http://www.scp-inc.org/publications/journals/J2402/DarkApocalypse.htm Dark Apocalypse: Blood Lust of the Compassionate By Lee Penn The prophets of Theosophy and the New Age movement promise a glorious future very soon for all mankind. Since 1875, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Alice A. Bailey, David Spangler,1 Neale Donald Walsch,2 Robert Muller,3 Barbara Marx Hubbard, Nick Bunick, and other spiritual writers have said that we can overcome death, ascend to divinity, and build a heaven on earth--if we realize that we are gods, and that all of humanity is One.
The avatars of the New Age have friends--and funding sources--in high places.7 Barbara Marx Hubbard is one of the directors of the World Future Society,8 along with author John Gardner (founder of Common Cause), Sol Linowitz (former ambassador to the Organization of American States), Robert McNamara (formerly the U.S. Secretary of Defense and president of the World Bank), Irving Shapiro (former chairman of E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co.), and Maurice Strong (secretary general of the UN Conference on Environment and Development).9 Laurance S. Rockefeller has financed the work of Matthew Fox10 and Barbara Marx Hubbard. In turn, Barbara Marx Hubbard describes Rockefeller as her "beloved patron,"11 and says that Rockefeller's "intuition about 'the Christ of the 21st Century' deeply inspired me."12 Rockefeller also funded the Lindisfarne Association, supporting the work of James Parks Morton (who was for many years the militantly avant-garde rector of the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City), David Spangler, and other New Age luminaries.13 Robert Muller, who has been the Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN) and Chancellor of the UN University for Peace in Costa Rica, won the UNESCO Prize for Peace Education in 1989 for his theosophical World Core Curriculum. 14 On the contrary--New Age and theosophical teaching is not merely a collection of silly, comfortable bromides. In fact, this spiritual movement is far worse. New Age and theosophist gurus--Blavatsky, Bailey, Muller, Marx Hubbard, Walsch, Spangler, and others--firmly oppose Christian orthodoxy. They believe that the Fall was mankind's ascent into knowledge, assisted by Lucifer--whom they praise as the bearer of light and wisdom. They expect an imminent, apocalyptic upheaval that will lead humanity into a New Age. Afterward, there will be world government, and a new economic order to enforce "sharing." (See the article "New Age & Globalist Strategies: Unity, Collectivism, & Control," in Volume 23:4-24:1 of the Journal, for the details). Furthermore, many New Age leaders promote the libertine "do your own thing" morality that has wreaked havoc on Western society since the 1960s. Christians worship one God, the Holy Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In opposition, the New Age prophets propose an unholy trinity: human self-worship, Luciferian religion, and a collectivist earthly Utopia, a "spiritual" version of Communism. "Man's conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man's side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well."
Just as New Age teachers invert theology and devalue human life, they also invert morality. Neale Donald Walsch's celestial confidant told him, "There's no such thing as the Ten Commandments. ... God's Law is No Law."23 Walsch's spirit guide also said: "Understand that 'right' and 'wrong' are figments of your imagination."24 Walsch's familiar spirit opposes obedience to God's will: "Obedience is not growth, and growth is what I desire."25 Instead, the spectre proposes self-indulgence: "No kind of evolution ever took place through denial. If you are to evolve, it will not be because you've been able to successfully deny yourself things you know 'feel good,' but because you've granted yourself these pleasures--and found something even greater. For how can you know that something is 'greater' if you've never tasted the 'lesser'?"26 As a result, Walsch's god approves of sexual activity by children and teenagers, saying, "In enlightened societies offspring are never discouraged, reprimanded, or 'corrected' when they begin to find early delight in the nature of their very being. ... Sexual functions are also seen and treated as totally natural, totally wonderful, and totally okay."27 Walsch's goblin does not say whether the enlightened little ones are doing it solo, with their friends, with their siblings, or with adults. To ensure that the kids get the message, Walsch's god says schools should