Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
Integral Abuse: Andrew Cohen and the Culture of Evolutionary Enlightenment
Be Scofield - Founder of God Bless the Whole World and Writer for Tikkun Magazine
April 27th, 2010
Andrew Cohen is a Rude Boy. He is not here to offer comfort; he is here to tear you into approximately a thousand pieces. - Ken Wilber
Luna Tarlo spent over three years living with her guru Andrew Cohen (founder of What is Enlightenment? magazine now called EnlightenNext) in India and the United States. After she experienced extreme forms of public condemnation and humiliation she broke from him and wrote a book depicting Cohen as an “arrogant, power-hungry, dangerous figure who practices mind control over adherents.” She is, however, different than the hundreds of other disciples who followed him. Luna Tarlo is Andrew Cohen’s mother. In an interview with the Boston Globe in 1998 she stated, Cohen “requires total surrender to him. You have to obey everything he says and trust him 100 percent, and anybody who disagrees is subject to derision and verbal abuse.” In tragic fashion she ended what had previously been a healthy and loving relationship, “I know my life with him is over, and it’s very sad. I love him a lot.”
Twelve years after Tarlo’s “The Mother of God” (1997) was published, William Yenner a follower of Cohen’s for over 13 years and insider of his Foxhollow ashram has released a scathing book which chronicles the abuse that Cohen’s mother spoke of. “American Guru: A Story of Love, Betrayal and Healing – former students of Andrew Cohen speak out” (2009) is an insider’s look at how this self-proclaimed “rude boy” manipulated, abused, pressured and controlled his followers. The accounts given (an excerpt from the book is below) are very disturbing. After reading them I feel saddened, shocked and angry. And as I note below Cohen’s contemporaries have an ethical responsibility to speak out. Yenner was certainly in a position to know about these abuses as he was a central player in Cohen’s operation. He explains his role, “I was a member of the “inner circle” of Cohen’s students; in fact, I lived in his personal residence for several years, was a member of the EnlightenNext Board of Directors, and was the real estate scout who located and helped arrange the purchase of the 220 acre, nearly three-million-dollar, EnlightenNext “World Headquarters” at Foxhollow, as well as the EnlightenNext Centre in London.” And like many others in the group Yenner had “donated” a very large amount of money ($80,000) to Cohen. These large sums of money were part of Cohen’s plan. Yenner writes,
Andrew let it be understood that his good favor could also be had for a price, establishing a practice that was morally reprehensible, legally questionable and indicative of a degree of corruption that had warped his ideals and would eventually stain the fabric of his entire organization. It is a testament to the faith that so many of us had in Andrew that, despite the questionable nature of these new financial arrangements, we complied – some of us taking on enormous and ill-advised debt. Though it may be difficult for outsiders to comprehend, our desire to please our guru was so great that we were prepared to mortgage our futures in order to do so.
Survivors of Jonestown speak similarly about how once they gave their money, assets and signed over their homes to Jim Jones and the “church” it was the final step in the loss of their identities. I don't mean to suggest that Cohen is comparable to Jim Jones or that his followers are about to commit mass suicide. But rather I am merely highlighting the similarity in these actions to illustrate how the giving over of yourself includes money, property and belongings. And furthermore this loss of property is directly linked to the increasing loss of the ability to remain an autonomous agent within the group.
For years after his departure in 2001 Yenner remained silent. Like the others he was pressured under “extreme psychological distress and in an emotionally crushed state of mind” into giving his $80,000 and a few years after he finally broke with Cohen he wanted it back. Cohen agreed but made Yenner sign a five-year non-judicial but binding gag order to not speak about his experiences at Foxhollow or with Cohen. This enforced silence was, Yenner states, but yet another reminder to him that Cohen wasn’t ready to let him go. But the gag order expired in 2008 and now Yenner’s book is published.
Luna Tarlo and William Yenner’s books are not the only criticisms of Cohen to surface. Prior to the release of Yenner’s book some of Cohen’s former followers had set up a website, What Enlightenment?, in 2004 that chronicled his abusive and controlling methods with advice on cult recovery. Yenner’s book also contains the passages from other former Foxhollow members. In 2003 former What Is Enlightenment? editor Andre van der Braak published “Enlightenment Blues: My Years with an American Guru”. An eleven year disciple of Cohen’s, van der Braak chronicled the abuse and manipulation he witnessed and experienced as part of the Foxhollow community. He reports that one of the more mild but still disturbing elements of daily life in the community consisted of 600 daily prostrations while repeating the required mantra, “To know nothing, to have nothing, to be no one.” And Geoffry Falk in his “Stripping the Guru’s: Sex, Violence, Abuse and Enlightenment” dedicates an entire chapter ‘Sometimes I feel Like God’ to Cohen. It places Cohen in context of his guru Poonjaji and provides a short history of his life. (This is an excellent and important book with startling revelations about everyone from Krishnamurti and Osho to Trungpa, Sai Baba and Yogi Amrit Desai just to name a few. My endorsement of this book is not about its level of scholarship as I must humbly admit I am in no position to evaluate this. Rather I appreciate the book because it draws attention to the phenomenon of cults, gurus and spiritual abuse. The whole book is available free online. Here is a link to the chapter on Cohen).
What did Cohen do? This is an excerpt from American Guru.
Some years ago at Foxhollow, a student named Jeff, a very good writer, was having a great deal of trouble with a writing project he had been assigned to do. He was supposed to write an introduction to a book Andrew was publishing, but he was having no success. Feeling terrible guilt about this, he wrote in a desperate letter to Andrew, “If I don’t come through, I will cut my finger off.” Andrew seemed to like this idea. When Jeff still did not succeed at his writing, Andrew called for Mikaela, [who was a] physician, to come see him…. Andrew told Mikaela to go to see Jeff, and to bring her medical kit. She was instructed to tell Jeff that Andrew was taking him up on his offer to sacrifice a finger. She should take out her scalpel, her mask, her gloves, a sponge – everything she would need for such an operation – and lay them all out. She was told to carry through the charade up to the very last minute, and then stop. When Mikaela visited Jeff, he had barely slept in about a week. He was in a desperate state…. Mikaela [later] confirmed…that she had followed Andrew’s instructions precisely. Jeff was severely and obviously shaken by the incident. He left Andrew and Foxhollow a few weeks later.
****
Face slapping and name-calling, while they were uncalled for and may have been damaging, were mild in comparison to other questionable manifestations of “crazy wisdom” that occurred at Foxhollow. One such incident involved a student (Mikaela) who was responsible for the marketing of Andrew’s publications and who had fallen out of favor by reminding him that something he had criticized her for doing had been his idea in the first place. He decried her as evil and ordered that the walls, floor and ceiling of her office (which had been relocated to an unfinished basement room) be painted red to signify the spilled blood of her guru. She was ordered to spend hours there contemplating the implications of her transgression, with the additional aid of a large cartoon on the wall depicting her as a vampire and the word “traitor” written in large letters next to it.
