, because they open your mind to a spiritual realm, but that realm is not of God. It gives you a false kind of a peace and a false kind of a light, like the peace and light the Antichrist will give to the world. And so you can have a false sense of security that you’re on the road to God when you’re actually on the road to hell.”

Janette’s answer once and for all delivered me from my conflict. I could finally understand why drug use, or, for that matter, Eastern meditation or any method of inducing altered states of consciousness, was not the way to reach God. It was possible to have a spiritual experience—to even feel blissfully enlightened and serene—without really experiencing God. Spiritual evil can and does masquerade as spiritual good (2 Cor. 11:14), and trancelike states of consciousness tend to open one up to such influences.

As I submitted to the spiritual regimen of the house, including daily personal and group Bible study and prayer, I gradually began to understand experientially what authentic spirituality is—entirely different from what I’d known before. I remember it dawning upon me after three months in Ashland that I now really knew what it was to be “born again”; what everyone meant when they spoke of having a personal relationship with the Lord. I no longer just knew about Him—I knew Him. I found this intimate fellowship with Christ to be the sweetest thing I’d ever known in life. It surpassed the “bliss” of cosmic consciousness just as one would expect the genuine to surpass the counterfeit.

In my 18 years of experience I have found evangelical Christianity to be entirely satisfying, both experientially and intellectually. It has profoundly answered the questions and met the needs that first propelled me on my quest for truth. It is my heart’s wish that New Agers will not take this testimony lightly, for I believe I had the same intellectual and experiential reasons for rejecting Christianity in favor of Eastern/occult mysticism as they. If I can find abundant satisfaction in Christian faith, it seems to me they could too.

Actually, I have no reason to doubt that I would have gone on to become an active participant in the contemporary New Age movement were it not for one thing only: through all my spiritual experiences I remained open to the possibility that another world view could be true than the one to which I was currently attracted. For this reason it is ironic when New Agers now accuse me of closed-mindedness because of my Christian beliefs.

My biggest concern about today’s New Agers is that they seem to be closed to everything but pantheism. Today’s seekers do not appear as interested in finding objective truth as those of 15 to 20 years ago. Spirituality without such commitment falls right into the hands of the Evil One. Jesus said, “Seek and you shall find” (Matt. 7:7). He also said “I am…the truth” (John 14:6). My experience, and that of countless others, testifies to the piercing accuracy of both these claims.

SYNOPSIS

Nontraditional health-related practices that involve the hands, based on the assumption that people are energy fields, are becoming increasingly popular.

One of the most widely used is Healing Touch, a practice rooted in a variety of belief systems, including Theosophy, spiritism, and Buddhism. Nurses and others certified as Healing Touch practitioners are expected to read a wide range of books on occult philosophy and engage in experiential training that includes information on contacting and channeling “angels” or “spiritual guides.” Healing Touch and related practices such as Therapeutic Touch and Reiki are being welcomed into Christian churches uncritically in the guise of Christian healing practices, based on the belief that the healing associated with them is the same form of healing practiced by Jesus and the first-century Christians. These churches appear to be ignoring biblical injunctions that warn the people of God to have nothing to do with aberrant belief systems, mediums, and with any practices associated with divination.

Elisabeth Jensen is a registered nurse and a qualified mid-wife. She has many qualifications in complementary healing methods: she is a Therapeutic Touch Teacher; Melchizedek Method Facilitator; Past, Parallel, and Future Lives Therapist; Certified Angel Intuitive Practitioner; Professional Crystal Healer; Aura Reading and Healing Therapist, and Healing Touch Practitioner. According to her Web site, Jensen is a member of the Australian Foundation for Healing Touch and the Nurse Healers-Professional Associates International.¹ She claims that the goddess Isis guided her to Egypt, communicated with her in the Queens Chamber of the Great Pyramid, and continues to give her direct guidance. Following this mystical experience, Jensen established the Isis Mystery School to teach Goddess Divination, Ancient Egyptian Divination, Isis Divine Alchemy, and Isis Lotus Healing.²

Jensen is just one of many nurses who also describe themselves with such titles as Past Life Regression Therapists, Reiki Masters, Certified Hypnotists, and Certified Angel Therapy Practitioners. In addition to holistic healing, private therapy, and activities noted above, they engage in such practices as angel readings (psychic readings in thin disguise) and other types of “angel care.”³ Some of the nurses who are flirting with techniques such as Therapeutic Touch or Healing Touch are Christians. Many of the nurses with experience in this arena are available for presentations, training workshops, and healing seminars in recreation centers, public libraries, workplaces—and even your neighborhood church.

AN ENERGY-BASED APPROACH TO HEALING

The Level I Healing Touch workshop, sponsored by the local district of the American Nurses Association, began with teaching on Therapeutic Touch, an extremely popular noncontact (despite the name) nursing intervention. The technique was developed by Dora [van Gelder] Kunz (1904–1999), then president of the Theosophical Society of America, and Dolores Krieger, R.N., Ph.D., a Buddhist and a professor of nursing at New York University.⁴ Books for sale included titles such as Vibrational Medicine,⁵ which is described as “a bridge between the metaphysical and medical communities”;⁶ The Women’s Spirituality Book,⁷ which focuses on the reclamation of goddess religion for inner development; and The Crystal Stair: A Guide to the Ascension, which includes the secondary subtitle Channeled Messages from Sananda (Jesus), Ashtar, Archangel Michael, and St. Germain.⁸

Healing Touch Spiritual Ministry is described in a program brochure as “a continuing education program for parish nurses, ministers in parish ministries, chaplains and nurses in hospitals, nursing homes and hospices, and the lay community seeking to explore a spiritual healing ministry involving the laying-on of hands and other Healing Touch techniques.”⁹ A 2004 issue of the Healing Touch Spiritual Ministry Newsletter indicates that the educational focus in ministry settings includes “prayer, energetic healing and anointing with essential oils”; all three are considered forms of “vibrational healing” that “formed a foundational stone and marked the success of the early Christian community.”¹⁰ Continuing education units for workshops throughout the United States are granted through the Colorado Center for Healing Touch; the program is an approved provider of continuing education by the Colorado Nurses’ Association and the California Board of Registered Nursing. The Healing Touch Spiritual Ministry is also approved to grant Continuing Chaplaincy Education units by the Association of Professional Chaplains.¹¹

According to their official ministry Web site, the program has “an energy-based therapeutic approach to health and healing that includes the practice of many modern-day Christian healers.”¹² The ministry states that its “deeper roots…go back to the prayer, the laying-on of hands and anointing with oil modeled by Jesus as a major part of his ministry,”¹³ but its actual contemporary beginnings are rooted in the Healing Touch program begun in the early 1980s. A suggested reading list includes a few good books on healing that should be in church libraries.¹⁴ The majority of books recommended, however, contain content more suitable for metaphysical bookstores, including Doreen Virtue’s Healing with the Angels: How the Angels Can Assist You in Every Area of Your Life,¹⁵ Rosalyn Bruyere’s Wheels of Light: A Study of the Chakras, volume 1,¹⁶ and Barbara Brennan’s Hands of Light: A Guide to Healing through the Human Energy Field.¹⁷ Much of the core teaching on Healing Touch is based on the writing of Bruyere and Brennan.

THE OCCULT CONNECTION

Doreen Virtue, a “spiritual clairvoyant” with a Ph.D. in counseling psychology, claims that she was able, as a child, to communicate with “invisible friends” who were really “angels and deceased loved ones.” Now Virtue lectures on angel therapy, spiritual healing, mediumship, reincarnation, and channeling. A primary target audience for Virtue’s workshops is the registered professional nurse.¹⁸

The Reverend Rosalyn Bruyere, founder and director of the Healing Light Center Church in Sierra Madre, California, considers herself a clairvoyant, healer, and medicine woman.¹⁹ Bruyere’s Wheels of Light is a compendium of occult philosophy with a heavy focus on the rising and awakening of kundalini energy, also known as “serpent energy.” Bruyere notes that “every culture of antiquity with the exception of Christians” revered the symbol of the serpent. Her studies of goddess religion led her to discover the snake as “the power of the undulate” or as a “feminine power” associated with healing, renewal, physical and spiritual well-being, and enlightenment, rather than with deceit and corruption as depicted in the Genesis account.²⁰

Barbara Brennan, founder of the Barbara Brennan School of Healing, lists among her credentials a Ph.D. in Energy Medicine from Greenwich University, Norfolk, Australia, and a Th.D. (Doctorate of Theology) in Healing from Holos University, Springfield, Missouri.²¹ Holos University Graduate Seminary is the official postgraduate school of the International Science of Mind Church for Spiritual Healing.²² Brennan’s school, located in South Florida, grants a Bachelor of Science in Brennan Healing Science and a diploma in Brennan Healing Science for studies related to hands-on energy healing and personal transformation.²³

In Light Emerging, Brennan offers pages of channeled messages from Heyoan, her spiritual guide.²⁴ In Hands of Light, Brennan tells readers that the name Heyoan means “The Wind Whispering Truth Through The Centuries.” Included in her book are exercises for the steps involved in contacting one’s own spirit guides; “understanding that you are one with God” is first in the process.²⁵ Brennan’s Healing Science Web site offers weekly channeled messages. She also regularly channels messages from Heyoan to students enrolled in her school, many of whom are associated with the health professions.

ENERGY HEALING WITH ANGEL AND SPIRIT GUIDES

The foregoing illustrations offer but a glimpse of what has become a significant movement called Energy Medicine or Energy Healing. The incorporation of “spirit guides” or “angel guides” and training on how to channel them has become an increasingly common practice for nurses who attend advanced Healing Touch workshops, and, more recently, advanced “invitation only” Therapeutic Touch workshops. Approved by the New York State Nurses Association Council on Continuing Education, nurses at these latter workshops are taught to work with “other-than-human intelligences.”²⁶

The Spiritual Dimension of Therapeutic Touch,²⁷ published in 2004, is based largely on Dora Kunz’s workshops that were held at East and West coast Theosophical retreat centers. Included in the book is reference material from The Real World of Fairies, one of her early writings.²⁸ This new emphasis in Therapeutic Touch training may well be an effort to capitalize on the popularity of spirit guide communication that has long been a feature of Healing Touch. Healing Touch as a movement appears to be vying for the allegiance of nurses worldwide, eclipsing the popularity of Therapeutic Touch and, with the proliferation of Healing Touch books and workshops, gaining a significant market share. Krieger has spoken disparagingly about Healing Touch,²⁹ even though the two modalities are similar in practice and are both rooted conceptually in the Western occultism of Theosophy, spiritism,³⁰ and the Eastern belief system of Buddhism.

Kunz references the writings of early-twentieth-century Theosophist Charles W. Leadbeater as primary source material for her explanations of the mechanisms underlying energy healing. Leadbeater (1847–1934), a clairvoyant, was a curate in the Church of England who converted to Buddhism. His influence on future generations of Theosophists and on the development of contemporary energy-based practices was enormous.³¹ Two of his books, The Chakras, and Man, Visible and Invisible, provided the conceptual framework for Kunz’s foundational writings for nursing.³² Energy, generally defined as prana or chi, is believed to flow through, and can be transformed by, chakras, a Sanskrit word meaning “circle or wheel.” Some of these chakras are located in the hands where they are centers of activity for the “reception, assimilation, and transmission of life energies.”³³ Another primary reference used by both nursing movements is The Chakras and the Human Energy Field,³⁴ a more contemporary Theosophical publication.

Therapeutic Touch involves four primary steps: (1) centering meditatively, (2) assessing the patient’s supposed energy field, (3) unruffling or decongesting energy, and (4) modulating using the mind or intentionality to redistribute energy through the hand chakras. ³⁵

In contrast, more than 30 techniques for rebalancing energy are taught in the Healing Touch program in a series of three workshops, though the initial teaching is very similar to that of Therapeutic Touch.³⁶ Janet Mentgen, a registered nurse with a bachelor’s degree, was introduced to Therapeutic Touch in a workshop in 1980, then went on to practice various forms of “energy-based medicine” in the Denver, Colorado, area, eventually combining a number of them into the practice of Healing Touch. The American Holistic Nurses’ Association began offering Healing Touch in 1990, and officially certified it in 1993. In 1993 Mentgen formed the Colorado Center for Healing Touch. By then, Healing Touch had grown from a modality into a movement. Healing Touch International, soon incorporated by the Colorado Center for Healing Touch, became the certifying authority for Healing Touch and promoted its growth worldwide, including a five-level educational program ranging from beginner to advanced levels. A student who attends all levels of the program can apply to become a Certified Healing Touch Practitioner.³⁷

One example of the practices taught in the Level III workshop is Etheric Template Clearing, or removing negative energy patterns. Brennan describes the etheric template as the fifth layer of the aura;³⁸ the aura has been described as the field of energy that surrounds and interpenetrates the physical body.³⁹ Actual healing of the etheric template can involve “spiritual guides” performing “etheric operations” through the hands of a Healing Touch practitioner. Brennan notes that it is the guides who control everything that goes on; the healer is “largely passive.”⁴⁰ In order to access or be responsive to these guides, the healer must develop Higher Sense Perception (HSP) by expanding his or her senses beyond normal ranges. Examples of HSP include clairaudience, clairvoyance, and clairsentience.⁴¹ Brennan includes exercises for developing each in Hands of Light. In Light Emerging she more fully explores HSP, noting that another aspect of it is perceiving spiritual guides or guardian angels. She adds that she could tell the difference between the two in her own experience because, unlike the angels, the spiritual guides “didn’t have wings.”⁴²

Celestial Level Healing, related to the sixth layer of the auric field, is another technique taught at more advanced Healing Touch workshops; it is considered a type of channeling. A drawing in Hands of Light depicts a healer sitting at the head of a table, eyes closed, and hands hovering several inches from a patient’s head; angels surround the healer and patient.⁴³ Brennan discusses the need for healers to learn to “raise their vibrations” in order to accept a “greater reality.” This makes it easier, Brennan wrote, for “the guides to get concepts through to you because you are not so prejudiced about the nature of the world; i.e., you have removed some of the blocks from your brain.”⁴⁴

Jill Dickson, R.N., described her experience of attending one of Mentgen’s three-day Healing Touch workshops:

The second day was as amazing as the first. We learned many more energetic techniques with Janet, including the powerful Lymphatic Drainage sequence—a form of energetic release used to help relieve congestion and pain in the lymph system. I also spent time learning from my Healing Touch colleagues….Several people were repeating this course for the third and even fourth time because of their love of Healing Touch. There were hospital nurses from all disciplines, massage therapists, ministers, and psychologists, even someone who had worked as a high executive with a pharmaceutical industry. We shared stories of how Healing Touch had entered our lives, and how it had profoundly impacted our lives and our practices. We laughed, we cried, and we healed. I slept soundly that night. Janet had taught us how to introduce spirit guides into our work, and as I slept, I felt enveloped by the love of my colleagues and my spirit guides.⁴⁵

Workshop Levels IV and V prepare students to become Certified Healing Touch Practitioners. At these levels, each student is assigned a mentor. Students also are required to conduct and document 100 Healing Touch sessions, and to experience at least 10 additional alternative healing techniques; Reiki is one of the most popular and it is not unusual to find nurses who are certified in both Healing Touch and Reiki.⁴⁶ Many of these nurses will engage in private practice; these workshop levels therefore include information about establishing a business and integrating various healing techniques into health-care programs.