replace the current "facts-based curriculum" with a "values-based curriculum," including courses on such things as "Celebrating Self, Valuing Others, Joyous Sexual Expression, Fairness, Tolerance, Diversities And Similarities, Ethical Economics, Creative Consciousness And Mind Power."28 (How much of this curriculum is already taught in American public schools?) Barbara Marx Hubbard's spirit guide says that sexual identity confusion is a good thing; in the new age, "Your adolescence will be a joy. You will be androgynous."29 Walsch's imp approves of mixing sex acts with occult rituals: "Give yourself abundant pleasure, and you will have abundant pleasure to give others. The masters of Tantric sex knew this. That's why they encourage masturbation, which some of you actually call a sin."30 Walsch's ghostly guide also urges, "Mix what you call the sacred with the sacrilegious, for until you see your altars as the ultimate place for love, and your bedrooms as the ultimate place for worship, you see nothing at all."31 When Walsch speaks for himself, rather than quoting "God," he says, "I envision a world where we can make love to anyone, anyway [sic] we wish to, at anytime, anywhere. (Of course they have to be willing and consent.) ... Please understand, I am not talking about sex, and yet at the same time, I am."32 Matthew Fox says, "Lust is a blessing;" he only draws a line when "there is addiction" or "when sexuality is used ... in a sadistic way."33 Fox quotes Shiva, "creator and destroyer of things" and "lord of the dance," as saying: "The phallos is identical with me. It draws my faithful to me and therefore must be worshipped;" Fox then says, "This is Cosmic Christ language."34 Any more questions about the nature of the "Cosmic Christ"? In the New Age, traditional families will disappear. Marriage will be a transient affair, and tribal elders will raise the children. Barbara Marx Hubbard says, "The break-up of the 20th century procreative family structure is a vital perturbation needed for the breakthrough of the 21st century cocreative family structure."35 Her familiar spirit says that in the new age, "Fidelity of the partners is to each other for the sake of their chosen act, whether it is to be a godly child or godly work in the universe. When the act is completed, the partnership is renewed if there is more to be done. It is lovingly ended if there is nothing more to be created by that particular couple. Each discovers the next partner, or partners, with no hint of sorrow, for nothing is separated among those totally connected with God."36 The ethics of the orgy becomes the ethics of the New Age. Walsch's god proposes that parents should turn the care of their children over to the "entire community": "Place the raising of children in the hands of your respected Old Ones. Parents see their children whenever they wish, live with them if they choose, but are not solely responsible for their care and upbringing. The physical, social, and spiritual needs of the children are met by the entire community, with education and values offered by the elders."37 In the New Age, "it takes a village ..." For the sake of the Divine Self, Walsch's god denounces fidelity and marriage vows: "Betrayal of yourself in order not to betray another is Betrayal nonetheless. It is the Highest Betrayal."38 "Your marriage vows, as you presently construct them, have you making a very un-Godly statement."39 "If you forfeit freedom, you forfeit your Self. And that is not a sacrament, that is a blasphemy."40 (This may be a message that Walsch badly wanted to hear; he has a history of five marriages.41) Indeed, family members who won't move into the New Age should be left behind. Barbara Marx Hubbard says, "But if members of our family choose to remain where they are, we have no moral obligation to suppress our own potential on their behalf. In fact the suppression of potential is more 'immoral' than growing beyond our biological relationships."42 Theosophists who adhere more closely to the older teachings of Blavatsky and Bailey disagree with Walsch, Fox, and Hubbard about sexuality. Benjamin Crème, the spokesman for "Maitreya," a false Christ, says, "The family is the basic unit which provides the best conditions and karmic situation for correct evolution. It cannot, with impunity, be replaced."43 Crème also says that "Homosexuality is not seen by the Hierarchy as normal." 