Andrew often employed red paint in this fashion to create environments designed to induce shame and guilt in students that he felt had questioned his judgment or disobeyed him. Another female student who had displeased Andrew and, after leaving the community, had returned to help out on a weekend painting project, was summoned to another basement room. There she was met by four female students who, having guided her onto a plastic sheet on the floor, each poured a bucket of paint over her head as a “message of gratitude” from Andrew. She left the property traumatized and fell ill in subsequent days (during which she was harassed by phone calls from another student who, at Cohen’s instigation, repeatedly called her a “coward”) and never again returned to Foxhollow. “Crazy wisdom” is the most charitable possible explanation for these often traumatic and disturbing incidents, many of which have already been related on the whatenlightenment.net blog. Several of these student accounts of Andrew Cohen’s “acts of outrageous integrity,” employed to dubious or damaging effect, are reproduced below.
Read more disturbing details from American Guru.
Capitalist Spirituality for the New World Order
So what type of spiritual education is provided by the Wisdom University? Well, according to their Web site:
The average student enrolled at Wisdom University is a professional, with an established career and one or more advanced degrees. They have come to the conclusion that they need deeper spiritual challenges in order to maintain momentum and meaning in their lives. Our students soon discover that they can continue to grow spiritually and professionally at Wisdom University, thus combining spiritual nourishment with enhanced professional qualifications.
It appears that Wisdom University provides spiritual guidance for corporate and political elites who have lost their way (and inner peace) in the harsh capitalist, individualistic, secular world that they promote as the panacea for the world's problems. This form of globalized corporate spirituality is an important phenomenon. Paul Heelas writes in his landmark book The New Age Movement (Blackwell Publishers, 1996) how: "A significant number of New Agers have in fact moved beyond counter-cultural antagonism to the capitalistic mainstream. Instead, they incorporate the creation of prosperity." (16) This is what Jeremy Carrette and Richard King refer to in their book Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion (Routledge, 2005) as "capitalist spirituality," which they argue is "utilised to 'smooth out' resistance to the growing power of corporate capitalism and consumerism." (17) They write:
The interiorisation of spirituality and its location within the bounds of the modern, individual self emerged with the development of psychology in the late nineteenth century. It became popularised, however, in the 1950s and 1960s with the rise of Humanistic Psychology (particularly the work of [Abraham] Maslow), professional counselling, and psychedelic culture. Having been cast as a private and psychological phenomenon, "spirituality" has gone through a second major shift in the 1980s. This is the point at which the first privatisation -- involving the creation of individual, consumer-oriented spiritualities -- begins to overlap with an increasing emphasis upon a second privatisation of religion -- that is, the tailoring of spiritual teachings to the demands of the economy and of individual self-expression to business success. This is no better illustrated than by the various self-improvement movements of the 1980s... (18)
Michael Parenti draws our attention to the activities of the arch-democracy-manipulator, Vaclav Havel, who "now promotes a sort of New Age spiritualism." Parenti points out how Havel has...
...called for a new breed of political leader, who would rely less on "rational, cognitive thinking," and show "humility in the face of the mysterious order of Being" and "trust in his own subjectivity as his principal link with the subjectivity of the world." We should have a "sense of transcendental responsibility, archetypal wisdom," and the ability "to get to the heart of reality through personal experience." Havel lists the ecological dangers facing the world but denounces the idea of rational, collective social efforts to solve them. He denounces democracy's "traditional mechanisms" for being linked to "the cult of objectivity and statistical average." He thinks he is being visionary when in fact he is putting forth an elitist subjectivism and antidemocratic obscurantism. (19)
As Steve Bruce noted in 2006, "New Age spirituality would seem to be a strong candidate for the future of religion because its individualistic consumeristic ethos fits well with the spirit of the age." (20)
Returning to Wisdom University, in order to provide spiritual comfort to their already well-educated students the University employs fourteen faculty chairs "who teach and conduct research and other programs at Wisdom University." For instance, Caroline Myss, a "pioneer in the field of energy medicine and human consciousness," is chair of Energy Medicine, while other chairs cover subjects as diverse as Sacred Dance and Interspecies Connections. Yet, the one chair that seems particularly relevant to the topic of this essay is Barbara Marx Hubbard's chair in Conscious Evolution. (21)
Marilyn Ferguson recounts some of Hubbard's achievements in the new age classic, The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s (Paladin Books, 1982):
In 1967, Barbara Marx Hubbard, a futurist moved by [Pierre] Teilhard's vision of evolving consciousness, invited a thousand people around the world, including [Abraham] Maslow's network, to form a "human front" of those who shared a belief in the possibility of transcendent consciousness. Hundreds responded, including Lewis Mumford and Thomas Merton. Out of this grew a newsletter and later a loose-knit organization, the [pro-space exploration group] Committee for the Future. (p.59)
Hubbard is well qualified to teach Conscious Evolution as she is the president of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution -- a group that has been "supported by major financial gifts from [the late] Laurance S. Rockefeller," amongst others. Furthermore, although not organized by Hubbard, Ferguson notes how in 1970 Lockheed Aircraft underwrote a meeting held at De Anza College in Cupertino, California, "that was the first group of scientists and physicians -- friends -- gathered in a public forum to assert their interest in spiritual realities and alternative approaches to health." She adds that within a few years similar meetings were taking place all over America, and the "Rockefeller, Ford, and Kellogg foundations funded programmes exploring the interface of mind and health." (22)
An important person working alongside Barbara Marx Hubbard at the Foundation for Conscious Evolution during the 1990s was Nancy Carroll, who served as the Foundation's executive director from 1993 to 1999. Like Hubbard, Carroll happens to be a founding board member of a group called Women of Vision and Action -- a group whose advisory board includes people like Maurice Strong's wife, Hanne Strong, and Alison Van Dyk (who is the chairman of the board and interim executive director at the Temple of Understanding at the United Nations).
Here it is interesting to return to the fact that one of Hubbard's most influential supporters at the Foundation for Conscious Evolution was David Rockefeller's brother, Laurance Rockefeller. This is noteworthy as Rockefeller dynasties activities have long provided fertile grounds for one world government conspiracy theorists (for example, in 1952 Emanuel Josephson published his book Rockefeller, 'Internationalist': The Man Who Misrules the World). Ironically Laurance Rockefeller is directly involved in funding research that advocates the legitimacy of some phenomena often categorised as conspiracy theories.