Healing Touch, in particular, has been making significant inroads into churches of all denominations in the guise of a “Christian healing modality.” It has been doing so primarily with aggressive promotion by the Healing Touch Spiritual Ministry. Parish nursing also may be a vehicle for incorporating Healing Touch and related therapies into churches, often through the avenue of a church health fair, although the premises, assumptions, and foundations of basic parish nurse training are generally sound and based on a biblical understanding of health and healing (see sidebar for a description of this important movement).

AVENUES OF LEGITIMACY

Alternative healing modalities of all types blossomed in the 1970s in the wake of the 1960s counterculture. The importing of Hinduism and Buddhism introduced Americans to meditation techniques such as Transcendental Meditation (TM) and yoga. TM, yoga, and many other alternative approaches to spirituality and health rooted in Eastern metaphysical systems of thought became more firmly established in the culture at large in the 1980s. They also began appearing regularly in professional journals, described as techniques that lowered stress and blood pressure. They gained more legitimacy in medicine through the establishment in 1993 of the Office of Alternative Medicine by the National Institutes of Health; one purpose of the Office of Alternative Medicine was to encourage research and exploration of the effectiveness of these alternative healing techniques.

TM, yoga, and Therapeutic Touch gained legitimacy in nursing schools in the 1970s and 1980s, largely promoted by national nursing organizations such as the National League for Nursing and the American Nurses Association. Many nurses have researched Therapeutic Touch as an intervention through heavily funded research projects. Healing Touch has become a more recent topic for nursing research and use in clinical settings such as hospitals, hospices, and nursing homes.⁴⁷

Developers of both Therapeutic and Healing Touch have appealed to the science of quantum physics for legitimization and substantiation of their claims, though critics have noted that the appeal has been to select interpretations of quantum physics that might be more accurately described as quantum metaphysics or quantum mysticism.⁴⁸ Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics,⁴⁹ Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters,⁵⁰ and Deepak Chopra’s The New Physics of Healing⁵¹ are sources frequently cited, along with the writings of physicist David Bohm (1917–1994), whose interpretations of quantum physics were heavily influenced by the metaphysical writings of Jiddu Krishnamurti.

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986), born in India into a moderately wealthy Brahmin (highest caste or class) family, was originally groomed by Theosophists Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater as the fifth Buddha and incarnation of Lord Bodhisattva Maitreya, the coming World Teacher who was proclaimed as “the vehicle for the reincarnation of Christ in the west and of Buddha in the East.”⁵² Krishnamurti later resigned from Besant’s religious organization, the Order of the Star in the East, and renounced his claim to messianic fame, but Buddhist monistic (“all is One”) concepts continued to permeate both his individual writings and a coauthored book with Bohm.⁵³ Concepts from Buddhism, housed in various schools of Theosophy, are foundational to both Therapeutic and Healing Touch.

The writings of Alice Bailey (1880–1949) also play a major role in the Healing Touch movement. Bailey founded the Arcane School (which was rooted in Theosophy, but then branched out into many teachings that differed from it). Her supposedly channeled book, Esoteric Healing,⁵⁴ is a primary source textbook for the Healing Touch practitioner. Bailey claimed that she was the amanuensis, or scribe, of Djwhal Khul, a Tibetan adept and ascended Master of the White Brotherhood.⁵⁵ In Initiation, Human and Solar, Bailey described her “teacher” (one assumes she was referring to Djwhal Khul) as an adept who “works largely, too, with certain groups of the devas of the ethers, who are the healing devas, and who thus collaborate with Him in the work of healing some of the physical ills of humanity.”⁵⁶

HEALING TOUCH AND THE CHURCH

The standard teaching of the Healing Touch Spiritual Ministry is that the contemporary Christian church has lost its original focus on healing and needs to reclaim it. There is, it could be argued, some validity to this assessment, though there has been a renewed focus on healing in many Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches since the early 1970s in particular, sparked by books reflecting various denominational perspectives.⁵⁷ Healing has long been a focus in churches reflecting Pentecostal or charismatic traditions. There is also a rich historic tradition of books on healing by missionaries and ministers such as Andrew Murray (1828–1917), author of Divine Healing, and Christian and Missionary Alliance founder A. B. Simpson (1843–1919), author of The Gospel of Healing. The parish nurse movement is one of the most visible and recent expressions of a holistic healing focus influencing churches of all denominations.

If this rich historic and contemporary tradition is the case, why, then, does a practice such as Healing Touch appeal to so many within the church? How is it possible that a practice so clearly rooted in Western occultism and esotericism, Eastern metaphysical beliefs, and even spiritism, can be considered compatible with a Christian worldview or even be allowed in a church in the first place?

Some answers to the foregoing questions are found in what Healing Touch claims to offer and what it may deliver to the practitioner; this includes an emotionally satisfying experience couched in the context of an appealing ritual. Healing Touch is highly aesthetic and highly ritualistic, from the initial step of meditative centering, to the patterned series of hand movements believed to assess, unruffle, and modulate or even flick away “negative” energy. The practice seems designed to meet a human need for a sense of order, beauty, and balance. In nursing literature, practices such as Therapeutic and Healing Touch are, in fact, frequently referred to as healing rituals evoking “art, beauty and soul care.”⁵⁸

Rituals are powerful tools, engendering strong emotional responses as well as experiences that may or may not be accurately interpreted as spiritual. The Old and New Testament Scriptures are replete with examples of rituals God commanded His people to engage in, including rituals of healing (see, e.g., 2 Kings 5:13–14 and John 9:7). The primary purpose of these healing rituals, however, invariably led to restoration of physical, emotional, social, mental, and spiritual health. A radical repentance was also foundational to the practice of much healing in Scripture, accompanied by recognition of one’s humanness and total dependence on God as opposed to a belief in one’s innate divinity (see 2 Kings 20; Num. 21; James 5:13–16). The most powerful healing ritual of all for Christians was, in reality, the Roman ritual of crucifixion. Isaiah53:5 tells us, “With His stripes we are healed” (ESV), we are not merely rebalanced.

True biblical healing on any level really is a “power encounter.” The power encountered is God. In many cases, however, there is a lack of discernment or recognition of other powers or of spiritual realms of existence that are considered “off-limits” to Christians. There is power in these realms too, though power of a different nature. Angels, including fallen ones, really do exist, but are not ours to invoke, conjure, or channel. The consequences for accessing angels, and for attempting to access deceased humans as well, can be quite severe, as Saul found out when he attempted to channel Samuel’s spirit through a medium (see 1 Sam. 28:3–19). God forbids it (see also Lev. 19:31 and Deut. 18:9–14).

Healing practices that appeal to extrabiblical sources of authority appear to have a particularly strong appeal to the senses. A pastor from Sackville, Nova Scotia, Canada, who wrote about introducing Therapeutic Touch in his church immediately after the communion service, noted that some of the congregants who remained at the altar to receive the laying-on of hands experienced “tingling, heat,” and “seeing light.”⁵⁹ Physical sensations such as these may be legitimate responses to the traditional Christian experience of the laying-on of hands and prayer, but the focus of true Christian healing is not on feelings and experiences but on God, who bids us to come to Him in our brokenness.

There is another side to many energy-based healing techniques, including dangers accompanying the raising of one’s own or another’s “kundalini energy.” Explanations of these dangers vary greatly. Training on handling “psychospiritual crises” is now included in more advanced Therapeutic Touch workshops.⁶⁰ Christians would be wise not to subject themselves to experiences or practices that specifically are designed to awaken or manipulate energy in any form.⁶¹

Practices such as Healing Touch are also self validating; that is, they fall into the category of subjectively validated as opposed to objectively validated experiences. Whereas the former are evaluated within the context of one’s private network of feelings where the heart blindly approves, the latter are evaluated within the context of a biblical system of thought where the mind carefully appraises, embracing reason rather than escaping reason. An informed and engaged mind should make us more critical rather than less critical about the nature of this world, as well as any spiritual worlds that may not be ours safely to explore.

Healing Touch proponents have attempted to legitimize this practice to the church by promoting the idea that the type of healing Jesus engaged in was energy-based healing, consistent with new discoveries in quantum theory. To support this belief, they use, for example, the healing by Jesus of the woman with the issue of blood. Mark 5:27 describes her touching the garment of Jesus from behind. In response to her touch, power immediately came out of Jesus and the woman was healed, instantly and completely. The source of the power to heal seems clear in this passage; it was from God, given to the Son by the Father, residing in Jesus. To equate this dynamic healing power of a personal God with the subtle and impersonal energies of prana or chi, capable of being manipulated and channeled independently by human intentionality or with the assistance of spirit guides or other-than-human intelligences, implies an equivalence that simply does not exist.

“I don’t believe we can be content with natural abilities and gifts—we have to continuously review and update our studies and methods until Energy and Angel Medicine becomes so dramatically effective and widely accepted that it becomes a natural thing to just have these treatments and readings as required,”⁶² wrote Elisabeth Jensen, the nurse mentioned at the beginning of this article who practiced a wide variety of occult and energy-based therapies, including Healing Touch. Her statement should be a wake-up call to Christians to get back to legitimate Christian prayer for healing. True Christian healing should never be considered “natural,” but a supernatural act of grace. Those who are promoting energy-based healing in the church have made healing an autonomous act, relying on human manipulation.

Francis Schaeffer wrote about an autonomous notion of nature “eating up grace.”⁶³ When this happened historically, Schaeffer noted, philosophy “became increasingly free” and “was separated from revelation.” It “began to take wings, as it were, and fly off wherever it wished, without relationship to the Scriptures.”⁶⁴ The greatest need of the church in relation to a renewed and restored focus on healing is to let our philosophies of healing and our practices of healing be fully informed by the Scriptures and by the God of history who desires to teach us to heal and to be healed only through His power. That is both our heritage and our hope.

notes

1. Angel Miracles, “Combining the Gifts of Healing and Clairvoyance with Professional Skills in Health Care and Healing,” About Elizabeth Jensen, Angel Miracles, http://www.angelmiracles.com.au/elizabeth.html.

2. Angel Miracles, Isis Mystery School, Angel Miracles, http://www.angelmiracles.com.au/course/egyptian.html.

3. See, e.g., Judy Meinen, Angel Care Healing Touch, http:// www.angelcarehealingtouch.com/about.

4. For a critical analysis of Therapeutic Touch, see Sharon Fish, “Therapeutic Touch: Healing Science or Psychic Midwife?” Christian Research Journal 18, 1 (1995), 28–38 (http://www.equip.org/free/DN105.pdf).

5. Richard Gerber, Vibrational Medicine: New Choices for Healing Ourselves (Santa Fe, NM: Bear and Company, 1996).

6. “Interview by the Intuitive Times with Dr. Richard Gerber, M.D., Author of Vibrational Medicine—New Choices for Healing Ourselves, Part One,” The Intuitive Times 1, 3, Natural Choice Associates, http://www. intuitivetimes.ca/Articles/artpartone.htm.

7. Diane Stein, The Women’s Spirituality Book (St. Paul: Llewellyn Publications, 1992).

8. Eric Klein, The Crystal Stair: A Guide to the Ascension: Channeled Messages from Sananda (Jesus), Ashtar, Archangel Michael, and St. Germain, 3rd ed. (Livermore, CA: Oughten House Publications, 1994).

9. Healing Touch Spiritual Ministry, February, 2003. A conference brochure.

10. Healing Touch Spiritual Ministry, “HTSM Births a New Curriculum,” Healing Touch Spiritual Ministry Newsletter 3, 1 (Spring 2004): 1, http://www.htspiritualministry.com/ Vol.III.No1.pdf.