44 Spangler repeatedly criticizes New Age believers' destruction of marriages due to pursuit of "self-development."45 With the New Age libertines' apotheosis of free love comes a "spiritual" justification for use of mind-altering drugs--as if the casualties of the 1960s drug craze were not still strewn about our streets and our hospitals. Huston Smith, author of The World's Religions (a standard comparative religion textbook) now openly supports "entheogens." Smith has just published Cleansing The Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants & Chemicals. He says that drug use in religious rites can bring people closer to God, and covers the history of this practice--from the Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece and India's sacred soma to the modern supporters of better religion through chemistry: Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Gordon Wasson (an enthusiastic researcher into magic mushrooms),46 and Albert Hoffmann (the discoverer of LSD).47 Smith's interest in religious drugs dates back to his friendship with the aforementioned celebrities in the early 1960s.48 In 1997, he had praised a collection of essays titled Entheogens and the Future of Religion, saying that the essays "constitute the best single inquiry into the religious significance of chemically occasioned mystical experiences that has yet appeared."49 Barbara Marx Hubbard put "mind-expanding substances" on a par with the civil rights movement as a way to foster social change: "The environmental movement, the antiwar movement, the Apollo space program, the women's movement, the civil rights and human rights movements, new music, transcendental meditation, yoga, and mind-expanding substances all encouraged a young generation to act as instruments of social transformation -- striving to birth the still-invisible social butterfly."50 (Traditional theosophists disagree. David Spangler says: "taking drugs does not represent a path into the culture and world of the New Age."51 Benjamin Crème describes proposals for legalizing drugs as "tantamount to legalized murder," 52 and says, "Do not take drugs, hallucinogenic or any other type of drug."53) Supporters of entheogens have an audience among the powerful. Huston Smith attended the Gorbachev Foundation's State of the World Forum in 1995.54 Of the 12 authors of Entheogens and the Future of Religion, four attended or spoke at State of the World Forum events in 1996 and 199755 (Ann and Alexander Shulgin and Robert Jesse in 1996; Jack Kornfield and Robert Jesse in 1997). The proponents of entheogens also network with the Wiccans. The PantheaCon witches' convention is held each February at the Cathedral Hill Hotel in San Francisco; the most recent gathering attracted 1,200 neo-pagans, double the number that attended in 1999.56 At the February 2000 PantheaCon, Dale Pendell, one of the 12 authors of Entheogens and the Future of Religion, spoke on "Eros: The Muse and Other Poisons;" he said hat he is "currently finishing Pharmako/Gnosis, the second volume of his trilogy on plant powers, herbcraft, and the Poison Path."57 At the 1999 PantheaCon, Pendell spoke about "The Poison Path and Quantum Tantra."58 Once our bodies, minds, and souls are drained dry by free sex, mind-bending drugs, and trafficking with the spirit world, we can--and ought to--choose to die. As Barbara Marx Hubbard says, "Those who have more to create choose to live on until they are finished with their work. When we feel that our creativity has run its course, we gracefully choose to die. In fact, it seems unethical and foolish to live on. ... When we are old and tired of life and do not want to live on, we learn to die by choice, as some native people do."59 She plans to act on her beliefs when her time comes to die: "It is my preference that, when I feel complete with this life, I call in my beloveds [sic], my family, my friends. In a momentous celebration I will prepare to enter the mystery of the next phase of life and seek the blessings of those I love. I choose to make my transition gracefully."60 Neale Donald Walsch likewise favors euthanasia: "It is insane to think that endless suffering is what God requires, and that a quick, humane end to the suffering is 'wrong'."61 (Benjamin Crème's spirit masters disagree, saying that euthanasia and suicide "interfere with soul purpose." 