This article first appeared in Forward, volume 9, number 2 (1986). The full PDF can be viewed by clicking here. For more information about the Christian Research Journal, click here.
Prominently displayed next to the “exit” doors at the local supermarket are free copies of a slick New Age “community resources” publication; everything from holistic dentistry to “gay spirituality” gatherings to past life therapy is advertised. The local junior college mails a catalogue of summer extracurricular offerings which include classes in yoga, tai chi, astrology, and psychic healing. A major television network advertises a five-hour “mini series” based on Shirley Maclame’s autobiography Out on a Limb, a classic piece of New Age evangelism. And, with the fanfare of We Are the World and Hands Across America, the World Instant of Cooperation gathers millions in meeting places worldwide on New Year’s Eve to visualize the world at peace and meditate on the oneness of all life on earth.
Secular humanists tend to dismiss all expressions of occultism as fringe lunacy — not to be taken seriously. Evangelicals have often shared this view (perhaps because they’ve seen society’s real spiritual threat as coming from the secular humanists themselves!). Nonetheless, occultism, as represented by the New Age movement, is rapidly becoming a force to be reckoned with in the Western world.
Western culture is being repeatedly barraged with New Age influences such as those described above. Much of this is best understood as a massive social trend, spontaneous and unorchestrated. However, to a significant degree it also represents an “Aquarian Conspiracy”— Marilyn Ferguson’s term for a conscious effort by New Age humanists to win cultural dominance over secularism and traditional religion.
While the “conspiracy” is still far from its goal of supplanting the establishment, its momentum continues to build at a steady rate: even the relatively conservative Ronald Reagan years have failed to discourage or dissipate it. Over the past few years New Age writers increasingly have shifted from calling their movement a subculture to referring to it as the “emerging mainstream.”1
Hoping to hasten the Age of Aquarius, and to make sure there is still life on this planet when it arrives. New Agers are actively seeking to influence such social arenas as health care, psychology, education, business, and politics.
This is not to suggest that everyone who in any way promotes the New Age cause is a conscious participant in the Aquarian Conspiracy: many doctors who prescribe meditation for their patients do so strictly because they believe in its therapeutic value, not to win converts to the New Age movement: many parents who volunteer to teach in New Age education programs do so because they want to help children cope with the pressures of childhood in the 1980s, not to recruit young activists for future Aquarian political objectives.
The fact that there are a variety of motives and perspectives among those contributing to the New Age illustrates an important point: it is wrong to view the rise of the movement as a carefully engineered plot originating from a covert central network of ingeniously devious conspirators. However, as this writer will demonstrate presently, it is usually wrong to assume that there is no collusion involved.
In my research I have identified two distinct objectives to New Age social penetration. The first, “personal transformation,” is evangelistic, and the second, “planetary transformation,” is sociopolitical. Both individuals and the very structure of society are targeted for change at fundamental levels. In Part One of this article we will examine Aquarian “evangelism.” In Part Two (next issue) we will turn our attention to New Age social and political activism.
PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION
New Age writers often argue that if “planetary transformation” (global political unification along New Age lines) is ever to occur, a “critical mass” of individuals must first experience “personal transformation” — the New Agers’ psychic counterpart to Christian transformation through regeneration and sanctification. For this reason especially, New Agers are anxious to win people over to their mystical occult perspective.
In the competition for souls, New Agers have a strategic advantage (though, from the Christian perspective, unethical). Unlike the Christian gospel, which openly demands a faith commitment at the outset, conversion to New Age belief can be provoked subtly and deceptively. What in actuality may be Hinduism or occultism can be taught and administered in secular guise. Many seemingly innocent techniques for increasing health, enhancing creativity, and achieving deeper levels of relaxation, for example, are sometimes deliberately used by New Agers to effect this shift in perspective.2
First, an altered state of consciousness (ASC) is induced in the potential convert with the hope that it will trigger a mystical or psychic experience powerful enough to cause him to doubt his previous understanding of reality. If the subject’s belief system has been shaken, though he remains responsible for his decisions, he will be far more disposed to embrace a new world view than he would have been before submitting to this “nonreligious” exercise. Then he is exposed to New Age beliefs which supply him with a seemingly profound explanation of his experience. Since the monistic world view (“all is One”) is derived from and closely related to mystical experiences, it will seem to fit the new way of viewing reality perfectly. In fact, for this reason even if the monistic interpretation is not offered, after going through such an experience a reflective individual may come to monistic conclusions on his own. (The dynamics of this process and why it should not be trusted were elaborated in Part Two of this series.) Marilyn Ferguson explains:
Exercises and experiments are designed for direct experience from a new perspective.