11. See Association of Professional Chaplains, http://www. professionalchaplains.org/education-list.asp.

12. Healing Touch Spiritual Ministry, “About Us: Our Beginning Roots,” Healing Touch Spiritual Ministry, http://www.htspiritualministry.com/about.html.

13. Ibid. Author’s Note: There is no Scriptural evidence that Jesus Himself anointed anyone with oil, though it was clearly a practice of the early church with respect to healing.

14. Suggested Reading, Healing Touch Spiritual Ministry http://www.htspiritualministry.com/reading.html.

15. Doreen Virtue, Healing with the Angels: How the Angels Can Assist You in Every Area of Your Life (Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 1999).

16. Rosalyn Bruyere, Wheels of Light: A Study of the Chakras, vol. 1 (Sierra Madre, CA: Bon Productions, 1991).

17. Barbara Brennan, Hands of Light: A Guide to Healing through the Human Energy Field (New York: Bantam Books, 1987).

18. Angel Therapy, “Doreen Virtue, Ph.D. Biography,” Angel Therapy, http://www.angeltherapy.com/about.html.

19. Healing Light Center Church, “Rosalyn L. Bruyere: Healer, Clairvoyant and Medicine Woman,” Think Holistic, http://www.thinkholistic.com/comdir/ cditem.cfm?NID=601. See also Healing Light Center Church, http://www.rosalynlbruyere.org.

20. See Bruyere, Wheels of Light, 124–26.

21. Barbara Brennan, “Credentials,” Barbara Brennan School of Healing, http://www.barbarabrennan.com/bbsh/about_barbara/credentials1.html.

22. See Holos University Graduate Seminary, http://www.hugs-edu.org/.

23. Barbara Brennan, “New Degree Program,” Barbara Brennan School of Healing, http://www.barbarabrennan.com/bbsh/BACHELOR/BSdegreeInfo.html.

24. Barbara Brennan, Light Emerging: A Journey of Personal Healing (New York: Bantam Books, 1993).

25. See Brennan, Hands of Light, 170–71.

26. See, e.g., Northeast Theosophical Retreat Center, “Workshops on Therapeutic Touch,” under “31st Annual Advanced Therapeutic Touch Workshop,” Pumpkin Hollow Farm, http://www.pumpkinhollow.org/ tt_ws.html#advanced_ws.

27. Dora Kunz with commentary by Dolores Krieger, The Spiritual Dimension of Therapeutic Touch (Rochester, VT: Bear and Company, 2004).

28. Dora van Gelder, The Real World of Fairies (London: Quest Books/The Theosophical Publishing House, 1977).

29. Dolores Krieger, interview with “Interconnect,” WVXU 91.7 FM (Cincinnati, Ohio), Spring, 1997; available at http://www.phact.org/e/tt/cin.txt.

30. Spiritism is “the practice of attempting communication with departed human or extra-human intelligences… through the agency of a human medium.” Elliot Miller, A Crash Course on the New Age Movement: Describing and Evaluating a Growing Social Force (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1989), 141.

31. Bruce F. Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived: A History of the Theosophical Movement (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980).

32. C.W.Leadbeater, The Chakras (Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1981. Originally published 1927); C.W.Leadbeater, Man, Visible and Invisible (Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1981. Originally published in 1902). Also Dora Kunz, comp., Spiritual Aspects of the Healing Arts. (Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1985); Dora Kunz, The Personal Aura (Wheaton, IL: Quest Books/Theosophical Publishing House, 1991).

33. Llewellyn Encyclopedia, s.v. “Chakras,” Llewellyn Worldwide, http://www.llewellynencyclopedia.com/term.php?id=55.

34. Shafica Karagulla and Dora van Gelder Kunz, The Chakras and the Human Energy Fields (Wheaton, IL: Quest Books/ Theosophical Publishing House, 1989).

35. Dolores Krieger, Therapeutic Touch: How to Use Your Hands to Help or to Heal (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall Press, 1979).

36. For a seven-step sequence, see Steve Anderson, “Basic Healing Touch Sequence,” Basic Sequence, Steve’s Healing Touch Practice, http://www.stevehtouch.bizland.com/ Sequence.htm.

37. Healing Touch International, “Program Information,” Colorado Center for Healing Touch, http://www. healingtouch.net/program/index.shtml.

38. See Brennan, Hands of Light, 52.

39. Kunz, The Personal Aura.

40. Brennan, Hands of Light, 219–20.

41. Ibid., 153.

42. See Brennan, Light Emerging, 54.

43. See Brennan, Hands of Light, 227.

44. Ibid., 226.

45. Jill Dickson, “Three Days with Janet,” Biosphere 6 (2002), California Hematology Oncology Medical Group and B’Shert Integrative Oncology Services, CHMOG and BIOS, http://www.chomg.com/three_days_with_janet.htm.

46. Reiki usually involves three levels of attunements or initiations by Reiki Masters in often secret ceremonies to raise the vibrations of initiates so as to enable them to channel increasing amounts of energy, then to become Reiki Masters themselves. See, for example, William Lee Rand, Reiki: The Healing Touch. First and Second Degree Manual (Southfield, MI: Vision Publications, 1991).

47. Research Department, “Healing Touch Research,” Healing Touch International, http://www.healingtouch.net/research/summary2003.pdf.

48. Patrick Grim, ed., Philosophy of Science and the Occult, 2nd ed. (Albany, NY: State of University of New York Press, 1990).

49. Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism (Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 1975).

50. Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics. (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1979).

51. Deepak Chopra, The New Physics of Healing (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2002).

52. Krishnamurti Foundation, “J. Krishnamurti,” Krishnamurti Foundation of America, http://www.kfa.org/biography.php.

53. For a comprehensive and easy to understand overview of Bohmian physics, see Sheldon Goldstein, “Bohmian Mechanics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Winter 2002 edition), http://www.plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2002/entries/qm-bohm/; see also Martin Gardner, “David Bohm and Jiddo Krishnamurti,” Skeptical Inquirer 24, 4 (July 2000) (http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2843/is_4_24/ai_63693002).

54. Alice A. Bailey, Esoteric Healing: A Treatise on the Seven Rays, vol. 4 (New York: Lucis Publishing Companies, 1953).

55. Lucis Trust, “About Alice A. Bailey” Lucis Publishing Companies, Lucis Trust, http://www.lucistrust.org/ lucispub/aab.shtml.

56. Alice A. Bailey, Initiation, Human and Solar (New York: Lucis Publishing Companies, 1926), 57–58.

57. See, e.g., Francis MacNutt, Healing, rev. ed. (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 1999); Ken Blue, Authority to Heal (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1987); and Paul Meyendorff, Sacrament of Healing in the Orthodox Church (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004).

58. Jean Watson, Postmodern Nursing and Beyond (New York: Churchill Livingstone, 1999), 257–58.

59. David Maginley, “The Gift of Healing: Re-examining the Clergy Vows of Laying Hands on the Sick,” In Touch, The Therapeutic Touch Network of Ontario, http://www. therapeutictouchnetwk.com/Article9.htm.

60. See, e.g., Northeast Theosophical Retreat Center.

61. See, e.g., SilverDrake Fey, “Serpent Fire: Kundalini and Spiritual Crisis,” Reiki Articles, Sacred Path Reiki, http//www.sacredpath.org/html/reiki/general/article001.htm. See Elliot Miller, “The Christian, Energetic Medicine, ‘New Age Paranoia,’” Christian Research Journal 14, 3 (1992): 24–27.

62. Jensen.

63. Francis A. Schaeffer, Escape from Reason (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1982; originally published in 1968), 21.

64. Ibid., 211.

The ManKind Project aims for “Changing the world one man at a time,” and it is roughly 36,000 men closer to that goal through its New Warrior Training Adventure. Werner Erhard, creator of est (Erhard Seminars Training), the most popular and controversial human potential seminar of the 1970s, had no hand in founding the ManKind Project, but one Christian critic sees in it a message that is compatible with est.

Mark Roggeman, a thirty-year veteran of the Denver Police Department, evaluated the ManKind Project for Midwest Christian Outreach’s Journal in the winter of 2006. He told the Christian Research Journal that his article led to roughly thirty calls from across the country from people whose families had been disrupted by a man’s participation in New Warrior Training Adventure. In one case, he said, a young man returned from the weekend blaming his mother for his problems. Another man’s marriage ultimately ended in divorce.

Roggeman interviewed three alumni of the training, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity, to gain a sense of what happens during the training, which begins on a Friday evening and ends on a Sunday afternoon. Roggeman’s article described the men as having been yelled at, told to sit in a dark room while awaiting other initiates (new participants), ordered to hand over their wristwatches and cell phones, and sleep-deprived for much of the weekend. The three men also referred to initiates dancing naked amid frenetic drumming.

What Roggeman heard in the testimony of his three anonymous informants was a pattern of breaking people down in order to rebuild them. That reminded him of est, which he had studied in the 1970s. Roggeman also was troubled by the ManKind Project’s policy of not discussing what occurs during its weekend training sessions. “That’s always a red flag,” he told the Journal.

Much of Roggeman’s 3,000-word article—“Oh, Man, What Kind of Project Is This?”—describes ties of influence between the ManKind Project and est. For instance, the three founders of the ManKind Project (ex-Marine and ex-corporate executive Rich Tosi, therapist Bill Kauth, and educator Ron Hering) attended a men’s seminar by Justin Sterling, who is an alumnus of est. Roggeman believes Sterling’s seminar, which was the subject of several different critical reports by journalists, helped shape what became the ManKind Project’s New Warrior Training Adventure.

Les Sinclair, media relations director for The ManKind Project, confirmed that the group’s founders attended Sterling seminars. “One difference is that Justin Sterling runs his seminars for a profit and we’re a not-for-profit organization. I do know that the Sterling Group emphasizes that men are in control” in their relationships with women, Sinclair said. “We don’t do that.”

Sinclair said he attended an est session in the 1970s when he was a television producer. “It was very harsh and very self-promoting,” he told the Journal. The primary similarity between what est offered then and what The ManKind Project offers today, Sinclair said, is the importance of taking responsibility for your life and for the choices you make.

Emptying Your Pockets. Sinclair defended The ManKind Project’s policy of not discussing the details of New Warrior Training Adventure. He compared that policy to the practice of not ruining a person’s experience of a film by disclosing every plot twist in advance. “If we divulge all the key elements of what happens, it spoils the experience for men,” he said.

Sinclair alluded to men divesting themselves of wristwatches and cell phones and emptying their pockets. “You’d be surprised. Some men bring weapons, some men bring drugs,” Sinclair said. “They’re not awake yet.” (In fairness, it’s also worth noting that many Christian retreats, such as Cursillo, also require participants to hand over the trappings of everyday modern life.)

Sinclair agreed that the weekend experience can be too intense for some men. “We say very clearly that the training is not for every man,” he said. “We tell potential initiates that there will be times in the weekend when they will want to run away and hide. You will be tested—physically, emotionally, and spiritually.”

The ManKind Project recognizes that boys and young men no longer have initiation rites that mark their passage into adulthood, Sinclair said. For modern people, this void began with the Industrial Revolution, which disrupted the traditional pattern of a boy learning a trade from his father and going through an apprenticeship.

“You still need a masculine hand for boys to see what it means to be a man,” Sinclair said. The weekend offers initiates “a vortex of masculine power that is so powerful.”

The ManKind Project stresses being conscious, helping men become awake to their choices, and the consequences of those choices. “What we are doing is letting men look at their emotional wounds,” Sinclair said. “Men typically do not talk about their emotional issues with other men. They talk about the money they make, about cars, and about women. They look past one another.”

Sinclair said he first became involved with The ManKind Project when he was going through a divorce and a battle for custody of his children. “I felt like a wounded bird,” he said, and the New Warrior Training Adventure helped him discover his inner strength. “One of the proudest things I’ve ever done in my life was to be a good father.”

The ManKind Project is interested in spirituality, and encourages its participants to serve others, often by taking New Warrior Training Adventure to fatherless children or into prisons. Sinclair believes every man has within himself the four archetypes of king, warrior, lover, and magician. “Standing in the center of those four quadrants,” he said, “is the citizen.”

The ManKind Project has encountered enough criticisms that its Frequently Asked Questions document directly addresses the question of whether the group is a cult: “Cults ask their members to devote their lives, and often their material possessions, to a single leader or doctrine. The Mankind Project’s broad leadership base takes a very different approach, challenging each man to define the life that works best for him, and to live that life fully with the support of other men.”

“We don’t espouse any religion, although any man is welcome to attend,” Sinclair said.

What the Bleep Do We Know? extrapolates from quantum physics to answer life’s big questions. That’s its claim anyway. In reality, science is completely incidental to the film’s conclusions. Viewers instead are fed a nauseating stream of nonsense that traces back to the teaching of a woman who claims to channel a 35,000-year-old deity.

What any reviewer fears when reviewing an outlandish book or film is unintentionally lending credibility to a work that would be better served by silence. Perhaps this dynamic was at work in Christianity Today’s refusal to print a full review of the “docudrama.” Instead the magazine opted to publish a collection of dismissive snippets from Christian critics, which in large part were echoed by their secular counterparts who also balked at the production’s pseudoscience and New Age vacuity.