62) Pride--self-esteem to the nth degree--is the hallmark of New Age leaders. (How else could they plan a global utopia and discard traditional moral codes that most of mankind has accepted for millennia?) George Soros says, "It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out."74 Barbara Marx Hubbard now claims divinity for herself, saying, "the inner voice, the guide, the 'Beloved' higher self that has been signaling me from afar for thirty-five years, is incarnating as me."75 Robert Muller says, "If I should ever be proclaimed a saint by the Catholic religion or by the United Religions Organization, I would like to be named or known as: Saint Robert of Mount Rasur."76 Mikhail Gorbachev and Maurice Strong, the originators of the Earth Charter--a radical environmental treaty that will be proposed to the UN for adoption in 200277--seem to view themselves as supreme lawgivers, legitimate successors to Moses and Jesus. Gorbachev says, "We also need a new international environmental legal code rooted in an Earth charter--a covenant similar to the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights. ... My hope is that this charter will be a kind of Ten Commandments, a 'Sermon on the Mount,' that provides a guide for human behavior toward the environment in the next century and beyond."78 Maurice Strong says: "The real goal of the Earth Charter is that it will in fact become like the Ten Commandments, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights."79 With such hubris on the part of the authors of the Earth Charter, it should be little surprise that Gorbachev's global environmental organization, Green Cross International, proposes that all human values should be subordinated to the stated goal of the Earth Charter: "The protection of the Biosphere, as the Common Interest of Humanity, must not be subservient to the rules of state sovereigntydemands of the free market or individual rights."80 The Cruelty of Paganism Several of these New Age leaders take spiritual inspiration from pagan civilizations that engaged in large-scale human sacrifice.81 Muller extols the linguistics and philosophy of the "indigenous peoples," especially "the remarkable cosmologies of the Mayas [sic], Aztecs, Inkas [sic] and others;" there should be "a global spiritual Department to study the indigenous spiritualities and rituals derived from their intimate relation with nature and Creation."82 Barbara Marx Hubbard hopes for a "planetary birth party" by 2012; she chose the date based on the Mayan calendar.83 The "spiritualities and rituals" of the Mayans, the Aztecs, and the Incas incorporated human sacrifice. URI Executive Director Charles Gibbs has said that "indigenous religions" would be included in the URI "the same way everyone else would be involved. ... I was just in Oxford and ... the indigenous religion there is the Druid faith."84 Modern-day Druids participate in the URI; 85 the ancient Druids sacrificed people to the gods.86 Just as the ancient gods drank human blood, so does the theosophical Hierarchy. Benjamin Crème said, "it was a deliberate act of Hierarchy to prolong the First World War to 1918. The destruction of the animal bodies of man allowed the blood of man--representing animal life--to be poured into the earth. This was a great initiatory experience for the animal kingdom, including the animal nature of man."87 Revolution, War and Atomic Bombs: Engines of Human Evolution Communist and fascist leaders--from Lenin onward--have wantonly destroyed human life and liberty in pursuit of collectivist Utopias. They have said, "To make an omelet, you have to break eggs"--and according to the Black Book of Communism, approximately 20 million were killed under Soviet Communism, and 65 million were slain by the Chinese Communists.88 The Theosophists approve of these deeds; no bloodshed is too great if it advances their version of human evolution. In September 1939, 89 Alice Bailey hailed "Hitler who lifted a distressed people upon his shoulders; Lenin, the idealist, Stalin and Franco" as "great and outstanding personalities who were peculiarly sensitive to the will-to-power," all were "expressions of the Shamballa force" and "emphasised increasingly the wider human values."90 Foster Bailey, who carried on Alice Bailey's work after her death, wrote that the Russian Revolution had been "an outstanding hierarchical success."91 Foster Bailey's spiritual "hierarchy" of ascended masters claimed the Chinese Cultural Revolution as "an hierarchical project. Amazing changes have been achieved in that short period."92 Benjamin Crème praises Mao Tse-Tung as a "great initiate ... Nobody who was not imbued with the will-aspect of God could bring 500 million people from nothing to a great nation."93Interfaith Center Logo >From the start of World War II until her death in 1949, Alice Bailey wrote that the war had been necessary for the New Age to come. She believed that the New Age would be preceded by "A destructive cycle, wherein the old order passes away and that which has been created--human