Writing in 2002, Leslie Kean, an investigative reporter and producer with Pacifica Radio, noted that "a study about to be published [on crop circles] by a team of scientists and funded by Laurance Rockefeller concludes 'it is possible that we are observing the effects of a new or as yet undiscovered energy source.'" This funding of what in many circles is considered to be non-academic research is not however an anomaly, as for instance Laurance Rockefeller has also supported the research of the late professor of psychiatry John Mack (formerly based at Harvard Medical School). (23) Indeed, John Mack, shortly before publishing his book, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (Charles Scribner, 1994), with funding provided by Laurance Rockefeller, founded the Program for Extraordinary Experience Research. Thus the very family that is considered to be at the heart of the one world government conspiracies (the Rockefellers) is involved in promoting research that encourages the public to believe in theories that more sceptical people consider to be conspiratorial. (24)
A significant observation is that Hubbard's spiritual work is complemented by her pro-space exploration activities, which saw her provide financial assistance to a group called the L5 Society, a group that was formed in 1975 and later merged (in 1987) with the National Space Institute to form the National Space Society. More recently, Hubbard provided the "inspiration" that (in 2005) helped launch the Council for the Future -- a joint project of three leading space advocacy groups: the Space Frontier Foundation, the National Space Society, and the Mars Society. According to their Web site:
The Council [for the Future] is shaping an Earth/Space/Human Development Agenda. The Council is also shaping a new social meme or world view that is consistent with that Agenda. As part of the meme, there is full agreement as to the imperative of extending human civilization into space, and that logical coherent steps must be taken in the very near term to facilitate that accomplishment.
Hubbard sits on the Council for the Future's board of directors alongside Rick Tumlinson. Tumlinson is linked to Walter Anderson, one of the world's leading capitalists who plans to colonize space and profit from an imperialist space agenda. Tumlinson is the executive director and cofounder of the ominously named Foundation for the International Nongovernmental Development of Space, a group that was launched with $5 million from Anderson. Anderson backed the Roton project that aimed to make space travel "affordable." In 1991 he funded the establishment of the Space Frontier Foundation. This foundation's advisory board includes a representative from the Center for Enterprise in Space, and a variety of popular authors including the late Arthur C. Clarke of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame. Like Hubbard, Clarke happened to be a member of the Club of Budapest, whose efforts to promote a form of spirituality that can overcome all geographic and cultural divides appears to be highly suited to the homogenizing practices of corporate-led globalization and the defeat of democracy.
Hubbard's direct affiliations to other liberal corporate globalizers are strong, and in 1966 she helped cofound the World Future Society -- current board members of this group include amongst others, Maurice Strong, and the former US secretary of defense and subsequent Ford Foundation president, Robert McNamara. In addition, until recently the well-known corporate futurists Alvin Toffler and his wife, Heidi Toffler, sat alongside the late Arthur C. Clarke on the World Future Society's global advisory council. Hubbard's ties to corporate-backed futurists does not bode well for her involvement in teaching any form of emancipatory lessons in higher consciousness at Wisdom University. As Murray Bookchin observed:
The radical thrust of utopian thinking, as exemplified by [Charles] Fourier, has been transmuted by academics, statisticians, and "game theorists" into a thoroughly technocratic, economistic, and aggressive series of futuramas that can be appropriately designated as "futurism." However widely at odds utopias were in their values, institutional conceptions, and visions (whether ascetic or hedonistic, authoritarian or libertarian, privatistic or communistic, utilitarian or ethical), they at least had come to mean a revolutionary change in the status quo and a radical critique of its abuses. Futurism, at its core, holds no such promise at all. In the writings of such people as Herman Kahn, Buckminster Fuller, Alvin Toffler, John O'Neill, and the various seers in Stanford University's "think tanks," futurism is essentially an extrapolation of the present into the century ahead, of "prophecy" denatured to mere projection. It does not challenge existing social relationships and institutions, but seeks to adapt them to seemingly new technological imperatives and possibilities -- thereby redeeming rather than critiquing them. The present does not disappear; it persists and acquires eternality at the expense of the future. Futurism, in effect, does not enlarge the future but annihilates it by absorbing it into the present. What makes this trend so insidious is that it also annihilates the imagination itself by constraining it to the present, thereby reducing our vision -- even our prophetic abilities -- to mere extrapolation.(25)
Like the aims of the Club of Budapest, Hubbard's work appears better geared towards constraining new thought to the stifling confines of capitalist prerogatives. This makes it especially ironic that Hubbard is a member of the Leadership Council of the Association for Global New Thought. The Association's executive director, Barbara Fields Berstein -- who also serves on the board of Hubbard's Foundation for Conscious Evolution -- is the former co-director of Harvard University's Global Negotiation Network's Abraham Path Initiative. This affiliation is significant because, as recounted in the article, "Alternative Dispute Resolution or Revolution," the activities promoted by the Global Negotiation Network's work are indicative of the type of strategies that the corporate and political elites zealously promote to boost global corporate equity, not human equality. Finally, it is interesting to point out that Berstein is a board member of EarthAction, another project that is linked to Harvard University's Alternative Dispute Resolution network through the head of their Global Negotiation Project, William Ury (who serves on the advisory board of EarthAction). Consequently, given its key role in attempting to catalyse the formation of a one world government, the following section will explore the background of this group.
Diane Bell, on ‘Desperately Seeking Redemption’
Diane Bell discusses Marlo Morgan and Lynn V. Andrews, with obvious implications for others, placing it within the context of American Indian Movement (AIM) who had ‘protested, picketed, and passed resolutions condemning those individuals and institutions that packaged Indian sweat lodges, vision quests, shamanic healing, and sun dances for the spiritually hungry’. On Morgan and Andrews, Bell writes:
Morgan’s and Andrews’s readers often tell me that these books offer a vision of a world in which all life forms coexist in physical and spiritual harmony; where one person’s journey can undo centuries of abuse; where women are wise; where, despite differences in language, history, geography, economic status, and personal skills, we are all one. Here is community, meaning, belonging–all the,connectedness for which the self-absorbed, postindustrial, fragmented individual yearns. I certainly agree that we should be open to wisdom from a range of sources, but must we suspend all critical faculties in the process? It matters that the beliefs and practices of Native Americans and Australian Aborigines have been put through a cultural blender. It matters that the stories of those engaged in ongoing struggles for their very lives are marginalized, and that these representations of indigenous peoples are romantic and ahistorical. Morgan and Andrews shroud their “native teachers” in mystery while telling us that they hold the keys to true and authentic ways of knowing.