Reaction from the general public, however, has been quite different. Nearly a year after debuting in theaters, the film is boasting healthy DVD sales and spawning multiple conferences, chat rooms, and study groups. The work even has found its way into college syllabi, where it is touted as a link between science and spirituality. The Miami Herald ran a story on What the Bleep enthusiasts (“Bleepers”) who have made promoting the film a personal mission. Endorsements from celebrities such as Drew Barrymore and Ellen DeGeneres have also added to its momentum. The film’s growing popularity despite its lack of credibility necessitates a response from the Christian community.

So what the bleep is going on? Well, the film is more entertaining than your average documentary. Though it delves into science and philosophy—subjects traditionally expressed in academic prose—What the Bleep gives its heady material a new spin, interweaving “expert” interviews with the story of a frustrated, deaf photographer, named Amanda. Amanda (played by Marlee Matlin) is beset by personal and professional woes: she’s haunted by a painful divorce, unhappy at work, and dissatisfied with her appearance. Through a series of events and encounters (illustrated with mind-bending graphics, animation, and inspiring musical scores), however, she glimpses a new dimension: the dizzying reality of the subatomic universe. As Amanda’s story unfolds, the talking heads mine quantum physics for nuggets of spiritual wisdom, and the new branch of science turns out to be a goldmine. Apparently the molecular world tells us that reality exists only when we perceive it, that “we are all gods in the making,” and that a theistic understanding of God is “ugly, superstitious backwater.” As the film’s experts spout nebulous, New Age phrases, however, we can’t help wondering if the wisdom is coming from subatomic quarks or disingenuous quacks.

Credibility Issues and Pseudoscience. One of the film’s featured experts is New Age guru J. Z. Knight. According to Knight, Ramtha (the aforementioned ancient deity) has chosen to indwell her body to spread his philosophy. “The totality of his message,” she says, “could be expressed in the statement, ‘You are God.’”

Although Knight is presented in the video as merely one of the experts, she is actually much more involved. The writers and producers of the film are all students of the school of “ancient wisdom” that she founded, named Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment.

Other experts interviewed have legitimate credentials, but almost all are heavily involved with New Age institutes such as the Institute of Noetic Sciences and Maharishi University of Management, and the interviewees willingly stray from their fields of study. The scientists make bold religious and philosophical statements, while the new age specialists freely share their “scientific” insights.

Perhaps these credibility issues could be overlooked if the film supported its claims with solid science, but it does not. To prove that our thoughts can create an alternative physical reality, for example, the film turns to the water experiments of Masaru Emoto. Emoto takes water samples and attaches different messages to each one, some negative (“I hate you,” or “You make me sick”) and some positive (“I love you,” or “Thank you”). He then snaps magnified photographs of the water to view the impact of the messages on the molecular level. He also crystallizes the water and takes samples from different sources—details not mentioned in the film. Samples with positive messages attached turn out beautiful and symmetrical, like snowflakes. The ones subjected to negative messages resemble pond scum.

Emoto’s books reveal even more fantastical claims about water’s supposed consciousness. In one experiment, a sample of water demonstrated empathy, splitting in two after “listening” to Elvis’s rock dirge “Heartbreak Hotel.”

One would think a discovery of this magnitude would cause a stir in the scientific community, yet searches of scientific databases yield not a trace of Emoto or his discoveries. In fact the only readily available information seems to come from the What the Bleep Web site or Emoto’s own site, where he sells self-published books and bottles of blessed water. This segment of the film ends with the haunting words: “If our thoughts can do that to water, just imagine what our thoughts can do to us.”

The film touts another experiment: a 1993 meditation conference conducted in Washington, D.C., that allegedly lowered violent crime in the area by nearly 25 percent. When asked about the study, however, a Washington, D.C., area government crime analyst stated: “We’ve heard of this experiment repeatedly. We have no idea how [the conference leaders] could arrive at their conclusions.” In fact, government statistics show that 1993 was the most violent year in the Washington, D.C., area in the past 20 years.

Philosophical and Theological Problems. The introductory prescript “In the beginning was the void…” opens the film on a skeptical note. What follows is an all-out assault on the human mind. One after another, the experts express their disbelief that the mind can accurately apprehend reality. They describe perception as the mere byproduct of an illusory interplay between the senses and the brain. With such disadvantages plaguing us, one expert asks, “How can we continue to see the world as real?”

Just when the film seems certain of uncertainty, however, it changes positions on the power of the mind, which suddenly morphs from hapless pawn to divine juggernaut. We could walk on water, one commentator assures us, if we only “believed with every fiber of our being.” Another insists that “We have this habit of thinking of things around us as already things, existing without [our] input, without [our] choice. [We] need to banish that type of thinking” and believe instead that the material world is brought into existence when the mind chooses between different possibilities of consciousness.

The mind, they say, is utterly incapable of discerning reality, but supposedly has no problem creating it. The film never bothers to address the obvious questions raised by its conflicting assertions regarding knowledge: if the mind is utterly susceptible to deception, how can we be sure of any of its conclusions, including the claim that it can create any desired reality? Even if the mind succeeded in achieving a divine mastery over the physical world, how could we verify the achievement, since a hopelessly deluded mind is our only tool of appraisal?

The film’s self-centered model also carries disturbing ethical implications. Recently John Olmsted, a professor of psychology at Oberlin College, invited the film’s makers to Portland, Oregon, to take part in a conference. To test the film’s theories, Olmsted displayed a photo of a child who has Down Syndrome and then asked: “Is this child free to create any reality he wants? Is this child responsible for his condition?” Producer William Arntz responded by stating that the child was paying for transgressions in a previous life. Arntz was consistent in this case, acknowledging the ugly and unavoidable conclusions that follow from the production’s assertions.

Even glaring philosophical incoherence does not prevent the experts from making very specific theological statements. One expert, for example, states that it is impossible to know exactly who or what God is, given the limitations of our knowledge, but then claims to know absolutely that a God who demands, or to whom we must render worship, cannot exist.

As Amanda paces through an old church, the voiceovers opine on the subjugation of humanity at the hands of religion. The film cuts to Knight, announcing that the concept that we could sin against God would be the height of arrogance. Besides, she says, “everyone’s gods [sic].”

This type of self-deification may sound novel and promising to the secular mind, but not to Christians. We are all too familiar with such deception from the garden account in Genesis. We can be thankful that What the Bleep packages the old lie with the seams clearly showing.

The film ends with a flourish from Knight: “Welcome to the kingdom of heaven without judgment, without hate, without testing, without anything.” Including, I might add, credibility or coherence.

— reviewed by Drew Dyck

As unlikely as it may at first have seemed, the UFO phenomenon appears to be going mainstream. For most evangelicals, belief in UFOs has been more a matter of amusement than concern, but in today’s postmodern culture this movement needs to be taken seriously.

How should Christians address this seemingly preposterous, yet pressing issue? What should parents teach their children about aliens? How can youth workers answer the ET questions of their teenage congregations, and how can the Christian employee capably address this topic with his or her co-workers? Does church history provide any lessons for us? We should be aware of at least seven key issues while addressing those who believe in the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence.

1. IT’S NOT JUST A FRINGE BELIEF ANYMORE

No matter how far out belief in extraterrestrials may seem to some people, the fact is that belief in their existence has become both widespread and en vogue. In an issue of Popular Mechanics, Kenneth Nealson, a scientist on the National Academy of Sciences Subcommittee for Solar System Exploration, said, “The search of life is no longer a fringe type of thing.”¹ Politicians, scientists, astronauts, and various celebrities (America’s unofficial worldview spokespersons) concur that intelligent extraterrestrial life must exist within the universe and that it is “arrogant” to presume that humanity is the only intelligent life form. A survey by USA Today revealed that “61 percent of Americans say they believe humans are not the only life form in the galaxy.”² (Interestingly, another survey revealed that six percent of Americans claimed to have actually seen a UFO first hand.³) Need more proof that UFOlogy has permeated the American worldview? Consider the following:

The American Public: A 2000 USA Today survey revealed that 43 percent of Americans believe UFOs are real.⁴

Astronaut Gordon Cooper: “I believe that these extraterrestrial vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets and are obviously more advanced than we are here on earth….Also, I did have occasion in 1951 to have two days of observation of many flights of them [UFOs], of different sizes, flying in higher formation, generally from east to west over Europe.”⁵

U.S. Presidents: Jimmy Carter: “I don’t laugh at people anymore when they say they’ve seen UFOs. I’ve seen one myself.”⁶ Gerald R. Ford (while in congress, 1966): “In the firm belief that the American public deserves a better explanation than that thus far given by the Air Force, I strongly recommend that there be a committee investigation of the UFO phenomena. I think we owe it to the people to establish credibility regarding UFOs, and to produce the greatest possible enlightenment of the subject.”

U.S. Senator: A caller on Larry King Live asked Senator Barry Goldwater, “Do you believe that the government is withholding information on UFOs?”⁷ Goldwater replied, “Yes I do.”

The U.S. Government: In 1992, the government authorized funding for NASA to search for artificial radio signals generated by extraterrestrial civilizations. Congress terminated the program in 1993, but it is now operated privately and known as the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute.

Scientist: Carl Sagan was perhaps one of the best-known scientists to have expressed a belief in the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence.⁸ In 1977, he was instrumental in the launching of the Voyager spacecraft, which transports a gold-coated phonograph with recorded messages of music and sounds of Earth in the hope of communicating our existence to other beings.

It wasn’t that long ago when an admission of the belief in aliens may have qualified a person as a candidate for an insane asylum. Today, such a confession may further advance one’s chances in receiving a research grant or qualifying as a candidate in a Ph.D. program. The first step in addressing this phenomenon, therefore, is to recognize that it is considered a legitimate subject in a variety of mainstream circles. As ludicrous as this may sound, this recognition is essential for effectively ministering to the postmodern culture in which we now live. This is not to imply that we are to patronize their beliefs; rather, we are to treat them with the respect they deserve as human beings and so earn the right to be heard (1 Pet. 3:15).

2. PEOPLE REALLY ARE SEEING THINGS

I was one of many who witnessed what’s now referred to as the “Phoenix Lights” incident. On the evening of 13 March 1997, hundreds of people in Arizona observed a very unusual formation of lights that was well documented by video and eyewitness accounts. The incident created a flurry of speculation concerning the nature of the lights, with the most popular being extraterrestrial. The Air Force acknowledged the occasion with the explanation that the lights were actually flares.

This was not the first time that such a report has received widespread attention. Fifty years earlier, in 1947, the term flying saucer entered the American lexicon when Ken Arnold reported seeing nine “flying saucers” near Mount Ranier, Washington, traveling at speeds well beyond the capabilities of any conventional aircraft at the time.⁹ His report received international coverage. Approximately one week later the so-called “Roswell Incident” took place, which also received international attention. Almost overnight, a foot was in the door for the emergence of a worldview that raised the question: Are beings from outer space visiting us?

Prior to the “Phoenix Lights,” one of the best-documented and recorded UFO events in history occurred on New Year’s Day, 1993, in Mexico City. In broad daylight, at approximately 2 p.m., a vast number of Mexico City residents reported a silvery, metallic object performing unusual aerial maneuvers above the city. Many observers documented the occurrence with camcorders. Local television and radio stations also provided coverage. The event even resulted in a minor traffic jam as drivers brought their vehicles to a stop to witness the object.

Military and airline personnel, engineers, air traffic controllers, police, and people of all walks of life across the globe have made UFO reports. It is true that a significant number of reports are hoaxes and intentionally fraudulent,¹⁰ but the fact remains that credible people are witnessing events that they cannot explain. We should, however, not conclude that because something is unidentifiable that it has extraterrestrial origins. Simply put, UFO does not equal ETI.

It must be remembered that UFO is an abbreviation for unidentified flying object. Mark the word unidentified and note that it is the term that the individual making the report ascribes to the flying object, which simply means that it is unidentifiable to the observer. In most cases, with minimal research, the object turns out to be quite explainable. With others, it may be a rare event, such as a satellite re-entry. With a few, it is the result of a hoax or the vivid imagination of “close encounter wanna bes.”

3. NO HARD EVIDENCE SUGGESTS THAT THERE IS ETI

To date there is no nut, bolt, spaceship, carcass, or transmission to provide overwhelming and convincing proof that ETI exists. This is not to deny that credible people are seeing inexplicable aeronautical and cosmic incidents. It is noteworthy, however, that the vast majority of UFO reports are easily explainable. This may not be the sensationalistic answer for which many people in our culture are looking, but the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of UFO reports have earthly origins.

For example, from 1947 to 1969, the United States Air Force officially studied UFOs under the name “Project Blue Book.” The project, headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, was terminated on 17 December 1969. Of the 12,618 sightings reported, 11,917 (94 percent) were solved. The conclusions of the study were:

(1) no UFO reported, investigated, and evaluated by the Air Force was ever a threat to our national security; (2) there was no evidence submitted to, or discovered by, the USAF that sightings categorized as “unidentified” represented technological developments or principles beyond the range of modern scientific knowledge; and (3) there was no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as “unidentified” were extraterrestrial vehicles. (emphasis added)¹¹

What about Roswell? Like a lawyer yelling “objection,” UFO enthusiasts are quick to point to Roswell as the smoking gun for proof of ETI. Most UFOlogists refer to Roswell as the undisputed site of a UFO crash landing covered up by the government. No doubt, something did crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in the summer of 1947. A little investigative work, however, reveals that although there was a crash and a military cover-up, this does not prove extraterrestrial involvement. Today, we know that the “crash” was actually the debris of a downed balloon for a top-secret military project referred to as “Project Mogul” from nearby White Sands, New Mexico. It was a pre-U-2 attempt to spy on Soviet Russia to ascertain their nuclear capabilities.¹² This prompted the initial controversy and suspicion since the Air Force couldn’t reveal the details of the incident at the time and consequently reported that it was just the debris of a “weather balloon,” and nothing more.