For only that which is deeply felt can change us. Rational arguments alone cannot penetrate the layers of fear and conditioning that comprise our crippling belief systems. The Aquarian Conspiracy creates opportunities wherever possible for people to experience shifts of consciousness.3
HOLISTIC HEALTH
Examples of this abound in the burgeoning holistic health movement. Ferguson observes:
The proliferating holistic health centers and networks have drawn many into the consciousness movement. A nurse said, “If healing becomes a reality with you, it’s a lifestyle. Altered states of consciousness accompany it, increased telepathy. It’s an adventure.”4
In spite of its many obvious accomplishments and benefits, there are widely recognized inadequacies in the overall approach of traditional medicine. Consequently, a virtual revolution has been transpiring in health care:
No one had realized how vulnerable the old medical model was. Within a few short years, without a shot being fired, the concept of holistic health has been legitimized by federal and state programs, endorsed by politicians, urged and underwritten by insurance companies, co-opted in terminology (if not always in practice) by mans’ physicians, and adopted by medical students. Consumers demand “holistic health,” a whole new assortment of entrepreneurs promise it, and medical groups look for speakers to explain it.5
New models of wellness as well as healing are being popularized, some of them valid and helpful. For example, the Association for Holistic Health describes the holistic approach as being “person oriented rather than disease oriented,” having as its objective “full vibrant health (positive wellness), not symptom amelioration,” and focusing on “primary prevention rather than crisis intervention.”6 However, holistic thought and practice are so often interlaced with occultism that, in its search for alternative approaches to healing, an entire generation is in danger of being baptized in psychic power.
That this is so can be discerned from the pages of the International Journal of Holistic Health and Medicine:
The Eastern philosophy/spiritualism movement has also contributed to holistic health by its appreciation of a unifying invisible dynamic force within and around the human both’ that is called “Chi” by the Chinese, “Ki” by the Japanese, “prana” by the yogis and numerous other names by various cultures throughout the world. Unlike the word “spirit” in the West, the words for this energetic force in the East generally have a very practical meaning and have direct and specific influences upon health.”7
As we saw in Part Two of this series, this “invisible dynamic force” is scientifically undemonstrable, but nonetheless can be real. Historically, under various names such as those the author lists, the same force has always appeared in the context of spiritistic paganism. Thus the Christian has every reason to consider it supernatural, demonic, and dangerous.
Psychic Healing
Psychic healing, which — in spite of whatever immediate benefits it may deliver — opens people up to occultic deception and (ultimately) oppression, is rapidly becoming accepted as a valid form of therapy in the medical world. Fifty-eight percent of medical school faculty members would like to see the subject of psychic phenomena included in psychiatric training, according to a survey published in the October 1981 American Journal of Psychiatry.8
A good (though far from the only) example of psychic healing’s infusion into traditional medical practice is “Therapeutic Touch.” It has received federal funding and been taught to many thousands of health professionals by New York University Nursing School professor Dolores Krieger.9 “Essentially meditative,”10 Therapeutic Touch is nothing other than the ancient religious practice of the laying on of hands for healing — attempts to dress it up in scientific language notwithstanding. Nor should it be confused with the biblical practice of laying on hands which invokes the name of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit. Instead, it is based upon the Hindu doctrine that “prana” or “universal energy” flows through the body. In a trance-like state, “the Therapeutic Touch practitioner becomes a channel of universal life energy for the patient and then helps the patient assimilate this energy” (emphasis added).11
Meditation
Adapted Eastern meditative methods are being prescribed by thousands of American doctors as therapy for high blood pressure, tension headaches, chance fatigue, insomnia, etc. Harvard cardiologist Dr. Herbert Benson, whose popular “relaxation response” technique is based upon Transcendental Meditation (TM), told Esquire magazine that meditation has “become an integral part of medical practice.”12
Benson’s experiments lend support to this writer’s contention that Eastern meditation cannot be desacralized (i.e., isolated from its historical religious and mystical context). Although he has more recently concluded that meditation is more therapeutically effective when kept in a religious context, for some time Benson had attempted to administer his own meditative method in a strictly medical, nonesoteric setting. For example, instead of a mantra (e.g., the name of a Hindu deity, as is used in TM), he instructed his patients to repeat mentally the word “one” (presumably neutral). In spite of these desacralizing measures, however, the ASCs created by Benson’s relaxation response resulted in religious experiences and conversions for many.