Marketers of neo-shamanic books and workshops claim that indigenous wisdom is part of our common human heritage. By sharing such knowledge, the argument goes, together we can save the planet. But is this sharing or a further appropriation? There is a bitter irony in turning to indigenous peoples to solve problems of affluent urbanites. In the midst of the wealth of first-world nations, most native peoples endure appalling health problems, underemployment, and grinding poverty. A philosophy of reverence for the earth rings hollow in the reality of toxic waste dumps and nuclear testing on native lands. As Ines Talamantez, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, says: “If the impulse is for respect and sharing, then come stand with us in our struggles for religious freedoms and the return of skeletal remains and against hydroelectric dams and logging roads.”
Bell, Diane. “Desperately seeking redemption.” Natural History Mar. 1997
ConFest: A thesis in defence of…whatever.
Graham St John has a Ph.D. thesis published on the ConFest website entitled Alternative Cultural Heterotopia: ConFest as Australia’s Marginal Centre. In his apologia for appropriation at ConFest, he writes for his chapter on ‘Indigeneity and Appropriation’ about the goings on in the “marginal centre”:
A white male Toc III participant posed a curious sight. With his body covered in mud, didjeridu painted in a black, yellow and red pattern, and penis decorated in matching hues, he emblematised the sensuous simulation of, and experimentation with, primitivity discovered on site. Here, participants manipulate a repertoire of symbolism (paint, musical instruments, clothing, dance styles, architecture) assuming aspects of the valorised primitive, seeking indigeneity.11 While workshops like ‘Koori astronomy’ and ‘intercultural sharing’ – involving the construction of multi-totemic murals – appeared at Toc III (in Koori Culture), body decorations using ochre (hence the experience of getting ‘ochred’) and dot painting technique have become ephemeral recently. And, like primitive antennae seen on backpackers commuting to and from ConFest, the popularity of the didjeridu has escalated. Non-indigenous Australians (usually males but increasingly females also) desire to create the vibrating drone to which Aborigines have always attributed sacred significance, a trend that is underscored by the popularity of workshops on ‘how to play didjeridu’ and ‘didge healing’,12 and stalls like ‘Heartland Didgeridoo’ which, at Toc III, was signposted:
It’s time for Aboriginal spirit to rise in us all …The didge is the sound of Mother Earth and is bringing forth the heart spirit, from the depths of our land. The Didge Spirit will guide us if we put aside our ego and be humble … The vibrating sound of the didge is stirring for it reflects the wonderful sound of creation. Even the earth rotating as taped from outer space sounds like a didgeridoo … By using it in creative ritual in day to day life and going into meditative, reflective and feeling spaces it becomes our soul companion helping open and clear the doorway to our spirit.
In sympathy with such logic, the didjeridu, a chief ritual tool used in a fire walk at Toc IV, was played over the bare feet of prospective coal walkers with the purpose of guiding their journey. Such discourse and practice is consistent with essentialising patterns like those located in contemporary world music where the instrument is often perceived to resonate Mother Earth (Neuenfeldt 1994), and whose originators are imagined to be so ‘in-touch’ with their natural environment that they themselves are Nature. However, as a conduit between the sacred and profane (1994:93), the didjeridu’s specified use in nascent performances (‘didge healing’ and the Toc IV fire walk) delivers us upon fresher ground.
For the disenchanted of Euro-origin, the world’s aboriginal peoples have become the embodiment of the sacred. Indigenes are mobilised to serve varying purposes in different orbits. They are ‘fetishised’ at the global level (Beckett 1994); discursive mediators for the national imaginary (Lattas 1990; Hamilton 1990); and models for developing ‘indigenous selves’ (Mulcock 1997a).
[C.I. bold emphasis]
ConFest attendees wish to embody Aboriginal peoples, they wish to be a part of something that they perceive to be “primitive”, “primordial” and “down to earth”. They want to be “innocent”. They want body decorations, dot painting and “did healing” and fire walking. They want mud and meditation, “mother earth” and a “didj spirit”, ritual and resonance.
What they don’t want is beyond measure.
Go on, crank this one:
Andrea Smith on New Age movements and Survival
Some sanity from Andrea James:
These practices also promote the subordination of Indian women to white women. Many white “feminists” tell us how greedy we are when we don’t share our spirituality, and that we have to tell them everything they want to know because prophesies say we must. Apparently, it is our burden to service white women’s needs rather than to spend time organizing within our own communities.
The New Age movement completely trivializes the oppression that we, as Indian women face: that Indian women are forcibly sterilized and are tested with unsafe drugs such as Depo-Provera; that we have a life expectancy of forty seven years; that we generally live below poverty level and face a seventy-five percent unemployment rate. No, ignoring our realities, the New Age movement sees Indian women as cool and spiritual and therefore, available to teach white women to be cool and spiritual.
This trivialization of our oppression is compounded by the fact that, nowadays, anyone can be Indian if she wants to be. All that is required is that a white woman be Indian in a former life or that she take part in a sweat lodge or be mentored by a “medicine woman” or read a “how to” book.
Since, according to this theory, anyone can now be “Indian,” the term “Indian” no longer refers only to those groups of people who have survived five hundred years of colonization and genocide. This phenomenon furthers the goal of white supremists to abrogate treaty rights and to take away what little we have left by promoting the idea that some Indians need to have their land base protected, but even more Indians [those that are really white] have plenty of land. According to this logic, “Indians” as a whole do not need treaty rights. When everyone becomes “Indian” it is easy to lose sight of the specificity of oppression faced by those who are Indian in this life. It is no wonder we have such a difficult time getting non-Indians to support our struggles when the New Age movement has completely disguised our oppression.
A. Smith, ‘For All Those Who Were Indian in a former life’, in C. J. Adams (ed.), Ecofeminism and the sacred, New York, 1993
THE FALSE MEMORY HOAX
by Alex Constantine
I. CIA Connections to the Mind Control Cults
Within hours, 27 other members of the Sovereign Order of the Solar Temple were found dead at chalets in Granges, Switzerland and Morin Heights, Quebec. Luc Jouret, the Temple's grand master, the London Times reported, "espoused a hybrid religion that owed more to Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum than to any bible. His followers called themselves 'knights of Christ.' The crusading codes of the Knights Templar, the rose-and-cross symbolism of the medieval Rosicrucian Order, Nazi occultism and new age mysticism were joined together into a mumbo- jumbo mishmash that seemed more designed for extracting money from disciples than saving souls."
Jouret, born in the Belgian Congo in 1947, set out in youth as a mystic with communist leanings, but his politics apparently swung full circle. He has since been linked to a clutch of neo-Nazis responsible for a string of bombings in Canada. He told friends that he had once served with a unit of Belgium paratroopers.