In the summer of 1947, lightning possibly struck one of those spy balloons, which then crashed on Mac Brazel’s ranch. Some of the debris, indeed, did not look like anything Brazel or any non-Project Mogul personnel had ever seen before, but it was not extraterrestrial. Much of the debris, in fact, was comprised of very recognizable ingredients, such as tape and balsa wood. Over the years, Roswell witnesses confused other events in the area with the 8 July 1947 report of a recovered saucer, such as the testing of high-altitude parachute drops with dummies from the stratosphere (Project High Dive), the flights of test pilots (Project Excelsior), and numerous other aeronautical experiments.

The military has gone on record to state that many of the UFO reports are probably the result of experimental projects. The July 1997 issue of Popular Mechanics detailed how Air Force interest in duplicating Nazi technology led to two American flying discs. “Documents declassified since then point to a…secret project, a 40-ft. ‘flying saucer’ designed to rain nuclear destruction on the Soviet Union from 300 miles in space.”¹³ UFO buffs, of course, quickly counter that such explanations arise from a conspiracy to cover up alien technology, but inductive reasoning points to aeronautical experiments related to national security. The burden of proof remains with the ETI proponents. To date, proof of ETI existence is nonexistent.

4. BIBLICAL REVELATION LENDS NO SUPPORT TO ETI

The Bible does not refer to intelligent life on other planets. The focus of the Bible, instead, is on humanity’s need for redemption. When Jesus commissioned the disciples to preach the good news, He directed them to spread the gospel to the “uttermost parts of the earth” (emphasis added), not to the uttermost regions of the galaxy or universe (see Acts 1:8). One doesn’t have to read between the lines to understand that God has a great interest in people on earth, whereas we have no specific revelation demonstrating God’s interest in intelligent life outside of Earth. A dogmatic belief in ETI simply cannot be justified from Scripture.

The focus of the ministry of Jesus Christ, as well, is on the human race. The most famous verse of the New Testament probably is John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life” (NASB, emphasis added). It’s true that the Greek word for “world” (kosmos) can also be translated as “universe,” but the claim that this verse validates and biblically proves the existence of ETI is not only a massive stretch but also a hermeneutical (rules of biblical interpretation) violation. First, the word “kosmos” is used in other places in the New Testament specifically to refer to humanity (see, e.g., John 1:9). Second, such an interpretation would be out of context with the entire Bible as a whole because its message is clearly focused on the human condition and need for redemption.

What about the “wheels” in Ezekiel? The passage referring to “wheels within wheels” (Ezek. 1:16) initially does indeed sound like an ancient UFO report, and UFO enthusiasts regularly cite this passage in an attempt to verify their claims of extraterrestrial interventions in the course of human history. A closer examination of the text, however, clearly demonstrates that Ezekiel was communicating a vision from God (vv. 26–28) and not an extraterrestrial visitation. Basic hermeneutic rules are violated when it’s assumed that the “wheels” of Ezekiel are spaceships.

First, we must read the passage within the entirety of its context. Second, we must attempt to interpret what the biblical author was communicating to his intended audience. With this in mind, we see that this passage inaugurates several visions.

Events seen in visions are not necessarily literal but often symbolic and metaphorical. In this case, the creatures and wheels are most likely representations of angels, who are presented as God’s attendants delivering a message for Israel from God to Ezekiel (cf. Isa. 6:2).

Some commentators concur that, among other things, the “wheels” are a vision to encourage Ezekiel by reminding him of God’s omnipresence. Since the Kebar River, the location of the vision, was probably south of Babylon and a place of prayer for the Jewish exiles, this vision would have been most appropriate at this site to remind Israel that wherever they went, God went, even to Babylon.

5. PROOF OF ETI WOULD NOT UNDERMINE CHRISTIANITY

Even if extraterrestrials do exist, God is their Creator, too. According to Genesis 1:1, “God created the heavens and the earth.” Such a discovery, therefore, would not nullify Christian doctrine but rather confirm the extent of God’s creative capabilities. From Scripture and from creation, we see clearly that God delights in His creativity. For example, when He created angels, He didn’t create just one type but rather many different kinds. It shouldn’t surprise Christians if other life forms exist in the universe. We should learn from the Copernican revolution and choose our battles wisely and avoid dogmatism with scientific issues that are not clearly articulated in Scripture. The bottom line for humanity, nevertheless, is that we on earth are spiritually corrupt and in need of a Savior for forgiveness and everlasting life that is available only through Jesus, regardless of the existence of ETI.

6. THE UFO PHENOMENON TENDS TO HAVE OCCULT QUALITIES

Due to the paranormal attributes of many UFO encounters, it can be logically argued that some supernaturally devious activity exists within the UFO phenomenon. Consider the following observations:

Evil Encounters. Speaking generally, UFO abduction encounters are not pleasant and wholesome experiences. For the most part, they are nightmarish events that often plague victims for years, if not for the rest of their lives. These abduction encounters are obviously not the work of benign and benevolent “space brothers.”

False Prophets. The aliens consistently proclaim a different gospel. The religion of these beings is typically a version of Eastern mysticism or New Age philosophy, which is, in actuality, very old — so old, that it goes back to the Garden of Eden with the temptation to “be like God” (Gen. 3:5). Paul warned the church in Galatia to beware of false teachings regardless of how impressive the source might be. “But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned!” (Gal. 1: 8).

There have been numerous reports of contact with aliens, and yet none thus far has acknowledged Jesus Christ as the Son of God. (If you know of any, please write and let me know about it.) They almost always sanction various Eastern and New Age groups instead as their official spokespersons. A significant percentage of all alleged contactees have admitted to being involved in some form of occult beliefs or practices.¹⁴ It is therefore reasonable to presume that in some cases a spiritual dimension is within the UFO phenomenon, and it is obviously outside the presence, activity, and authority of the Holy Spirit.

7. THE UFO PHENOMENON IS INDICATIVE OF A SPIRITUAL QUEST

One of the characteristics of our postmodern society is spiritual curiosity. This helps explain why books such as Left Behind and Harry Potter that are poles apart in their worldviews can simultaneously share a secular bestseller list. The popularity of spiritual topics, in my opinion, is a reflection of a society that is hungry for meaning and purpose in life, which they mistakenly believe will be fulfilled via contact with extraterrestrial civilizations or proof that life exists outside of planet earth. In effect, for some, the search and hope for ETI amounts to a quest for an extraterrestrial savior.

We witnessed a glimmer of this perspective in 1996 with the premature announcement that evidence for life on Mars had been found in a meteorite known as ALH84001. President Bill Clinton said, “Today, rock 84001 speaks to us across all those billions of years and millions of miles. It speaks of the possibility of life. If this discovery is confirmed [it wasn’t], it will surely be one of the most stunning insights into our universe that science has ever uncovered. Its implications are as far-reaching and awe-inspiring as can be imagined.”¹⁵

In Megatrends 2000, John Naisbett accurately forecasted that the late nineties and early twenty-first century would experience an increased and renewed interest in spirituality, but that people would not necessarily seek out the mainline Christian denominations to have those needs met.¹⁶ He was right. Spirituality is big business. The typical secular bookstore has entire sections devoted to UFOs, Wicca, Eastern thought, and, yes, even Christianity. An article in the New York Times Magazine described this surge of interest as a “revival”;¹⁷ although the “revival” is not within Christianity per se, the church should recognize its unique position in being the only candidate capable of truly meeting this need. The church should, therefore, equip its members to translate the Gospel into a vernacular that the spiritually curious can understand.

We have seen, then, that the proof for ETI is deficient and lacking. Regardless of the existence of ETI, humanity needs redemption, which is exclusively available through Jesus Christ. The presupposition that an advanced alien race could solve the world’s problems is misleading and deceptive. Such a hope is a cloud without rain. Christ alone is able to provide a solution to the problem of sin, and we have been commissioned to spread this good news to the uttermost parts of our planet. We must focus our attention on the Gospel.

NOTES

1. Kenneth Nealson, Popular Mechanics, July 1999, 66.

2. USA Today (Snapshots), 9 March 2001.

3. USA Today (Life), 16 February 2000.

4. Bob Laird, USA Today (Life section), 16 March 2000, 1.

5. Gordon Cooper’s 14 July 1978 letter to the United Nations, published in Timothy Gord, Above Top Secret (New York: William Morrow Co., 1988), 378–79.

6. Buck Wolf, “Carter’s Close Encounters,” ABCNews.com, http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/ dailynews/ufo990122.html. In 1969, Jimmy Carter and several others claimed to have witnessed a UFO outside a Lion’s Club, which appears to have most likely been the planet Venus. I realize this sounds a bit ludicrous at first, but as an amateur astronomer I can attest to the unique brightness of Venus at various times of the year, which has made it the source of numerous UFO reports over the years.

7. Larry King Live, 13 October 1988.

8. ET is an abbreviation for extraterrestrial, which implies nonearthly biological life but not necessarily intelligent life. ETI, on the other hand, is an abbreviation for extraterrestrial intelligence, which is a reference to life forms capable of making intelligent decisions.

9. Arnold said the flight pattern of the objects was “like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.” Quoted in John Spencer, ed., The UFO Encyclopedia (New York: Avon Books, 1991), s.v. “Arnold, Kenneth.”

10. Today’s technology has further simplified the ability to create a UFO hoax.

11. The US Government and Unidentified Flying Objects, NASA Fact Sheet 2000-01-015-HQ (http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/facts/HTML/FS-015-HQ.html).

12. The USAF officially released this information in a now out-of-print book entitled The Roswell Report, published by the U.S. Government Printing Office in 1997.

13. “America’s Nuclear Flying Saucer,” Popular Mechanics, November 2000, 68.

14. John Ankerberg and John Weldon, The Facts on UFOs and Other Spiritual Phenomena (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 1992).

15. Quoted in FYI: The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Science Policy News, no. 122, 9 August 1996.

16. John Naisbitt, Megatrends 2000 (New York: Avon Books, 1990), 290.

17. Jack Miles, “Religion Makes a Comeback,” New York Times Magazine, 12 December 1997.

Not surprisingly, the Boulder, Colorado firm that ran the ad did not respond to a letter asking for proof that there was something unusual about the dirt.

While it is not immediately known how many people actu­ally sent in their $5, the appear­ance of such an ad is not unusu­al. Alongside all the ads bought by New Agers — peddling crystals, “power within” seminars, and channeling sessions — are news bits about recent UFO landings, announcements of upcoming UFO conferences, and advertisements from some of the nation’s leading names in the field of UFOs and the New Age. Some of the ads are placed by alleged “walk-ins,” people who claim that ETs have literally invaded their bodies and can be summoned up (sometimes for a fee) to share wisdom and Ann Landers type advice.

In short, more and more peo­ple today are saying UFOs have landed. And while proof that they have seems consistently elusive, it is clear that the phe­nomenon of UFOlogy — a fas­cination with UFOs and alleged space creatures — has landed squarely in the middle of the New Age movement.

What is behind the recent resurgence of interest in UFOs, particularly in New Age circles? Los Angeles Christian journalist Stuart Goldman says one reason for the rise in interest is the unbelievable success of science fiction/horror writer Whitley Streiber’s 1987 book. Commu­nion (which soared to number one on the New York Times best seller list), and his recent sequel, Transformation.

In his books, Streiber alleges that he was abducted by UFO creatures and subjected to incredibly harrowing experi­ences, some of them sexual. Following publication of his books, Streiber formed “Com­munion” support groups throughout the country for people who claim to have had similar abduction experiences. These too have been growing.

In an unpublished manu­script, Goldman suggests that Streiber’s approach to the UFO phenomenon has fit the New Age movement well because it is “a much more Shirley MacLainesque approach.” Goldman, who claims to have infiltrated Streiber’s group, wrote that Streiber calls the aliens “visitors” who have pos­sessed his body. And, says Streiber, they “are not necessari­ly extraterrestrial at all, but rather interdimensional beings who have come here to take man on a journey through his own consciousness” for the bet­terment of the planet.

In UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game, UFO investigator Phil Klass writes: “Streiber’s remarks suggest that he now sees himself as a modern-day messiah who has been chosen to warn the people of this plan­et, bringing them not the Word of God, but of the omniscient UFOnauts.”

Goldman, who has appeared on numerous television and radio shows — including “Good Morning America” and

“Hard Copy’ — says there are many reasons to be wary of Streiber’s message, as well as those proclaimed by other UFO enthusiasts. First and foremost is that Streiber and others have been heavily involved in the occult prior to their “abduction” experiences, which could mean demons — not aliens — are toying with them.

“In looking at the backgrounds of UFO abductees, it quickly becomes clear that almost to a man, they have some background in New Age or occultic beliefs,” Gold­man wrote. “Interestingly, studies show that there are very few practicing Christians or lews amongst UFO contactees. What could this mean? Are the aliens racists? Or does this, rather, indicate something about the belief systems of the abductees themselves?”