Benson wrote in Psychiatry: “During the experience of one of these states, individuals claim to have feelings of increased creativity, of infinity, and of immortality; they have an evangelistic sense of mission, and report that mental and physical suffering vanish” (emphases added).13 Thus, an unknown but probably large population of Americans who were merely seeking physical or psychological relief have been overtaken and won over by the very kinds of experience that arc foundational to Eastern occult mysticism.
HUMANISTIC AND TRANSPERSONAL EDUCATION
Aquarian Conspirators have especially marked out students for conversion to the New Age. Brooks Alexander, co-founder of the Spiritual Counterfeits Project and a keen observer of New Age trends, explains why:
In the ideological contest for cultural supremacy, public education is the prime target; it influences the most people in the most pervasive way at the most impressionable age. No other social institution has anything close to the same potential for mass indoctrination.14
It began in the mid 1960s with the inroads of “humanistic education” into the public schools. Its originators claimed they had “developed techniques to help people validate themselves, to communicate more effectively with others, to enhance their self-concepts, to ask directly for what they want, to clarify their values, to express their feelings, to celebrate their bodies, to use their will, and to take responsibility for their lives.”15
Just as humanistic psychology led to transpersonal psychology, which sought to complete the former approach by making room for the spiritual dimension in man, so humanistic education was followed in the early 1970s by “transpersonal” or “holistic” education. Jack Canfield and Paula Klimek, pioneers in this field, wrote in 1978: “Now is the time to combine both of these focuses [i.e.:, humanistic and transpersonal], for the New Age means integrating the soul and the personality.”16
Marilyn Ferguson exulted in 1980 that “the deliberate use of consciousness expanding techniques in education, only recently well underway, is now in mass schooling.”17
Right Brain Learning: Smuggling Religion into the Schools
The discovery that the right hemisphere of the brain governs intuitive, creative, nonverbal activities has been seized by New Agers and used as a justification to bring “right brain learning techniques” into the classroom. These include meditation, yoga, guided imagery,18 chanting, mandalas (visual symbols used as aids to meditation), and fantasy-role-playing games. Children are being led into mystical and psychic experiences (including encounters with spirit guides called “Wise Ones”) on the premise that this will develop their intuitive abilities and thus provide a more balanced, holistic, or “whole-brained” education.
Ferguson is very candid when she writes:
Like holistic health, transpersonal education can happen anywhere. It doesn’t need schools, but its adherents believe that the schools need it. Because of its power for social healing and awakening [ie., transformed children can transform society) they conspire to bring the philosophy into the classroom, in every grade, in colleges and universities, for job training and adult education).19
While the New Age movement is not a conspiracy in the highly organized sense that some evangelicals have portrayed it. Ferguson’s use of the word “conspire” is certainly appropriate here. Mario Fantini, former educational consultant for President Gerald Ford, acknowledged that “the psychology of becoming has to be smuggled into the schools.”20
Canfield and Klimek counsel their fellow educators:
Centering [i.e., relaxation exercises] can also be extended into work with meditation in the classroom. (Advice: if you’re teaching in a public school, don’t call it meditation, call it “centering.” Every school wants children to be relaxed, attentive, and creative, and that’s what they will get.)21
The deception inherent in this nonreligious front becomes disturbingly evident when the same writers describe the nature and purpose of New Age education:
The word education comes from the Latin word educare, “to lead out from within.” What teachers are now interested in leading out from within is the expression of the self — the highest qualities of the individual student’s unique soul.
