The New Age: An Emerging Worldview in Society – Program 3

By: Brooks Alexander, Dave Hunt, Tal Brooke; ©1988

Some New Age techniques are being taught in our schools to children as young as kindergarten. Should parents be concerned? What can they do about it?

The New Age Movement in Our Schools

Ankerberg: Welcome! Welcome to our program. We’re talking about what was pictured in Time magazine: the New Age Movement. And inside the magazine said, “New Age harmonies: a strange mix of spirituality and superstition is sweeping across this country.” And we’ve been talking about the mystical experiences that people like Robert Muller at the United Nations have had as well as Shirley MacLaine and some of our other scientists. People in tremendous positions in this country are experiencing these things and embrac­ing this philosophy. What we want to talk about tonight is how far down are we preparing our people to have these experi­ences? I’d like you to listen to this. This is an actual event that took place. Picture 25 normal first graders peacefully lying in silence on their classroom floor. Okay? It’s not a fire drill; it’s not an air raid, but it’s part of a new curriculum they’re being taught. Now, here’s what they’re being taught. The children are being guided through a meditation in which they are instructed to, “Imagine the sun, radiantly shining toward them.” Now, maybe some of your kids have come home and they’ve gone through these exercises. Then they’re told to “gaze into the sun’s brightness without being hurt by the light.” Next, the children are asked to “try to bring the sun down into their bodies and feel its warmth, power and illumination.” And while they’re imagining that, the teacher says, “Imagine that you’re doing something perfect; that you are perfect.” The children are told to see themselves as “resplen­dent with light.” They should “feel at peace, for they are per­fect.” They are reminded “they are all-intelligent; they are magnificent;” that they “contain all the wisdom of the universe within themselves.” This exercise is given all across our country in many of our public schools at the first grade level. Now, we actually have New Age teaching that goes right down to kindergar­ten. The designer of this particular meditation, the late Beverly Galyean, she called it “confluent education.” Now, she told us what was behind her formulating this, and this is what I want you to hear. This is what she said was behind this. She says, “Once we begin to see that we are all God, that we all have the attributes of God, then I think the whole purpose of human life is to re-own the Godlikeness within us — the perfect love, the perfect wisdom, the perfect understanding, the perfect intelligence. And when we do that, we create back to that old, that essential oneness, which is consciousness.” So here you have some of our educators that are formulating curriculum for our schools programming our children to start thinking this way. And they don’t call that reli­gion. They just call that the philosophy that we want our kids to come up with. Now, what we want to talk about — and Tal, we want to come to you. Are we training our society the principles of New Age thinking so that sooner or later people are all going to say, “Well, listen, I was taught that. Everybody’s saying that. I believe that. Let me try for the experi­ence.” And then you’ve got the philosophy and the experience. When that happens, something happens. What is it?

Brooke: It’s called the consensus view, but there’s something else going on. Let me add to your puzzle. We just saw the first graders going under Beverly Galyean’s little experience. Now, here we are, the toy stores are full…someone in the audience actually said, “I go through a toy store and I kind of do this.” Okay? They’ve got He-Man. Parents, on televi­sion, your kiddies are getting He-Man, and what does He-Man do? Controls things — not like Superman, but with his mental powers. Okay? And then, of course, there are Ouija boards in the toy store. And all of you who have watched the TV in the last three years, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re wearing blinders. The Enchanted World. Okay? Remember that? Vincent Price going through the whole thing. Enchanted World. So there is an acclamation going on for sure.

Ankerberg: You’ve got the Smurfs. The cartoons….

Brooke: You’ve got the Smurfs. You’ve got a lot of different things.

Ankerberg: …magical powers. Brooks, we had the man who wrote the Humanist Manfesto II as a guest on our program not too long ago, Dr. Paul Kurtz, and he said man did not need God; he didn’t need any deity. Man was his own god.

Alexander: John, the secularism and secular humanism is a setup for this New Age Movement in several important ways. Secular humanism basically promotes human beings to the position of being God without ever giving it that name. Simply because by rejecting God, by rejecting the concept of God, it implies sitting in judgment over Him. If you say there are no moral laws built into the uni­verse that bind humanity, you are sitting in judgment over the laws that God has given. If you are saying that all meaning comes from mankind, you are sitting in judgment over God Himself, which implic­itly makes you in a higher position. Which puts you in a position of being God.

Ankerberg: Yeah, there’s “no sweat.”