French-Canadian journalist Pierre Tourangeau investigated the sect for two years. A few days after the mass murder, he reported that the sect was financed by the proceeds of gun-running to Europe and South America. Simultaneously, Radio Canada announced that Jouret's Templars earned hundreds of millions of dollars laundering the profits through the infamous Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), closed by authorities worldwide in 1991. Montreal's La Presse observed: "each new piece of information only thickens the mystery" - but the combination of international arms smuggling and BCCI presented a familiar enough picture of CIA sedition. The Manhattan D.A. who closed the American branch announced that 16 witnesses had died in the course of investigating the bank's entanglements in covert operations of the CIA, arms smuggling to Iraq, money laundering and child prostitution.
The average coffee table would crumple under the weighty BCCI Book of the Dead. Journalist Danny Cassalaro and Vince Foster appear in it - grim antecedents to the Solar Temple killings. The cult's connection to BCCI (reported in Europe but filtered from American newspaper accounts) fed speculation among Canadian journalists that followers of Jouret were killed to bury public disclosures of gun-running and money laundering.
But the fraternizing of America's national security elite and the cults did not begin in Cheiry, Switzerland. Jouret's Order of the Solar Temple was but the latest incarnation of mind control operations organized and overseen by the CIA and Department of Defense.
In a sense, we are in the same ethical and moral dilemma as the physicists in the days prior to the Manhattan Project. Those of us who work in this field see a developing potential for a nearly total control of human emotional status.
- Dr. Wayne Evans
U.S. Army Institute of Environmental Medicine, 1978
Scientists in the CIA's mind control fraternity lead double lives. Many are highly respected, but if the truth were known they would be deafened by the public outcry and drummed out of their respective academic haunts.
Martin T. Orne, for example, a senior CIA/Navy researcher, is based at the University of Pennsylvania's Experimental Psychiatry Laboratory. He is also an original member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation's advisory board, a tightly-drawn coterie of psychiatrists, many with backgrounds in CIA mind control experimentation in its myriad forms. The Foundation is dedicated to denying the existence of cult mind control and child abuse. It's primary pursuit is the castigation of survivors and therapists for fabricating accusations of ritual abuse.
Dismissing cult abuse as hysteria or false memory, a common defense strategy, may relieve parents of preschool children. In a small percentage of cult abuse cases it's possible that children may be led to believe they've been victimized.
But the CIA and its cover organizations have a vested interest in blowing smoke at the cult underground because the worlds of CIA mind control and many cults merge inextricably. The drum beat of "false accusations" from the media is taken up by paid operatives like Dr. Orne and the False Memory Syndrome Foundation to conceal the crimes of the Agency.
Orne's forays into hypno-programming were financed in the 1960s by the Human Ecology Fund, a CIA cover at Cornell University and the underwriter of many of the formative mind control experiments conducted in the U.S. and abroad, including the gruesome brainwashing and remote mind control experiments of D. Ewen Cameron at Montreal's Allen Memorial Institute. Research specialties of the CIA's black psychiatrists included electroshock lobotomies, drugging agents, incapacitants, hypnosis, sleep deprivation and radio control of the brain, among hundreds of sub- projects.
The secondary source of funding for Dr. Orne's work in hypnotic suggestion and dissolution of memory is eerie in the cult child abuse context. The voluminous files of John Marks in Washington, D.C. (139 boxes obtained under FOIA, to be exact, two-fifths of which document CIA interest in the occult) include an Agency report itemizing a $30,000 grant to Orne from Human Ecology, and another $30,000 from Boston's Scientific Engineering Institute (SEI) - another CIA funding cover, founded by Edwin Land of the Polaroid Corporation (and supervision of the U-2 spy plane escapades). This was the year that the CIA's Office of Research and Development (ORD) geared up a study of parapsychology and the occult. The investigation, dubbed Project OFTEN-CHICKWIT, gave rise to the establishment of a social "laboratory" by SEI scientists at the University of South Carolina - a college class in black witchcraft, demonology and voodoo.
Dr. Orne, with SEI funding, marked out his own mind control corner at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1960s. He does not publicize his role as CIA psychiatrist. He denies it, very plausibly. In a letter to Dr. Orne, Marks once reminded him that he'd disavowed knowledge of his participation in one mind-wrecking experimental sub-project. Orne later recanted, admitting that he'd been aware of the true source of funding all along.
Among psychiatrists in the CIA's mind control fraternity, Orne ranks among the most venerable. He once boasted to Marks that he was routinely briefed on all significant CIA behavior modification experiments: "Why would they come to him," Martin Cannon muses in The Controllers, which links UFO abductions to secret military research veiled by screen memories of "alien" abduction, "unless Orne had a high security clearance and worked extensively with the intelligence services?"
To supplement his CIA income, the influential Dr. Orne has been the donee of grants from the Office of Naval Research and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. "I should like to hear," Cannon says, "what innocent explanation, if any, the Air Force has to offer to explain their interest in post-hypnotic amnesia."
According to Army records, Orne's stomping grounds, Penn U., was a bee-hive of secret experiments in the Vietnam War period. The Pentagon and CIA - under the auspices of ORD's Steve Aldrich, a doyen of occult and parapsychological studies - conferred the Agency's most lucrative research award upon the University of Pennsylvania to study the effects of 16 newly- oncocted biochemical warfare agents on humans, including choking, blistering and vomiting agents, toxins, poison gas and incapacitating chemicals. The tests were abruptly halted in 1972 when the prison's medical lab burned to the ground.
Testimony before the 1977 Church Committee's probe of the CIA hinted that, as of 1963, the scientific squalor of the CIA's mind control regimen, code-named MKULTRA, had abandoned military and academic laboratories, fearing exposure, and mushroomed in cities across the country. Confirmation arrived in 1980 when Joseph Holsinger, an aide to late Congressman Leo Ryan (who was murdered by a death squad at Jonestown) exposed the formation of eccentric religious cults by the CIA. Holsinger made the allegation at a colloquium of psychologists in San Francisco on "Psychosocial Implications of the Jonestown Phenomenon." Holsinger maintained that a CIA rear- support base had been in collusion with Jones to perform medical and mind control experiments at People's Temple. The former Congressional aide cited an essay he'd received in the mail, "The Penal Colony," written by a Berkeley psychologist. The author had emphasized: Rather than terminating MKULTRA, the CIA shifted its programs from public institutions to private cult groups, including the People's Temple.
Jonestown had its grey eminence in Dr. Lawrence Laird Layton of the University of California at Berkeley, formerly a chemist for the Manhattan Project and head of the Army's chemical warfare research division in the early 1950s. (Larry Layton, his son, led the death squad that murdered Congressman Leo Ryan, who'd arrived at Guyana to investigate the cult.) Michael Meiers, author of Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment?, scavenged for information on the People's Temple for six years, concluding: "The Jonestown experiment was conceived by Dr. Layton, staffed by Dr. Layton and financed by Dr. Layton. It was as much his project as it was Jim Jones'. Though it was essential for him to remain in the background for security reasons, Dr. Layton maintained contact with and even control of the experiment through his wife and children." The African-American cult had at its core a Caucasian inner-council, composed of Dr. Layton's family and in-laws.