What nature has disposed and sealed
Is called the unborn Self.
The unburying of this Self
Is called the Process of Education.
— Tsze sze22
In other words, God has been “disposed and sealed” in the illusory identity of the student. It is the teacher’s responsibility to “unbury” or awaken within each child this sleeping Self (variously called “God within,” “Inner” or “Higher Self,” “Inner Wisdom,” “Infinite Potential,” etc.). This goal is the cornerstone of all transpersonal education. It is believed that each student already has all knowledge and wisdom. He needs only to be taught (through meditation, guided imagery, etc.) how to tap it.
In 1977-78 the late Beverly Galevan received two federal grants to prepare teachers of all grade levels to use transpersonal “confluent education” techniques in the Los Angeles city schools. The Association for Humanistic Psychology (AHP), which also helped sponsor the program, noted in its Aug.-Sept. 1980 newsletter: “The core of the curriculum is the cadre of guided imagery-meditation types of events experienced by the teachers for their own growth, and subsequently by the students.”23 In an article which followed those comments, Galevan wrote:
Another aspect of meditation is the increased capacity to contact and learn from the source of wisdom, love, and intelligence within us — often called the “higher self”; God, universal wisdom or spirit, conscience. This is done through the symbolic use of light such as the sun, the sky, mountain tops, wise persons, golden liquid energy, and the colors white, gold, purple, and violet. Teachers who are deeply spiritual and who feel comfortable working with their own spiritual development may choose to offer spiritually-oriented meditations to their students. This is done when there is an explicit sense of appropriateness established between the teacher and the students, parents, school personnel and community.24
Values Clarification
Occasionally, Christian parents are vigilant enough to explode this constitutionally inappropriate “sense of appropriateness.” But when the transpersonal elements of a program are detected and challenged, the authors of the program often simply remove those elements, while continuing the program with its humanistic underbelly unscathed. This results in a hollow Christian victory.
For example, Project Self Esteem (PSE), which has been broadly implemented by south Orange County, California public schools, originally included a mystical sounding guided imagery exercise (Galeyan’s “symbolic use of light such as the sun”), and had other religious overtones. In the spring of 1985 Christian parents in San Juan Capistrano organized to oppose the program, both legally and before their local school board. The creators of PSE, Sandy McDaniel and Peggy Bielen, quickly rewrote the curriculum, omitting all portions that had provoked controversy. Now for many PSE is no longer offensive, and it continues to be used by Capistrano elementary schools. However, “values clarification” remains a central component of the program.
Formulated in the mid 1960s by social scientists Louis E. Baths, Merrill Harman, Sidney B. Simon, and others, values clarification plays a pivotal role in both humanistic and transpersonal education. Holding that values emerge from within and therefore should not be imposed from without (a view compatible both with basic humanism and the transpersonal “Inner Wisdom” concept), it attempts to help students discover and clarify their own values. It has been widely used in public schools under the pretext that it is an appropriate approach to values in a pluralistic society, since it does not seek to impose any particular value system on the children.
There is a tacit value assumption involved in values clarification, however: there are no absolute truths; values are to be subjectively determined. Richard A. Baer. Jr., wrote in The Wall Street Journal:
On the deeper level…the claim to neutrality is entirely misleading. At this more basic level, the originators of Values Clarification simply assume that their own subjective theory of values is correct.…If parents object to their children using pot or engaging in premarital sex, the theory behind Values Clarification makes it appropriate for the child to respond, “But that’s just YOUR value judgment Don’t force it on me.”25
Because New Age spirituality flows out of the fountainheads or humanism and subjectivism, the use of values clarification in the schools is just as important to the Aquarian Conspiracy as the use of meditation or mystically oriented guided imagery. In fact, where values clarification becomes established it will likely be only a matter of time before meditation and guided imagery also appear.