Streiber was a 15-year fol­lower of (occult mystic) G. I. Gurdjieff, and his “occultic belief system includes Zen, alchemy, witchcraft, shaman­ism, tarot, hermeticism, and ‘mystical’ Christianity,” Gold­man wrote. Moreover, says Goldman, “in an interview with author Douglas Winter in Faces of Fear, a book profiling horror writers, Streiber says, ‘I am, a student of the great thir­teenth-century mystic, Meister Eckhart. I have been a witch. I have experimented with wor­shipping the earth as a goddess/mother.’”

Streiber was one of the lead­ing drawing cards at the Whole Life Expo in New York City, October 6-8, 1989 — the largest New Age festival ever held on the East Coast. But he was not the only workshop leader who spoke about space beings. A number of people representing UFO sects were manning their booths — spreading their messages of benevolent space brothers and furnishing instructions from outer space on how mere humans could usher in a new Golden Age. At the same time a handful of UFO “experts” were giving workshops on topic like how to welcome the space brothers to planet Earth so they can help us save ourselves from destruction.

One of the older UFO groups represented was the Jesusonian Foundation, which follows the teachings of The Urantia Book. According to the foundation’s booklet, “Origins of The Urantia Book,” the 2,000-plus page book was penned by “numer­ous supermortal (angel-like) beings” working in accord with a small group of people headed by a Chicago psychiatrist in the 1920s. The Urantia Book teaches that God is a “trinity of trini­ties,” that the human race never had a fall, and that humans are moving forward through pro­gressive revelation to become fused with God. The book also gives a derailed “account” (or gospel) of the life of Christ which declares that Jesus did not die to satisfy the Father’s jus­tice and wrath.

Another group represented at the festival was the rapidly growing Raelian movement, founded by French writer Claude Vorilhon (allegedly renamed “Rael” by the space aliens). In a booklet entitled “Help us welcome Extraterrestrials,” Vorilhon claims that on December 13, 1973, “in a vol­canic crater located in the cen­ter of France,” he “met with a space-craft from which emerged a small human-like being” that looked like a child. Vorilhon said the space being chose him as the one to spread “the great­est message ever revealed to humanity” and that he would be an apostle of a new world order.

The message was that he was to prepare humanity “for the Age of Apocalypse or the Age of Revelation,” which was kicked off by the explosion of the first atomic bomb in 1945. The space being also told him that life was created by aliens in a DNA laboratory.

The Raelian movement is surprisingly large and orga­nized: it claims 30,000 mem­bers worldwide, and has more than a dozen offices throughout the world — including ones in Japan, Africa, Switzerland, Mex­ico, Canada, and three offices in the U.S.: Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Miami.

Other UFO groups include The Aetherius Society (which is also one of the oldest and largest UFO sects), the One World Family, the Mark Age Metacenter, the Solar Light Cen­ter, the Solar Cross Foundation, the Universal Mind Church, the Ashtar Command, the Earth Mission Interplanetary Out­reach, the Unarius Educational Foundation, and the Amalga­mated Flying Saucer Clubs of America.

A few decades ago, “shamanism” was a word known mainly by anthropologists. As the New Age movement grew in the West, however, many others were introduced to and embraced spiritual practices drawn from several primitive cultures such as Native American, various Latin American, Hawaiian, Eskimo, and other indigenous groups. These practices, which emphasized trance and ecstatic states, spirit contact, animal spirits, out-of-body experiences, and nontraditional healing¹ were harmonious with the budding New Age beliefs that emphasized the earth, transcendence through drugs, and multileveled realities. Neoshamanism thus was born.

Two of the most influential people in the rise of neoshamanism were Carlos Castaneda and Lynn Andrews, who claimed to have been initiated into shamanism by native teachers. Castaneda claimed to have been a student of Yaqui Indian Don Juan Matus, while Lynn Andrews claimed to have studied under women teachers such as Agnes Whistling Elk and Ruby Plenty Chiefs. Castaneda’s many books on shamanism, including his influential and controversial The Teachings of Don Juan published in 1968, as well as Andrews’s many books since 1981, have sold quite well.

Castaneda, an anthropology student in 1960 who set out to research the medicinal properties of plants, enlisted the help of shaman-sorcerer Don Juan.² Thus began Castaneda’s journey into the world of sorcery, where dreams and visions became the prime reality — a spiritual trip that included hallucinogens, which was one of the touchstones of “spiritual awakening” in the 1960s and 1970s. Castaneda’s views resonated well with New Age seekers. He said, for example, that sorcerers “navigate” and “perceive energy directly” because they see the universe as a flow of energy³ — the New Age asserts that all is energy. Castaneda wrote about sorcery and Don Juan as a sorcerer, but in many respects he was referring to shamanism by another name. His books about his spiritual journey and Don Juan ignited interest in shamanism and became a seminal influence in the rise of neoshamanism.

The 1990 publication of Serge King’s Urban Shaman and Michael J. Harner’s The Way of the Shaman, as well as magazines such as Shaman’s Drum (started in 1985) and Sacred Hoop, featured stories and teachings of self-proclaimed shamans and helped bring shamanism to the suburbs.⁴ These works introduced practices such as the sweat lodge, a spiritual purification ceremony taken from Native American traditions. Wet heat from hot stones splashed with water creates a near suffocating heat inside a temporary hut for participants who typically chant, meditate, and receive intuitive visions. Another common practice was the vision quest,⁵ a journey made after fasting and meditating to find one’s totem (an animal spirit that serves as one’s guide and protector). The use of drums in shamanic ritual was also adopted to induce a trance state “necessary to the shaman’s ‘magical flight.’”⁶

One anthropology professor said people were drawn to shamanism “because they have a biological need for the ecstasy induced by mystic experiences.”⁷ The quest for physical and emotional healing outside traditional medicine was another strong draw.⁸

The New Age emphasizes Eastern meditation, energy, earth consciousness, the Higher Self, intuition, natural healing, and transcendent states, sometimes with the aid of hallucinogens. Such concepts and activities were a breeding ground for the new shamanism and its focus on ecstatic states, visions, and healing.

According to Andrews, for example, shamanism is “very much related to the harmonies of the earth…all things are alive; they all have energy and a purpose and a meaning…a shaman is someone who is related to those meanings.”⁹ Andrews asserts, “I have learned about how to heal the body with the power of thought, the power of spirit.”¹⁰ Andrews believes that conscious people are becoming more aware because “we are moving at a much higher frequency.…Because the Christed consciousness is right above us.…we are tuning into this Christed consciousness.”¹¹ The concept of Christ consciousness, however, comes from the New Age, not from shamanism; but the source of a concept makes no difference to Andrews, as long as “you are aligned with the goddess, with Jesus or with Buddha or with Native American teachings, whatever shamanic work, it doesn’t really matter.”¹²

CRITICS OF NEOSHAMANISM

The new shamanism was not without its detractors. Many Native Americans resented the use of their traditions and teachings outside the context of their culture. They considered the new shamans to be New Age charlatans.¹³ A southern Cheyenne Indian said, “Somehow, I think (shaman rituals) belong only to the Indians,” accusing non-Natives of first taking their land, then their spirituality.¹⁴ Other Native Americans said people should not be charging money to teach spiritual traditions.

In 1988, Andrews was sued by a former live-in companion, David Carson, who claimed that her books were based in part on stories he had written.¹⁵ Others, meanwhile, contended that some of Andrews’s geographical and cultural terms were in error, such as her Cree Indian guide having used Lakota and Hopi terms.¹⁶ A Native American professor who frequently worked among the Cree of Manitoba, moreover, noted that no one there had ever heard of Andrews.¹⁷

Castaneda, whose tales of the sorcerer Don Juan were never verified, was accused of making fraudulent claims in his story that do not fit the geography or the Yaqui Indian culture and of presenting teachings that resembled Hinduism or Buddhism rather than Yaqui beliefs.¹⁸ One critic stated that Castaneda “claimed to climb trees that can’t be climbed and to stalk animals that can’t be stalked.…He could provide no samples of the hallucinogenic mushrooms that he supposedly used, and indeed there are none in that region. Worst of all, he obviously knew nothing about Yaqui Indian beliefs and culture.”¹⁹

Despite these criticisms, followers of neoshamanism have defended Castaneda. Whether Castaneda’s claims are true or false, or whether Don Juan is real or imaginary, is irrelevant, according to one follower. What matters is the teaching of Don Juan — “Does it ‘work’ or not?”²⁰ Another supporter stated that Don Juan’s words lead us to a place “beyond the need for validity and scientific authenticity.”²¹

THE TREND CONTINUES

Although interest in shamanism seems to have peaked, a variety of materials are still readily available. Lynn Andrews’s first book, Medicine Woman, is in its 39th printing. Her Web site offers online courses in balancing one’s “Spirit wind,” communing with one’s sacred animal of power, and creating a “Spirit Friend…who will assist with spirit retrieval journeys into the dreamtime.”²² There are many other Web sites presenting shamanic spirituality, including one run by Michael Harner.²³ Shaman’s Drum and Sacred Hoop²⁴ are still in circulation.

More recent shamanistic books include The Four Agreements (1997) by Don Miguel Ruiz and Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism (2002) by Daniel Pinchbeck. Ruiz’s book allegedly conveys teachings from the Toltec tradition and has spawned a number of Web sites and classes. Pinchbeck’s book details a spiritual journey that includes psychedelic drugs, which he calls “visiting the ‘spirit world.’”²⁵

Considering the adaptability of New Age ideas and the rise of earth-based Neo-Pagan religions, neoshamanic quests and visions will undoubtedly be spirited into the twenty-first century.

– Marcia Montenegro

NOTES

1. William S. Lyon, “Working with Sacred Power,” Shaman’s Drum 16, 39 (Mid-Spring 1989).

2. Bruce Wagner, “You Only Live Twice,” Details, March 1994, 168.

3. Ibid.

4. Charles Lyles, “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” The Virginia Pilot, 27 July 1993, sec. B-1.

5. Stacy Trevenon, “Shaman Draws on Old Tradition,” Half Moon Bay Review, 1 August 1990, sec. 4B; Debra Warner, “Shamanism’s Seekers,” The Orange County Register, 12 February 1991, sec. E.

6. Lyon.

7. Warner.

8. Trevenon.

9. http://www.lynnandrews.com/Pages/frameteach.html

10. Lynn Andrews, “An Interview with Lynn Andrews,” interview by Dennis Hughes, http://www.shareguide.com/Andrews.html.

11. Lynn Andrews, “phenomeNEWS Exclusive Interview with: Lynn Andrews,” interview with phenomeNEWS, http://www.phenomenews.com/archives/june01/andrew.html.

12. Ibid.

13. Lyles.

14. Warner.

15. Jon Magnuson, “Selling Native American Soul,” http://www.religion-online.org/cgi-bin/relsearchd.dll/showarticle?item_id=905. Originally appeared in the Christian Century, 22 November 1989, 1084.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid. See Magnuson’s article for further criticism of Andrews.

18. Ross Paviac, review of The Don Juan Papers by Richard de Mille, Cornerstone Magazine 13, 70.

19. Kathryn Lindskoog, “In the Footsteps of Carlos Castaneda,” http://www. discovery.org/lewis/carlos.html.

20. http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Rhodes/5418/continue.html.

21. “Carlos Castaneda and the Don Juan Controversy: Are You the Hunter or the Prey?” http://users.rcn.com/sfbardo/castaneda.htm.

22. http://www.lynnandrews.com/Pages/frameteach.html

23. The Foundation for Shamanic Studies, www.shamanism.org.

24. Published in Wales as the “Leading magazine for Shamanism, Animism, and Earth Wisdom” (www.sacredhoop.org).

25. Publisher’s Weekly, review of Breaking Open the Head by Don Miguel Ruiz, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/books/0767907426/ reviews/.

MILLER — THE NEW POLYTHEISM

In 1974 David L. Miller, Associate Professor of Religion at Syracuse University, published The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses.⁵ In this book Miller argues that polytheism is alive and well in the contemporary world. Believing this is a good thing, he urges people in Western society to get in tune with the gods in order to liberate themselves and become the kind of people they really are.