The press was blind to obvious CIA connections, but survivors of the carnage in Guyana followed the leads and maintained that Jim Jones was "an employee, servant, agent or operative of the Central Intelligence Agency" from 1963 - the year the Agency turned to cult cut-outs to conceal MKULTRA mind control activities - until 1978. In October 1981 the survivors of Jonestown filed a $63 million lawsuit against Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Stansfield Turner, former director of the CIA, currently a teacher at the University of Maryland and a director of the Monsanto Corporation. The suit, filed in U.S. district court in San Francisco, accused Turner of conspiring with Agency operatives to "enhance the economic and political powers of James Warren Jones," and of conducting "mind control and drug experimentation" on the Temple flock.
The suit was dismissed four months later for "failure to prosecute timely." All requests for an appeal were denied.
Ligatures of the CIA clung to the cults. Much of the violence that has since exploded across the front pages was incited by CIA academics at leading universities.
Small wonder, then, that Ted Goertzel, director of the Forum for Policy Research at Rutgers, which maintains a symbiosis with the CIA despite media exposure, should write that the most susceptible victims of "cryptomnesia" (a synonym for false memories) believe "in conspiracies, including the JFK assassination, AIDS conspiracies, as well as the UFO cover-up." The problem, Goertzel says, "may have its origins in early childhood," and is accompanied by "feelings of anomie and anxiety that make the individual more likely to construct false memories out of information stored in the unconscious mind."
This side of gilded rationalizations, the CIA's links to the cults are no manifestation of "cryptomnesia."
Like Jonestown, the Symbionese Liberation Army was a mind control creation unleashed by the Agency. The late political researcher Mae Brussell, whose study of The Firm commenced in 1963 after the assassination of John Kennedy, wrote in 1974 that the rabid guerrilla band "consisted predominantly of CIA agents and police informers." This unsavory group was, Brussell insisted, "an extension of psychological experimentation projects, connected to Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park." (She went on to lament that "many of the current rash of 'senseless killings,' 'massacres,' and 'zombie-type murders' are committed by individuals who have been in Army hospitals, mental hospitals or prison hospitals, where their heads have been literally taken over surgically to create terror in the community.")
Evidence that the CIA conceived and directed the SLA was obvious. The SLA leadership was trained by Colston Westbrook, a Pennsylvania native. Westbrook was a veteran of the CIA's murderous PHOENIX Program in South Vietnam, where he trained terrorist cadres and death squads. In 1969 he took a job as an administrator of Pacific Architects and Engineers, a CIA proprietary in Southern California. Three of Westbrook's foot soldiers, Emily and William Harris and Angela Atwood (a former police intelligence informer), had been students of the College of Foreign Affairs, a CIA cover at the University of Indiana. Even the SLA symbol, a seven-headed cobra, had been adopted by the OSS (America's wartime intelligence agency) and CIA to designate precepts of brainwashing.
When the smoke cleared at SLA headquarters in L.A., Dr. Martin Orne was called upon to examine Patricia Hearst in preparation for trial. The government charged that she had participated voluntarily in the SLA's gun-toting crime spree. Orne's was a foregone conclusion - he sided with the government. His opinion was shared by two other psychiatrists called to appraise Ms. Hearst's state of mind, Robert Jay Lifton and Louis Jolyon West. Dr. Lifton was a co-founder of the aforementioned Human Ecology Fund. The CIA contractor that showered Orne with research grants in the 1960s. Dr. West is one of the CIA's most notorious mind control specialists, currently director of UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute. It was West who brought a score of mind control psychiatrists of the ultra-right political stripe to the UCLA campus.
Drs. Orne, Lifton and West unanimously agreed that Patty Hearst had been "persuasively coerced" to join the SLA. She had been put through a grueling thought reform regimen. She'd been isolated and sensory deprived, raped, humiliated, badgered, politically indoctrinated with a surrealistic mutation of Third World Marxism. Ms. Hearst was only allowed human companionship when she exhibited signs of submission. Orne and his colleagues assured that attention was narrowed to their psychologizing, conveniently rendering evidence of CIA collusion extraneous to consideration by the jury.
Another psychiatrist called to testify at the trial of "Tania" surfaced with Dr. Orne in 1991 on the board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. (The FMSF board is almost exclusively composed of former CIA and military doctors currently employed by major universities. None have backgrounds in ritual abuse - their common interest is behavior modification. Dr. Margaret Singer, a retired Berkeley Ph.D., studied repatriated prisoners-of-war returning from the Korean War at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Maryland (1952-58).
Singer turned up in 1982 on the book jacket of Raven - the CIA's code-name for Jim Jones - by San Francisco Examiner reporters Tim Reiterman and John Jacobs, a thoroughly-researched account of the People's Temple that completely side-steps CIA involvement. Co-author John Jacobs was supposedly one of the country's leading authorities on CIA mind control, a subject he studied at length for a series published by the Washington Post. Reiterman had been the Examiner reporter on the Patricia Hearst beat. Yet both writers managed to avoid obvious intelligence connections. Dr. Singer commended the book as "the definitive psychohistory of Jim Jones." Raven, she opined, conveyed "the essence of psychological and social processes that Jim Jones, the ultimate manipulator, set in motion." The true "manipulators," of course, were operatives of the CIA, and the public disinformation gambit lauded by Dr. Singer was, according to Meiers, in tune with "a concerted attempt to suppress information, stifle investigations, censor writers and manipulate public information."
The CIA and Pentagon have quietly organized and influenced a long line of mind control cults, among them:
The Riverside Lodge of the Ordo Templis Orientis: Also known as The Solar Lodge of the OTO, which followed the teachings of cult messiah Aleister Crowley, whose fixed gaze on the astral equinox resulted in instructions from his deities to form a religious order. Crowley, high priest of the OTO and a British intelligence agent, gave Winifred T. Smith a charter to open an OTO lodge in Pasadena. The high priest of the lodge was Jack Parsons, a rocket expert and founder of the California Institute of Technology. Parsons, who took the oath of the anti-Christ in 1949, contributed to the design of the Pentagon under subsequent CIA director John J. McCloy. He was killed in a still unexplained laboratory explosion. There is a crater on the moon named after him.
The OTO's Solar Lodge in San Bernardino was presided over by Georgina "Jean" Brayton, the daughter of a ranking Air Force officer in the 1960s. The cult subscribed to a grim, apocalyptic view of the world, and like Charles Manson believed that race wars would precipitate the Big Cataclysm. In the Faustian Los Angeles underworld, the lodge was known for its indulgence in sadomasochism, drug dealing, blood drinking, child molestation and murder.