HUMAN POTENTIAL AND THE WORKPLACE
Like holistic health and transpersonal education, the human potential movement is subtly prompting widespread acceptance of the New Age world view. The Los Angeles Times observes: “For better or worse, the human potential movement has grown up to become a staple of our culture.”26 In such diverse settings as churches, schools, military bases, and prisons, “growth” seminars and workshops (usually billed as “nonreligious” and compatible with Christian faith) deliberately attempt to subvert participants’ belief systems in order to replace them with definitions of human potential derived from humanistic psychology and Eastern mysticism. Methods used by “trainings” like the Forum (formerly est) and Lifespring include medication, guided imagery, and other “psychotechnologies.”
Promising personal success, increased productivity, and improved interpersonal relationship skills, the human potential seminars have especially attracted the business community.
Consider the following revelations, which appeared in a September 28, 1986 New York Times article:27
- The magazine California Business reported recently that its survey of 500 company owners and presidents found more than half said they had resorted to some form of “consciousness-raising” technique. Although such “human potential” programs are more common in California than elsewhere, industry experts say that recently they have been the fastest-growing type of executive development program.
- At Stanford University’s well-regarded Graduate School of Business, the syllabus for a seminar on “Creativity in Business” includes meditation, chanting, “dream work,” the use of tarot cards and discussion of the “New Age Capitalist.”
- Representatives of some of the nation’s largest corporations, including IBM, AT&T and General Motors, met in New Mexico in July to discuss how metaphysics, the occult and Hindu mysticism might help executives compete in the world marketplace.
“OD” and “OT”
University of Southern California School of Management professor Warren Bennis notes that perhaps as many as 20 percent of the Fortune 500 corporations regularly devote a portion of their budgets to “organization development”: growth seminars and the teaching of interpersonal skills to managers and stress reduction techniques (psychotechnologies) to employees.28
Organization development (“OD”) had its beginnings in the 1950s with American businesses sending key management personnel to sensitivity training groups (“t-groups”). Soon it became common practice for such trainings to be held in the workplace (employee attendance often mandatory) so that the entire company could benefit from them.
The organizers of these sessions discovered that both groups and the communication patterns within them evolve in a broadly predictable way. Once they understood how the members of a group learned to trust one another, these trainers were able to apply the lessons throughout business, using such techniques as teamwork and management retreats. The methods these consultants and their academic colleagues worked out were joined with studies of how organizations function and became known as the field of organization development (OD).29
As the human potential movement blossomed in the 1970s there was much overlap between it and OD, and the OD field became saturated with the former movement’s distinctive beliefs and practices.
In the early 1980s OD consultants who were also Aquarian Conspirators became dissatisfied with the field’s lack of “vision.” In other words, in spite of its New Age connections, OD as a specialized profession was largely concerned with simply helping corporations turn a greater profit. Instead, as this “maverick 10 percent margin within OD” argued, consultants should encourage businesses to think more about their “responsibility,” “mission,” and “self-rea1ization.”30
Thus, a new field, “Organization Transformation” (“OT”), has recently emerged. While developing its own identity, it remains to a degree within the larger OD network as both its spiritual and activist wing.
As its name implies, OT is concerned with transforming organizations, not just developing them. OTs more visionary consultants are avowedly committed to fostering both personal transformation (the spiritual “awakening” of a corporations employees) and planetary transformation (the utilization of the corporation’s resources and influence for promoting New Age sociopolitical causes).
Typically, the efforts of New Agers to bring an already humanistically oriented tradition more fully into alignment with the
Aquarian Conspiracy meet with little resistance. By 1983 the OD Network’s annual National Conference featured plenary addresses and workshops with titles like “Organizing for Quantum Transformation” (New Age leader Barbara Marx Hubbard delivered this keynote address), “Applying Spiritual Principles to Organizations,” “Change Agents for a New Age,” “Chumming — Attracting Your Organization to Transformation,” “Managers and Executives for a New Age,” “Transformation: Theory and Practice from Ancient Sources,” and “Legitimizing Intuition in a Scientific Setting: Transforming Organizations from Insight Out.” For whatever reason, “The Shaman as OD Consultant” was canceled.