civilization with its accompanying institutions--is destroyed."94 Bailey gave credit to the "Hierarchy" of ascended spiritual masters for "Their decision, taken early in this century, which precipitated--in the centre which we call 'the race of men'--those potencies and stimulating energies which produced that major destructive agency, the world war (1914-1945)."95 In April 1943, Bailey said, "One of the purposes lying behind the present holocaust (World War II) has been the necessity for the destruction of inadequate forms. ... the Law of destruction was permitted to work through humanity itself, and men are now destroying the forms through which many masses of men are functioning."96 ("Destroying forms" does not mean shredding IRS paperwork; it is the Theosophist code phrase for killing.) After the war, Bailey wrote that "the Custodians of God's Plan" viewed World War II as a "major surgical operation" that had been "largely successful" in removing "a violent streptococcic germ and infection" that had "menaced the life of humanity."97 Therefore, "an operation was made in order to prolong opportunity and save life, not to save the form. The operation was largely successful." 98 Nevertheless, she warned that the two World Wars would be only the beginning of sorrows: "The germ, to be sure, is not eradicated and makes its presence felt in infected areas of the body of humanity. Another surgical operation may be necessary."99 Like Alice Bailey and Benjamin Crème, Teilhard de Chardin hailed the World Wars as occasions for human unity and progress. In March 1945, he wrote of World War II as "a crisis of birth" for a new humanity--anticipating the words that Barbara Marx Hubbard uses to describe humanity's current situation: "Finally, the present war; a war which for the first time in history is as widespread as the earth itself; a conflict in which human masses as great as continents clash together; a catastrophe in which we seem to be swept off our feet as individuals--what aspect can it wear to our awakened eyes except that of a crisis of birth, almost disproportionately small in relation to the vastness of what it is destined to bring forth?"100 In December 1945, Teilhard described World War II as "this new stirring of the human dough;" it--along with World War I--fostered human unity: "Brutal and harsh though the circumstances have been, who can fail to perceive the inevitable consequences of this new stirring of the human dough? ... during these six years, despite the unleashing of so much hatred, the human block has not disintegrated. On the contrary ... it has increased its vice-like grip upon us all. First 1914-1918 then 1939-1945--two successive turns of the screw. Every new war, embarked upon by the nations for the purpose of detaching themselves from one another, merely results in their being bound and mingled together in a more inextricable knot. The more we seek to thrust each other away, the more do we interpenetrate."101 Modern-day Theosophists Corinne McLaughlin and Gordon Davidson make a general case for war as an agent of change: "if peace is maintained at any price in order to continue vast injustices and materialistic, wasteful life-styles, then spiritual death may be the result. Physical death is only of the body, the form nature, which according to the Ageless Wisdom will be reborn again in another form. We must be cautious about a stubborn idealism that loves the ideal of peace more than it loves humanity's evolution. We can become so enamored of peace that it leads to inertia, stagnation, and above all else, an attachment to material comfort. Peace and war are not true opposites; peace and change are."102 This is the creed of fascism, brought up to date. Theosophist writers have also found reason to stop worrying and to love the Bomb. In an essay titled "The Release of Atomic Energy," written on August 9, 1945, Bailey hailed "the release of atomic energy ... [on] August 6, 1945, in connection with the bombing of Japan" as "the greatest spiritual event which has taken place since the fourth kingdom of nature, the human kingdom, appeared."103 She said of the atomic bomb: "This 'saving force' is the energy which science has released into the world for the destruction, first of all, of those who continue (if they do) to defy the Forces of Light working through the United Nations. Then--as time goes on--this liberated energy will usher in the new civilisation, the new and better world and the finer, more spiritual conditions."104 Bailey viewed the "first use of this energy" in th eof this energy" in the atomic incineration of Hiro |