The Death of God

According to Miller, monotheism represents an attempt to bring everyone’s “explanation systems, whether theological, sociological, political, historical, philosophical, or psychological” under one all-embracing system. This system operates “according to fixed concepts and categories” that are controlled by an either/or kind of logic; that is, something is “either true or false, either this or that, either beautiful or ugly, either good or evil.” But this kind of thinking, says Miller, “fails a people in a time when experience becomes self-consciously pluralistic, radically both/and.”⁶ This is what Western society is today — radically pluralistic. Contemporary Western man finds himself in a world where truth and morality are relative. His “life often feels anarchistic: no horizons, fences, boundaries, and no center to prove one securely close to home.”⁷ The contemporary situation is so pluralistic that its modern interpreters “have had to rely on a strange set of words” in their attempt to explain it. For example:

In tracing our psychology Charles Baudouin speaks of polyphonic meaning and being. In speaking of the nature of thinking required for contemporary understanding Philip Wheelwright points to plurisignificative knowing and communicating. Norman I. Brown talks about polymorphous reality as a key to our history, and Ray Hart names the deepest aspect of our literature articulations of reality with the phrase polysemous functioning of imaginal discourse. If we try to make sense of our society Michael Novak suggests it will help to think of America as a pluralistic community of radically unmeltable ethnics. Concerning government and political science, Robert Dahl speaks of polyarchy.⁸

Miller believes that this “poly” kind of thinking betrays the fact that “we have suffered a death of God.” No longer is there “a single center holding things together.” God is dead, as Nietzche boldly declared. Western man has seen “the demise of a monotheistic way of thinking and speaking about God and a monotheistic way of thinking and speaking about human meaning and being generally.”⁹ Man has been “released from the tyrannical imperialism of monotheism.” As a consequence, “man has the opportunity of discovering new dimensions hidden in the depths of reality’s history. He may discover a new freedom to acknowledge variousness and many-sidedness. He may find, as if for the first time, a new potency to create imaginatively his hopes and desires, his laws and pleasures.”¹⁰

Rebirth of the Gods

“The Death of God gives rise to the rebirth of the gods. We are polytheists,” declares Miller.¹¹ What is polytheism? “Polytheism is the name given to a specific religious situation,” one that is “characterized by plurality, a plurality that manifests itself in many forms.” For instance, socially speaking, “polytheism is a situation in which there are various values, patterns of social organization, and principles by which man governs his political life. These values, patterns, and principles sometimes mesh harmoniously, but more often they war with one another to be elevated as the single center of normal social order.”¹² Philosophically, Miller defines polytheism as “that reality experienced by men and women when Truth….cannot be articulated reflectively according to a single grammar, a single logic, or a single symbol-system.”¹³ Thus, “a philosophically polytheistic situation….will break forth with principles of relativism, indeterminacy, plural logic systems, irrational numbers; substances that do not have substance, such as quarks; double explanations for light; and black holes in the middle of actual realities.”¹⁴ Miller acknowledges that although “polytheism” carries these different meanings, “behind them is a religious situation. Religiously, polytheism is the worship of many Gods and Goddesses.”¹⁵ These are not worshipped all at the same time. Rather, only one god or goddess at a time can be worshipped. In this way polytheism (the worship of many gods) includes monotheism (the worship of one God). “This implies that a polytheistic religion is actually a polytheistic theology, a system of symbolizing reality in a plural way in order to account for all experience, but that the religious practice is composed of consecutive monotheisms.” And this “implies that our experience of social, intellectual, and psychological worlds is religious — that is, it is so profound and far-reaching that only a theological explanation can account for it fully.”¹⁶ At one time polytheism reigned in Western culture. But when the Greek culture collapsed, polytheism died and was replaced by Judeo-Christian monotheism. Although polytheism remained “in the underground or countercultural tradition of the West” throughout the 2,000-year reign of monotheistic thought, it did not have any significant effect in the West.¹⁷ Miller takes note of the connection of polytheism with the many New Age-type religions. He suggests that a need exists to revive polytheism in order to help Western man deal with his pluralistic experience. This need “may be behind the recent interest in the occult, in magic, in extraterrestrial life, in Hindu India and Buddhist Japan, in multideamoned China, in sorcery, in new forms of multiple family life, in communes, in the ‘new religions,’ and many other alternative life-styles and meaning-systems which have been hitherto foreign.”¹⁸ According to Miller, the rebirth of polytheism is desirable because it has several advantages over monotheism. First, polytheism frees one from the monotheistic idea that he must “get it all together.” Polytheism points “to the possibility that ‘keeping it all apart’ is a safe, a realistic, and an exciting way to ‘go on.’” Second, polytheism better accounts for the nature of human beings. That is, humans are not monotheistic in consciousness, but polytheistic. Hence, “only a polytheistic consciousness will account realistically for our lives.”¹⁹ Third, polytheism will help us keep in touch with the richness and diversity of life. Monotheism does just the opposite, for it encourages thought about that which lies behind life, namely “the essence, or substance, or principle of being,” rather than thought about life itself.²⁰ We do not need, Miller maintains, a rebirth of the old polytheism for old purposes, but for new ones. In this sense we need a new polytheism: “A new function for the old Gods and Goddesses.”²¹ He suggests that this new polytheism has three aspects. First, the new polytheism “is a modern sensibility.” It is not just that “our contemporary society is pluralistic, nor that our roles are many, nor that our morality is relativistic, nor even that our political ideology is fragmented.” These conditions “are manifestations of something deeper and more fundamental. The more basic feeling is that the Gods and Goddesses are reemerging in our lives.”²² Second, the new polytheism is “a way of rethinking the past tradition of thinking, and especially the orthodox tradition of religious thinking.”²³ Since Western thought is rooted in the early Greek thinkers who were largely polytheistic, it follows Western Greek polytheism in its “ideas, concepts, and categories, which were once the images of Gods and Goddesses,” and for its “formal structures of thought or logic, which were once narrative processes in mythic tales.”²⁴ And third, according to Miller, the new polytheism “is a discovery of the polytheism of the psyche.” It helps one to see the “many potencies, many structures of meaning and being, all given to us in the reality of our everyday lives.”²⁵

Who Are the Gods?

Given the death of monotheism and the rebirth of polytheism, who or what are the gods and goddesses of this polytheism? Miller maintains that “the Gods and Goddesses are the names of powers, of forces, which have autonomy and are not conditioned or affected by social and historical events, by human will or reason, or by personal and individual factors.” In other words, “the Gods are Powers” that transcend the personal, the historical, and the social. Yet they are also immanent in the world as potencies “in each of us, in societies, and in nature.” Indeed, “as they manifest themselves in life they are felt to be informing powers that give shape to social, intellectual, and personal behavior.” They are the basic structure of reality, “the names of the plural patterns of our existence.” These powers are “the Gods and Goddesses of ancient Greece — not Egypt, not the Ancient Near East, not Hindu India, not Ancient China or Japan. Greece is the locus of our polytheism simply because, willy-nilly, we are Occidental men and women.”²⁶ Do these many different gods act harmoniously? Miller says no. They often act in “contention.” Life may even be characterized as “a war of the Powers.”²⁷

Man — his self, his society, and his natural environment — is the arena of an eternal Trojan War. Our moods, emotions, usual behaviors, dreams, and fantasies tell us those rough moments when the war is no longer a cold war or a border skirmish, but an all-out guerilla conflict. These indicators also tell us, by feeling and intuition, when one God has absented himself and another has not yet rushed into the vacuum. We know the war well.²⁸

Man’s contemporary acknowledgment of these gods is important and functional. It will help him to infuse new life into old ways of seeing and thinking. It will provide the structure through which man may be able “to speak and to think appropriately concerning” his “deepest experience.”²⁹ Miller suggests many ways in which this new function of the gods and goddesses and the telling of their stories “all in terms of human reality” could work out. For example, he proposes that the tremendous growth in technology coincides with the stories of Prometheus who steals the fire and ends trapped in a rock, gnawed at by the very power he has himself supplanted by his knowledge.³⁰ Miller believes the work of the “ever-present” god Pan (“All”) is seen in the “ever-presence of outbreaks of the irrational” (emphasis in original), such as “in the violent forms of Vietnam or rape on college campuses, or in the subtler forms of compulsive participation in mystical movements and black magic groups.”³¹ At one time the view of the world was Ptolemaic: the earth was thought to be “an immovable sphere at the center of the universe, around which nine concentric spheres revolve.” Thus, all that existed was “organized around a single center,” the earth, with the end of the universe imagined to be “fixed and secure.” This “monotheistic” view of the world collapsed with Copernicus (and subsequent scientists). Now the universe’s horizons are neither fixed nor secure. Instead, it is seen as an “infinitely expanding universe whose center is…. unknown.”³²

The “Playground” of the Gods

Miller believes that humans are “the playground” of the gods. They “live through our psychic structures” and “manifest themselves always in our behaviors.” The gods parade “through our thoughts without our control and even against our will.” We do not possess the gods, but the gods possess us. We do not grab the gods, but the “gods grab us, and we play out their stories.”³³ “Psychologically, polytheism is a matter of the radical experience of equally real, but mutually exclusive aspects of the self.” In this situation the “person experiences himself as many selves, each of which is felt to have autonomous power, a life of its own, coming and going on its own and without regard to the centered will of a single ego.”³⁴ But no one person can be gripped by more than one god at a time. In this sense man is a monotheist, “or at least a henotheist (that is, worshipping one god at a time in a large pantheon of gods).” However, in order for a person to think and speak about the god who has gripped him at that moment, “he will have to be polytheistic, since the story [i.e., the mythology surrounding this deity] may involve marriages with other Gods, parentage by still others, offspring by Godlings and maiden Goddesses.” In brief, because life and meaning are pluralistic, man must be polytheistic in order to think and speak about it. “To think differently is self-deception, a self-deception perpetrated by monotheistic thinking.”³⁵ Miller asks, “What do the Gods and Goddesses want with us?” His answer is that “our task is to incarnate them, become aware of their presence, acknowledge and celebrate their forms, so that we may better be able to account for our polytheism.” This can occur only when we redivinize our thinking, remythologize our lives; in short, see our world through polytheistic glasses.³⁶ All values, be they of truth, morality, beauty, or what have you, are relative. That is, in Miller’s words, “truth and falsity, life and death, beauty and ugliness, good and evil are forever and inextricably mixed together.”³⁷ The kind of thinking that separates values into either/or concepts and categories is monotheistic. But this way of thinking does not adequately account for the many-sidedness of man’s experience. What does account for it is the polytheistic both/and sort of thinking, which recognizes the relativity of all values.

ADLER — THE RELIGION OF WICCA

Another source of neopolytheism is the neopagan revival of the religion of Wicca. This movement, popularly known as witchcraft, has a significant overlap with the feminist movement. They too have a deep-seated abhorrence of monotheism. National Public Radio reporter and feminist witch Margot Adler expresses this view in her book, Drawing Down the Moon. She agrees with historian James Breasted that “monotheism is but imperialism in religion.” Adler also refers to monotheism as one of “the totalistic religious and political views that dominate our society.” As far as neopagans are concerned, “Islam and Christian fundamentalism are seen as appropriate individual spiritual paths as long as each is seen as merely a flower in the garden.” In this sense, she adds, “Polytheism always includes monotheism. The reverse is not true.”³⁸

The Pantheistic Connection

Most polytheistic neopagans are also pantheistic, though strangely, a few claim to be “agnostic,” attracted primarily on aesthetic grounds. At first this seems contradictory. How can everything be one (pantheism) when there are many gods? Within their system, however, this is perfectly consistent. Reality is one in the sense of one ultimate impersonal Force, but it is many in that there are numerous personal manifestations of this ultimate divinity. Hinduism has long sported a belief in one ultimate impersonal deity (“Brahman”) with millions of personal gods as lower manifestations of It. It is at this point that the pantheistic polytheism of neopaganism significantly overlaps with the New Age movement. George Lucas’s Star Wars “religion of the Jedi” is a significant example. His acknowledged roots tap into both Buddhism and the Mexican sorcerer, Don Juan. In the Lucas biography, Dale Pollock notes that “Lucas’s concept of the Force was heavily influenced by Carlos Castaneda’s Tales of Power. This is an account of a supposed Mexican Indian sorcerer, Don Juan, who uses the phrase ‘life force.’”³⁹Irvin Kershner, the director of Lucas’s movie, The Empire Strikes Back, is a Zen Buddhist. Kershner admitted of the film: “I wanna introduce some Zen here because I don’t want the kids to walk away just feeling that everything is shoot-em-up, but there’s also a little something to think about here in terms of yourself and your surroundings.”⁴⁰ In fact, Lucas’s biographer, Dale Pollock, acknowledges that “Yoda’s philosophy is Buddhist — he tells Luke that the Force requires him to be calm, at peace, and passive.”⁴¹ Whatever the source of the Force of Star Wars, it is clear that it is similar to the pantheistic polytheism of neopagan witches. Lucas himself called it a “religion” three times in the first movie of his Star Wars trilogy,⁴² and he admitted to Time magazine that the Force was “God.” He claimed that the simple message of the movie was that “there is a God and there is both a good side and a bad side [to God]. You have a choice between them, but the world works better if you’re on the good side.”⁴³ Not only are both the religion of the Force and the religion of Wicca pantheistic, but central to both is a belief in sorcery. Luke Skywalker, the hero of Star Wars, is a sorcerer. So, even more clearly, is the hero of Lucas’s subsequent film, “Willow.”

The Polytheistic Manifestations

Surely the apostle’s statement, “there be gods many and lords many” (1 Cor. 8:5), is applicable afresh with the rise of neopaganism. According to neopagans, one is free to worship any gods or goddesses, ancient or modern, from the East or West. Some worship Apollo and Diana. Others, like Theodore Roszak, author of Where the Wasteland Ends, are admittedly animistic. As represented by Adler, he believes that “the statue and sacred grove were transparent windows….by which the witness was escorted through to sacred ground beyond and participated in the divine.”⁴⁴ Most neopagans revive one of the Western forms of polytheism. While the names of the gods differ, “most often the names are Celtic, Greek, or Latin.” Some neopagans debate about the ontological status of their “gods,” assigning an idealistic or aesthetic role to them. But as one put it, “all these things are within the realm of possibility. It has been our nature to call these ‘gods.’” She defines a god as “an eternal being, and in that sense we, too, are gods.”⁴⁵ Margot Adler notes, however, that “the deities of most Wicca groups are two: the God, lord of animals, lord of death and beyond, and the Goddess, the Triple Goddess in her three aspects: Maiden, Mother, and Crone.” Each of her aspects “is symbolized by a phase of the moon — the waxing crescent, the full moon, and the waning crescent.” In this sense Adler suggests that many neopagans “might well be considered ‘duotheists,’ conceiving of deity as the Goddess of the Moon, Earth, and sea, and the God of the woods, the hunt, the animal realm.” She adds, however, that “feminist Witches are often monotheists, worshipping the Goddess as the One.”⁴⁶ Indeed, some describe themselves as monotheistic polytheists. Morgan McFarland, a Dallas witch, declared: “I see myself as monotheistic in believing in the Goddess, Creatrix, the Female Principle, but at the same time acknowledging that other gods and goddesses do exist through her as manifestations of her, facets of the whole.”⁴⁷ Obviously, by her own definition her use of “monotheistic” here is misleading; her belief is really the same as that of other neopagans, namely a many-faceted (polytheistic) manifestation of pantheism.