THE CHRISTIAN RESPONSE
New Age penetration of Western civilization through such avenues as health care, education, and the workplace (other areas could have been discussed, such as the military, the media, the arts, and even the church) is particularly troubling in what it portends for the future. As this article has documented, occult beliefs and practices are progressively interweaving themselves throughout our cultural fabric. Thus the New Age world view could become dominant without society as a whole even realizing what happened to it.
If New Age influences continue to grow it will become increasingly difficult for Christians to participate in day-to-day cultural life. Those who do will seriously risk being infiltrated and overpowered by anti-Christian spiritual influences. Christians who refuse to participate in New Age spirituality could conceivably be forced, not just to the periphery of the culture (that has already begun to happen), but outside of it. If and when New Age values become dominant the status of “inflexibly dogmatic” Christians as a very resented minority will be questionable indeed.
Next issue this theme (what the future may hold) will be developed further, and the question of whether we should even bother to resist the Aquarian Conspiracy will be addressed. For now we will assume that Christians should resist New Age inroads in such areas as this article has discussed.
Rational Resistance
To be effective, Christian resistance should be carried out in a rational rather than emotional manner. We should studiously avoid making declarations about the New Age movement’s size, hidden intentions, etc., if we cannot clearly substantiate them. New Agers already think of us as fearful, backward reactionaries, and to a degree this cannot be helped: we must react to their cultural onslaught. But when they detect hysteria in us (as they too often have) it only reinforces their entire false belief system. This defeats our mission of evangelism, which is even more important than resisting their social influence. A rational presentation of our position, on the other hand, has the potential of breaking their stereotypes and thus opening them to the gospel.
If we are protesting the presence of New age philosophy or practice in public institutions, we should avoid resting our case on theological premises. The secular public is not apt to appreciate our uniquely Christian concerns that “New Age thinking is unbiblical,” or “Meditation opens the mind to the devil.” The issue to stress is that New Age programs have religious connotations. If the program contains yoga, meditation, or talk of the “Inner Self” and “Wise Ones,” its religious nature can be easily demonstrated to any open-minded individual. To be religious, something need not exhibit such traditional formalities as a sanctuary, clergy, and formal services.
It is important to grasp, however, that something can also be religious without making reference to “God,” “faith,” “salvation,” etc. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, one of the primary characteristics of a religion is that it adheres to and promotes “underlying theories” concerning such “ultimate realities” as man’s nature and place in the universe.31 Virtually all New Age programs operate from such metaphysical assumptions, even those which only use values clarification.
Richard Baer, quoted earlier, argues that values clarification is “a kind of religious position in its own right which competes directly with other religious views,” and that “schools that use the method are probably unwittingly, fostering the establishment of one particular ‘religion’ and by doing so are abusing the rights of others who hold differing positions.”
Any public agency which promotes or facilitates (let alone requires) New Age ideas or practices is on precarious legal ground, because the First Amendment prohibits government from establishing religion. It also protects the individual citizen’s right to free exercise of religion.
When a school sponsored program opposes the religious training children are receiving in the home, it could be argued in court that the family’s free exercise of religion has been violated by the state, without compelling state interest justifying the infraction.
It is not enough, then, to oppose New Age programs on the grounds that they contain overtly religious elements (when they do). Though this is important, the religious implications of a program’s presuppositions must also be addressed.
What about the Christian whose private employer is demanding that he participate in a human potential seminar? In an interview with this writer, Tom Brandon of the Christian Legal Society advised first a creative appeal to the employer, suggesting (for example) an alternative seminar which would satisfy the employer’s job-related concern without violating the Christian’s faith.
If the employer refuses to compromise, legal recourse is open. Brandon says: “The employer is prohibited from discriminating against your religious convictions, and if you said ‘I’m sorry, I cannot attend that, it violates my religious principles,’ then according to Title Seven they have to make reasonable accommodation for that.” Perhaps just such a civil suit is in order at this time, to establish a precedent that will help constrain New Age inroads into the workplace.
As for holistic health, Christians within the health professions need to oppose the implementation of therapies that lack a firm scientific basis, particularly if they invoke dangerous psychic forces.