Candace Reos, a former member of the lodge, was deposed by Riverside police in 1969. Reos said that Brayton controlled the thinking of all cult members. One poor soul, she said, was ordered to curb his sexual urges by cutting his wrists every time he was aroused. Mrs. Reos told police, according to the report, that when she became pregnant, Georgina was angry and told her that she would have to condition herself to hate her child. Reos told police that children of the cult's 43 adult members were secluded from their parents and received "training" that took on "very severe tones."
"There was a lot of spanking involved," she said, "a lot of heavy criticism. There was a lot of enclosed in dark rooms." The teachers, she added. "left welts."
If so ordered, adult cultists would beat their children.
According to a Riverside County Sheriff's report, a six year-old child burned the group's school house to the ground. The boy was punished by solitary confinement in a locked shipping crate left in the desert, where the average temperature was 110 degrees, for two months. The boy was chained to a metal plate.
When police freed him, they were nauseated by the suffocating stench of excrement. The child was smothered in flies swarming from a tin-can toilet.
The Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh Movement: In 1985 the Portland Oregonian published a 36-part, book-length series linking the cult to opium trafficking, prostitution, money laundering, arson, slave labor, mass poisonings, illegal wiretaps and the stockpiling of guns and biochemical warfare weapons. The year-long Oregonian investigation revealed cult ties to CIA-trained mercenaries in El Salvador and the Far East. Domestically, Rajneesh's secret police force worked with Agency operatives.
Finders: On February 7, 1987 Customs agents raided a child-porn ring in Tallahasee, Florida. Eight suspects and six children were taken into custody. The children, according to a Customs Department memo, behaved "like animals in a public park," and "were not aware of the function and purpose of telephones, televisions and toilets."
The children told police that they were forced to live outdoors and were given food only as a reward. A check on the backgrounds of the adults turned up a police report, "specific in describing 'bloody rituals' and sex orgies involving children, and an as-yet unsolved murder."
Customs agents searched a cult safe house and discovered a computer room and documents recording "high-tech" bank transfers, explosives, and a set of instructions advising cult members on moving children through jurisdictions around the country. One photographic album found in the house featured the execution and disembowelment of goats, and snapshots, according to a Customs report, of "adults and children dressed in white sheets participating in a bloody ritual."
An American passport was found. The investigating agents contacted the State Department and were advised to "terminate further investigation."
They investigated anyway, reporting that "the CIA made contact and admitted to owning the Finders ... as a front for a domestic training organization, but that it had 'gone bad.'" The late wife of Marion David Pettie, the cult's leader, had worked for the Agency, and his son had been an employee of Air America, the heroin-riddled CIA proprietary. Yet Pettie denied to a reporter for U.S. News & World Report any connection to the Firm. Police in Washington refused to comment. Officials of the CIA dismissed as "hogwash" allegations of any connection to the Finders cult.
Peyote use by non-Indians participates both materially and ideologically in the dispossession of Native North Americans.
undead wrote:Hey AD,
Really great thread - I wish I had time to read it all. I wanted to comment on the "Psychedelic Orientalism" paper. The colonial mindset is definitely huge in white psychedelic culture - just look at Daniel Pinchbeck. He is the best example of what the author is talking about. But the author is clearly in the dark about the reality of the psychedelic experience as well as the communities and overall movement of people who are involved in psychedelic substance.Peyote use by non-Indians participates both materially and ideologically in the dispossession of Native North Americans.
This is a really counterproductive attitude that will undoubtedly surface in the minds of countless "progressives", academics, and leftists who are too conservative to understand the benefit (and necessity) of psychedelics. First, just as it is morally indefensible for pharmaceutical companies to patent these plants and chemicals, it is likewise indefensible to claim that they should be reserved for any one ethnic or cultural group. All human beings share a common bond with mind altering plants at some point in their ancestry, and there is no reason why white people in general should not partake.
The identification with colonized cultures comes from the fact that the psychedelic experience is more obfuscated and exterminated in western culture than it is in any other. White people have no reference point because the history of their ancestors' use of these substances has been erased, so they are forced to look to other cultures to explain and understand their experience. While it may seem arrogant for a white person to claim to see the truth of the Asian religions by using psychedelic substances, they could hardly do worse than the Buddhist theocracies or Hindu fundamentalists that oppress their respective populations.
Furthermore, there is ample evidence that all of these religions originated with the use of psychedelic plants. Granted that a genuine spiritual experience is by no means guaranteed for anyone taking a psychedelic, it is certainly possible. It still requires all of the traditional practices to attain, but the catalyst allows one to see the reality of the end goal, which is often lost to those who follow the religion out of blind faith. In this case I think that the authors simply dismiss the notion of plant-generated religions out of hand, which is a big mistake.
One particularly competent researcher of this subject is Jan Irving (gnosticmedia.com) who has taken it upon himself to revive the work of John Marco Allegro, the man who proposed and advocated the theory that Christianity was originally based on the ritual use of mushrooms after being allowed to examine the Dead Sea Scrolls when they were discovered. Allegro was the only person allowed to read them who was not an ordained Catholic priest. As a result of taking this position he was professionally ruined and died in obscurity. Jan Irving is an exceptional independent thinker, not employed by a university as far as I know, and when it comes to this subject (as with many other taboo subjects) mainstream academics are basically useless.
When it comes to the appropriation of native American cultures in a psychedelic setting, I agree that it is a huge problem, but that does not negate the benefit or necessity of psychedelic use in modern white society. The notion that white people should not take psychedelics prevents the formation of a coherent modern context for the experience and perpetuates all of the very negative phenomena associate with their use and abuse.
Yes psychedelics should not be abused, and white people should not appropriate native cultures. You will notice, however, that out of all of the fake new age appropriation that goes on very few of these instances actually involve ingestion of psychedelic substances. I have never experienced peyote myself, but I know many people who have, and it is my understanding that it is very easy for white people to participate in native peyote ceremonies as long as they approach it with the appropriate attitude, and know where to meet the right people.
Continues at: http://www.selectsmart.com/twyman.htmlSeptember 22, 2003
INDIGO:THE COLOR OF MONEY
by Lorie Anderson
Many are excited about the upcoming New Age movie, "Indigo," written, produced, and directed by three renowned individuals who now live in Ashland - James Twyman, Neale Donald Walsch, and Stephen Simon. Appealing are the career opportunities, the camaraderie of movie-making, the promoting of spirituality and messages of peace and love. Promoters say it will stimulate the local economy and help our schools. But after examining the Indigo Child movement, and specifically the activities of co-writer/producer James Twyman, I see potential consequences for the community -- and for children.