The Feminist Connection

There is also a close connection between neopaganism and feminism. Of course, not all neopagans are feminists, and not all feminists are neopagans. Nonetheless, neopaganism has a magnetic pull on many feminists. Margot Adler describes the dynamics this way: “Many feminist Witchcraft covens have….attracted women from all walks of life. But even there, most of these women have already been strengthened by the feminist movement, or by consciousness-raising groups, or by an important experience such as divorce, separation, or a homosexual encounter.”⁴⁸ One neopagan feminist put it this way: “We have found that women working together are capable of conjuring their past and reawakening their old ascendancy…. This does not seem to happen when men are present….It seems that in mixed covens, no matter how ‘feminist’ the women are, a kind of competition begins to happen. Among the women alone, none of this occurs, and a great reciprocity develops, unlike anything I have seen before.”⁴⁹ Some were witches before they were feminists. Z. Budapest, a famous Hungarian-born teacher of witchcraft, said: “I was a Witch before I became a feminist….I observed my mother talking to the dead. I saw her go into a trance and feel presences around her. She is an artist and her art often reflects Sumerian influences….She tells fortunes and can still the wind.” But after coming to New York Z. Budapest experienced social oppression, ending up, as Adler relates it, “in a traditional role: wife and mother. After twelve years, feeling limited and enslaved, she was driven to make a suicide attempt. During this attempt she had a vision in which she died and death was not fearful.”⁵⁰ At this point her awareness as a witch and the feminist perspective meet in the attempt to liberate her womanhood from her perceived oppression. As far back as the 1890s Charles G. Leland wrote that whenever “there is a period of radical intellectual rebellion, against long-established conservativism, hierarchy, and the like, there is always an effort to regard women as a fully equal, which means superior sex.” Further, he noted that in witchcraft “it is the female who is the primitive principle.” That is, “the perception of this [tyranny] drove vast numbers of the discontented into rebellion, and as they could not prevail by open warfare, they took their hatred out in a form of secret anarchy, which was, however, intimately blended with superstition and fragments of old tradition.” Adler notes that Leland is most popular with the feminist groups in the craft partly because he “places the feminine principle first.”⁵¹

AN EVALUATION OF NEOPAGAN POLYTHEISM AND FEMINISM

There are many obvious condemnations of neopagan polytheism in the Bible, but my evaluation here will be strictly philosophical. In the interest of fairness I will limit my criticisms to questions of coherence or internal consistency. The first four criticisms apply to polytheism in general. The rest are directed at the neopagan feminist forms. The Denial of Rationality. In keeping with their mystical orientation, many neopolytheists are at root irrationalists. Miller’s dismissal of any system that operates “according to fixed concepts and categories” and is controlled by an either/or kind of logic is a case in point. He rejects the idea that something is “either true or false, either this or that, either beautiful or ugly, either good or evil.”⁵² What he fails to notice, however, is that in contending that his own polytheism is true as opposed to false he has engaged in an either/or type of thinking. Everything cannot be true, including opposites. So, if it is either polytheism or monotheism, then one cannot deny the validity of either/or type thinking. In fact, the polytheist cannot avoid such thinking, otherwise his or her position cannot be made intelligible. The Denial of Ultimate Unity. There is also a self-defeating nature to the polytheistic denial of ultimate unity. Everything cannot be radically pluralistic. We live in a uni-verse not a multi-verse. Indeed, the polytheistic position is offered as a unified system of thought. But in presenting a unified thought about ultimate reality, they deny the very philosophy they are advocating. If reality were radically polytheistic we could not even know it. Any claim to know ultimate reality betrays a more basic commitment to a unity of thought that denies the polytheistic view. Failure to Ask the Ultimate Question. While some pagan religions speak of origins, few ask the ultimate question. There are gods acting, but — as C. S. Lewis noted — they fail to ask: “How does a play originate? Does it write itself? Do the actors make it up as they go along? Or is there someone — not on the stage, not like the people on stage — someone we don’t see — who invented it all and caused it to be? — this is rarely asked or answered.” If they did, they would see that nature is created. And, Lewis adds, “to say that God created Nature, while it brings God and Nature into relation, also separates them. What makes and what is made must be two, not one. Thus the doctrine of Creation in one sense empties Nature of divinity”⁵³ and thereby destroys paganism. Failure to Submit to the Ultimate God. Furthermore, if the pagan realized that “Nature and God were distinct; the One had made the other; the One ruled and the other obeyed,” then he or she would not worship the gods but rather the God. As Lewis observed, “the difference between believing in God and in many gods is not one of arithmetic. [For] ‘gods’ is not really the plural of God; God has no plural.”⁵⁴ But herein is revealed the depravity of polytheism. For they prefer to worship a god they make, rather than the God who made them. As one neopagan concluded: “I realized it wasn’t so outrageous, and that we could choose what deities to follow….[For] the element of Christianity that bothered…[me] was its requirement to be submissive to the deity.” He adds, “Gods have similar characteristics to humans….To some extent they are flawed and that makes them more approachable.”⁵⁵ In biblical language this is a vivid confession of the fact that they “suppress the truth in unrighteousness….and change the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man….” (Rom. 1:18, 23). Creedal Pronouncements. Many neopagan witches flatly reject the idea of The Witches’ Bible (written by Gavin and Yvonne Frost), fuming at “the word the, since the book, in their view, had nothing to do with their religion.” They claim that modern pagans “remain anti-authoritarian,” taking pride in themselves as being “the most flexible and adaptable of religions, since it is perfectly willing to throw out dogmas….”⁵⁶ Their protests notwithstanding, neopaganism has its own creeds and dogmas. First of all, even a Wicca Priestess admits: “I’ve seen a lot of people in the Craft get hung up on fragments of ritual and myth. Some people accept these fragments as a dogma.” Second, while protesting creeds Adler lays down a set of “basic beliefs” which she claims “most people in this book share.”⁵⁷ She seems blissfully unaware that a creed is by any other name still a creed. The creed she confesses is informative. In her own words:

The world is holy. Nature is holy. The body is holy. Sexuality is holy. The mind is holy. The imagination is holy. You are holy….Thou art Goddess. Thou art God. Divinity is immanent in all Nature. It is as much within you as without.⁵⁸

There are several standard doctrines of neopaganism in this creed, including pantheism, polytheism, animism, self-deificationism, and — more covertly — free sexual expression. On April 11-14, 1974 The Council of American Witches hammered out a creed they called “Principles of Wiccan Belief.” It should be no surprise that they came up with a list of thirteen basic principles! These include practicing “Rites to attune ourselves with the natural rhythm of life forces,” living in harmony with Nature (ecological balance), and belief in the “Creative Power in the Universe” manifest in male and female polarities. Interestingly, they disavowed Devil worship and the belief that Christianity is “the only way.”⁵⁹ It is clear that they think this is the only way to believe about Christianity. Reversed Sexism. It is ironic indeed that the very complaint that gave rise to the feminist movement is (for many) their own manifest sin. The admission that neopagan witchcraft appeals to feminists because it offers women a role as a “superior” sex is self-condemning. And the existence of many women-only groups is further condemnation of their sexist practices. Add to this the so-called “monotheistic” worship of only the female Goddess and we have, by their own standards, sexism on the highest level. Certainly, neopagan feminism has lost all ground to complain about so-called “sexist” language in the Bible. Morgan McFarland spoke of the desirably unique spiritual experience that women alone have, as opposed to what is possible when males are present.⁶⁰ What is this but de facto religious sexism by their own definition? One can scarcely imagine a male-dominated group suggesting the same without the whole feminist movement coming down on its defenseless heads. Spiritual Exclusivism. If there is one thing in which neopaganism prides itself it is inclusivism and diversity. They usually insist that they have no creeds and allow total diversity of expression. For example, in theory one can worship any god he or she wishes to worship. However, in practice it is a different matter, as is evidenced by several factors. First, the very existence of secret “covens” reveals the exclusivistic nature of the group. Second, the existence of an initiation rite is an earmark of exclusiveness. In defense, witches claim “initiation is primarily a method to protect the institution of the Craft from people calling themselves ‘witches’ who are insincere, ‘evil’ or would give the Craft a bad name.”⁶¹ However, why try to distinguish the “sincere” from the insincere or protect it from “evil” unless there is some genuine form to be preserved? Third, many neopagans claim that “Witchcraft was once the universal religion, which has been driven underground to service in secret, with much being lost.”⁶² What is this claim to universality but an implicit exclusivism — a claim to be the most legitimate or authentic religion? Fourth, even the “Principles of Wiccan Belief” adopted by The Council of American Witches has a strong statement excluding the belief that Christianity is “the only way.” They frankly acknowledge this as “our only animosity toward Christianity.”⁶³ What most all-inclusivistic groups seem to not understand is that every truth claim is exclusive. For if C (say, Christianity) is true, then of necessity all non-C is false. Likewise, if P (polytheism) is true, then all non-P is false. The neopagan religion of Wicca is just as exclusivistic as any other religion that claims to have discovered truth about reality. Fifth, neopagans affirm that “polytheism always includes monotheism. The reverse is not true.”⁶⁴ “Includes” is not the proper word; “absorbs” or “swallows” would be a more accurate description. For while giving the appearance of being all-inclusive, it is extremely exclusive of all orthodox forms of monotheism. In other words, it is “open” to anything that does not oppose its own view. In short, it conceals its own exclusivism under a cloak of inclusivistic language. But down underneath it believes that the only way is to deny there is an only way. Dr. Geisler is Dean of Southern Evangelical Seminary, Charlotte, North Carolina (704) 543-9475.

NOTES

¹ John Naisbitt, Megatrends (New York: Warner Books, 1982), 240. ² Os Guinness, The Dust of Death (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1973), 195. ³ Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy (Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, 1980), 23. ⁴ Mark Satin, New Age Politics (New York: Dell, 1978), 113-14. ⁵ David L. Miller, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1974). ⁶ Ibid., 7. ⁷ Ibid., 9. ⁸ Ibid., 3. ⁹ Ibid., 3. ¹⁰ Ibid., 3-4. ¹¹ Ibid., 4. ¹² Ibid. ¹³ Ibid. ¹⁴ Ibid., 5. ¹⁵ Ibid. ¹⁶ Ibid., 6. ¹⁷ Ibid., 7. ¹⁸ Ibid., 11. ¹⁹ Ibid., 81. ²⁰ Ibid., 27-28. ²¹ Ibid., 81. ²² Ibid., 64. ²³ Ibid. ²⁴ Ibid., 40. ²⁵ Ibid., 64-65. ²⁶ Ibid., 6, 7, 60, 80-81. ²⁷ Ibid., 60. ²⁸ Ibid. ²⁹ Ibid., 62. ³⁰ Ibid., 66. ³¹ Ibid., 68. ³² Ibid., 9. ³³ Ibid., 55, 34, 59. ³⁴ Ibid., 5. ³⁵ Ibid., 30. ³⁶ bid., 55, 63. ³⁷ Ibid., 29. ³⁸ Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and other Pagans in America Today, rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), viii. ³⁹ Richard de Mille, in The Don Juan Papers, put together a collection of scholarly essays which argue that Castaneda is one of “the world’s great hoaxers” (p. 10). They claim not only that no such sorcerer exists but that the teachings Castaneda places in his mouth are not native Mexican (Yaqui) but derive from Eastern religions. One Hindu monk, Agehananda Bharati, claims “there is nothing in Castaneda’s mysticism that you cannot also find, sometimes in nearly the same words, in Hindu and Buddhist tantrism [mystical writings] or in the official Patanjali Yoga” (pp. 148-49). ⁴⁰ Irvin Kershner, Rolling Stone, 24 July 1980, 37. ⁴¹ Dale Pollock, SkyWalking (New York: Harmony Books, 1983), 140. ⁴² George Lucas, Star Wars (New York: Ballantine Books, 1976), 37, 121, 145. ⁴³ Cited in Time, 23 May 1983, 68. ⁴⁴ Adler, 27. ⁴⁵ Adler, 112, 139. ⁴⁶ Ibid., 35, 112. ⁴⁷ Ibid., 35-36. ⁴⁸ Ibid., 37. ⁴⁹ Ibid., 124. ⁵⁰ Ibid., 76-77. ⁵¹ Ibid., 59. ⁵² Miller, 7. ⁵³ C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1958), 79-80. ⁵⁴ Ibid., 78, 82. ⁵⁵ Cited in Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 12 Dec. 1985, 2A. ⁵⁶ Adler, 126, ix, 135. ⁵⁷ Ibid., 88, ix. ⁵⁸ Ibid., ix. ⁵⁹ Ibid., 101-3. ⁶⁰ Ibid., 124. ⁶¹ Ibid., 98. ⁶² Ibid., 66. ⁶³ Ibid., 103. ⁶⁴ Ibid., viii.