Beyond this, there is a clear need for public education. When holistic healers talk about healing body, mind, and spirit, many assume that “spirit” is meant in a Christian rather than a pantheistic sense. When Therapeutic Touch practitioners, for example, claim they are utilizing “universal life energy,” many are blind to the fact that this is a nonphysical, psychic energy. When New Agers do speak of psychic energy, many fail to grasp the spiritual and psychological dangers involved.
Sadly, there are very few educational resources available. The works of Kurt Koch and those of John Weldon are important, particularly Koch’s Christian Counseling and Occultism (Kregel) and Weldon’s Psychic Healing (Moody Press) and The Holistic Healers, coauthored with Paul C. and Ten K. Reisser (InterVarsity). The “Holistic Health issue” of the SCP Journal (Aug. 1978) contains some helpful articles (write Spiritual Counterfeits Project, P.O. Box 4308, Berkeley, CA 94704). Also, Douglas Groothuis has an informative chapter on holistic health in Unmasking the New Age (InterVarsity), and Part Two of this series, “A New Age of Science,” might prove insightful for some.
Ultimately, direct resistance can only go so far toward curtailing New Age advances. Next issue, after exploring the world of New Age politics and activism (i.e., the move toward “planetary transformation”), and its possible eschatological (end-times) significance, I will conclude this series by pointing to some of the broader issues that the Aquarian Conspiracy raises for the church.
NOTES
- Willis Harman, Ph.D., “Peace Is Possible.” Festival of Lights program guide, Nov. 1985, B-8.
- This deceptive proselytizing methodology was first exposed by the Spiritual Counterfeits Project in tracts like “TM: Penetrating the Veil of Deception.”
- Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy (Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, 1980), 35-36.
- Ibid., 25, 58.
- Ibid., 242.
- Jerry Driessen, Ph.D., “Health Sharing: Comments on the Characteristics of Holistic Health,” (fact sheet), Holistic Health Education — Association for Holistic Health, May 1978.
- Dana Ullman, M.P.H., “Holistic Health: Friend and Foe of Progressive Health Care,” International Journal of Holistic and Medicine, 2 (Winter 1984 ): 22.
- Cited in Meme Black, “M.D.’s and Magic,” Science Digest, May 1982, 92.
- Lee Koromvokis, “Faith Healers in the Lab,” Science Digest, May 1982,92.
- “Therapeutic Touch,” New York Open Center catalog, Jan.-Mar. 1984, 9.
- Ibid.
- William Falk, “Meditation Merges with the Mainstream,” Esquire, Mar. 1983, 249.
- Quoted in Adam Smith, Powers of Mind (New York: Random House, 1975), 153.
- Brooks Alexander, “The Rise of Cosmic Humanism: What is Religion?.” SCP Journal 5 (Winter 1981-82):4.
- Jack Canfield and Paula Klimek, “Education in the New Age,” New Age, Feb. 1978, 28.
- Ibid.
- Ferguson, 295.
- There is nothing necessarily New Age about the practice of guided imagery per se. However, as the forthcoming quote from Beverly Galeyan indicates, it can easily be used for New Age purposes.
- Ferguson, 288.
- Ibid., 281.
- Canfield and Klimek, 36.
- Ibid., 27.
- Beverly Galeyan, “Meditating with Children: Some Things We Learned,” AHP Newsletter, Aug.-Sept. 1980, 16. (This quote, but not the following, was taken from the AHP’s introduction to the article.)
- Ibid., 18.
- Richard A. Baer, Jr., “Parents, Schools and Values Clarification,” The Wall Street Journal, 12 April 1982.
- Lynn Smith, “Americans Take a Long Look Inward,” Los Angeles Times, 20 July 1982, part 1.
- Robert Lindsey, “Spiritual Concepts Drawing a Different Breed of Adherent,” New York Times, 28 Sept. 1986, sec. B.
- Cited in Robert Tucker, “Back to Basics: The New Age Conspiracy,” New Age Source, Feb. 1983. The article originally appeared in PSA Magazine.
- Norman Boucher, “Transforming Corporation,” New Age Journal, Feb 1985, 38.
- Ibid., 39-40.
- See William F. Willoughby, “Man Shall Not Live by Raw Carrots Alone.” Liberty, 8 July 1982, 9.