INDIGO CHILDREN
The Indigo Child concept was first popularized by the book, "The Indigo Children," written by the husband and wife team Lee Carroll and Jan Tober. Carroll also portrays himself as a channeler for "Kryon," a spiritual entity who predicted the coming of the Indigo Children - will wonders never cease?
The authors say that "the Indigo Child is a boy or girl who displays a new and unusual set of psychological attributes, revealing a pattern of behavior generally undocumented before." For example, they act like royalty, have difficulty with absolute authority unless given choices or explanations, are easily frustrated (e.g. when waiting in line), are not shy, have difficulty with guilt-based discipline, are non-conformist, may seem antisocial and prefer to be with their own kind, and may have social difficulties in school. I, for one, see nothing new, unusual, or unheard-of here.
The Indigo Child concept may appeal especially to parents of children with mental health challenges, e.g. ADD, ADHD, autism, bi-polar disorder, conduct disorder, or a difficult temperament. Proponents target these label- and medication-wary parents. So, what is the harm in giving parents a positive spin on their children for a change -- like Indigo?
Besides parents possibly foregoing beneficial, if not life-saving, treatment for children with mental or neurological disorders, some proponents of the Indigo movement infuse children with a false sense of human superiority and a bizarre paranormal identity. Mutilating science while claiming scientific proof, children are led to believe by trusted adults that they were born members of a new breed of the human race, the next step in human evolution, that their genes were somehow altered -- perhaps as a result of divine or extraterrestrial intervention, or spontaneous genetic mutation accomplished by non other than the children themselves. Some children come to believe they are endowed with extraordinary powers such as clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, healing powers, pre-birth and previous life recall, etc. Tober and Carroll tell us that Indigo Children don’t fit in and feel uncomfortable when not with other Indigos. Small wonder!
Similar to the Indigo Child model, you may hear about The New Children, The Masters, Ascending Children, Star Children, Crystal or Chrystalline Children, Metagifted Children, Millennium Children, Children of the New Dream, Children of the New Times, Children of Aids (genetically altered child beings who are purportedly immune to all disease), and Super Psychic Children. Someone even wrote online about the "evil counterparts," the "End-Times Children." (I suspect it's just a matter of time before this logical progression of the ill-conceived supernatural child postulate takes on a life of its own.) James Twyman seems to prefer the terms Children of Oz or Psychic Children; and as of 10/2003, "The Mystic Children;" and as of around 1/2006, "The New Children."
NOT JUST ABOUT PEACE AND LOVE
Twyman, and other Indigo Child proponents, may try to shift our focus to the children’s message and mission of peace and love, but Twyman, for one, readily capitalizes on his own and children's purported paranormal abilities.
Twyman sells books and Internet course based on the Psychic Children. He holds pricey Psychic Children conferences, camps, and fairs, charging about $300 for adults for the main conference. He offers an Internet course on telekinetic spoon-bending. He purportedly conversed with Jesus ("Jeshua") who revealed to Twyman through a "Divine Partnership" the "secrets of Heaven and Earth," which Twyman turned into an Internet course for required donations -- with a suggested retail value of $150.
He purports to have frequently "conversed" telepathically from abroad with a Psychic Child he calls Thomas from Bulgaria, and other Psychic Children - providing more content for books and Internet courses. A "secret society" of spiritual masters called "emissaries of light" purportedly revealed themselves in the flesh to Twyman in Bosnia (before they disbanded) -- more content for courses and books.
He doesn't always make a distinction in his writings between his purported mystical interactions and actual, in-the-flesh interactions. When confronted with suspected and admitted misrepresentations, he conveys that he would rather we focus on the truth of his messages than the truth of his experiences - and this seems to satisfy many people, but for others honesty is a prerequisite for credibility.
In response to a question posed by a New Age organization, NewHeavenNewEarth (NHNE) , for an investigative report on Twyman in 1999, Twyman wrote reassuringly: "…as I have been telling those who inquire, Emissary of Light is not an organization, and I am not a guru. I am not asking for donations, and I do not seek either fame or adoration. This is not about me. It is about peace."
Well, certainly Twyman has asked for and collected a wealth of donations (sometimes with a required minimum donation and collected using guilt-pressure) and fees. He says that his organization, The Beloved Community, is now a "registered church organization." He purchased 42 acres of property in the local area, (for which he solicited donations to buy), for psychic children retreats, to start a Emissary of Light type of monastery, and to house workshops for his new "Seminary of Spiritual Peacemaking." He recently announced a five-year goal of 50 churches worldwide. After graduating from the seminary, Twyman suggests graduates can work with the Indigo and Psychic Children.
I believe adults are responsible for deciding what to believe, but as paranormal claims are key to Twyman's growing popularity, and income, and as he targets minors around the world, I think we owe it to the Children of Oz to pull the curtain on the wizard by scrutinizing his claims.
MISLEADING REPORTS OF SCIENTIFIC PROOF
Twyman reports scientific proof of several spurious claims, including that children develop ESP at his fairs after Brain Respiration (BR) training. BR was created by Ilchi Lee, aka Seung Heun Lee, founder of Dahn Centers and many other organizations. (Lee and Walsch are also affiliated). Twyman and Lee have reported that the University of California at Irvine, specifically the Center for Aging and Dementia, has researched and "confirmed" the effects of BR. However, this department at UCI tells me they have not conducted any studies on Lee's BR program, per se -- let alone confirmed its paranormal claims.
OILY-SKINNED PSYCHIC CHILDREN
At Twyman's psychic fairs for children, kids are persuaded to believe that sticking a lightweight spoon to their forehead is a result of psychokinetic power. The fact is that everyone can stick a lightweight spoon to their forehead if they first rub the spoon on their skin, especially the forehead and chin, coating the spoon with slightly sticky sebum.
X-RAY VISION
At Twyman's psychic children's fairs, parents paid for their kids' ESP powers to be tested (charging subjects is almost unheard-of in scientific research) before and after participation in Ilchi Lee's Brain Respiration training. The children were asked to identify certain shapes, colors, or simple words while blindfolded. Lee shows a video at his website of blindfolded children reading books held close to the face. But, the blindfolds were provided and the tests conducted by the program's staff. Naturally, Twyman and Lee report amazing results.
Magicians and paranormal investigators have continually exposed "x-ray vision" as flimflammery, e.g. perhaps the blindfolded person can see through a space between the blindfold and the nose, a pinhole in the blindfold, cloth that appears opaque but is translucent when held close to the face, or verbal cues are provided by testers or shills. Sometimes it’s a matter of working with probabilities. For example, when asked to pick a number between one and ten, the number seven is picked most often.
Return to Data & Research Compilations
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 17 guests