Alexander: So secularism is simply the New Age Movement without the God language essentially and without the experiential aspect of it. The New Age Movement is a form of simply escalating humanism to its next logical level, a form of cosmic humanism. And often for humanists of the secular stripe that transition takes place very subtly, and in many cases without them actually ever knowing that they have made it. Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review and the dean of literary humanism for years and years and years is a very good example of this. He got into the New Age Movement through the holistic health movement and being cured of cancer through the powers of his mind — or so he be­lieved.

Ankerberg: Yeah, Dave, and Time magazine says right in there that a part of this philosophy when you went from your secular humanistic views on atheistic basis, going from there to this cosmic conscious­ness sorcery is involved. What are they talking about? Why did they use the word “sorcery” right in Time magazine?

Hunt: Well, if you looked up “sorcery” in any dictionary or encyclo­pedia it generally associates it with evil — using magical powers in league with spirit beings and it’s generally called evil. But the interesting thing to me is that today sorcery has become something desirable. Things that a few years ago were confined only to the Third World and the Western World laughed at them as super­stition or ignorance or at least called it “religion,” and they were looked upon as…like voodoo and hexes and curses are now…we’re training ourselves in this, because it’s going to empower us. I find it also interesting, getting back to the secular humanistic thing here, evolution we haven’t said a word about. And evolution is not a scientific theory. It’s at the heart of all of this. It’s been in Eastern mysti­cism and occultism for thousands of years. Evolution is…that’s how karma and rein­carnation work. What’s the point of coming back again and again in a million lives if you’re not evolving higher. Okay? So, now the atheistic humanist says, “Hey, what do you know. There [are] beings out there on some of these planets. They could have been evolving ten billion years longer than we have. Why, they’re as far beyond man on the evolutionary scale as we are beyond a worm! I mean, when we meet them, we get this encounter with them. They’ve got…they’re omniscient. They’re omnipo­tent. I mean, they’re like gods to us!” So the atheistic humanist himself produces gods out of the evolutionary powers of the universe. Now, the next thing that’s happening then, it’s incredible. Take a look at your science fiction and you will see that they are presenting to us once again in a modern scientific form the very gods of the pagans!

Alexander: He-Man all over again!

Hunt: Right. You’ve got it. You’ve got these monsters, you’ve got these creatures. Now we’re believing in the fairytales once again. But it is brought to us through science and we’re back into paganism but now it’s a more sophisticated form to meet modern man’s demands.

Ankerberg: Did you know, guys, about…you know who Jim Henson is don’t you? He’s the creator of the Muppets. Have you seen his film “The Dark Crystal”?

Brooke: Yeah.

Ankerberg: What is the dark crystal? See if you can describe it for us.

Brooke: What happens is that you have these two races on a planet that one appears evil, the other appears good and, lo and behold, they merge at the end of the movie. Let me throw something out about this….

Ankerberg: Why do they…what does that prove?

Brooke: “They’re all one.” There’s no good and evil.

Ankerberg: But here you have the creator of the Muppets, going back to the meaning of that movie that he’s made for kids basically, is you have these two groups of people, and they get the crystal and this crystal magically restores them to the unity. And the force — the bad side and the good side, the dark side and the good side of the force all are merged into one. You have a monist, pantheistic philosophy again, and isn’t that the same thing you’ve got in Star Wars, Dave?

Hunt: Yeah, we’re making a quantum leap forward into a new age by retreating into pagan beliefs and superstitions of thou­sands of years ago. Now, in Star Wars, you’ve got the thing in a nutshell. And by the way, George Lucas is really the “Billy Graham of the Force.” He believes in this. He’s been quoted in Time magazine, Reader’s Digest and so forth. He has a Buddhist view of this. It’s the universal con­sciousness of Carl Jung and we’re all part of this, and if you tune into it, you can in fact get these powers.

Ankerberg: And the force is just another way of saying this pantheistic essence that we’re all a part of.

Hunt: Absolutely. You have a dark and a light side, which is black magic and white magic. And how did he initiate Luke into the force? He’s got him with this laser sword, which isn’t a weapon, it’s a divination device. It’s a means of focus­ing in on this force. And Luke is trying to hit this little ball, remember? And he can’t do it. So Obi Wan puts the visor on so he can’t see, and he says, “Luke, your problem is you’re trying to think. What you’ve got to do is tune it out and let the force take over.” The altered state of consciousness. “Then you can do it.” And at the end of the movie when he’s in a super-sophisticated space vehicle and he can’t destroy the death star, he hears the voice of his spirit guide, which is what Obi Wan has become when he died. Now he communi­cates from the other side and he says, “The force, Luke. The force. Let the force take over!” You see Luke go into his altered state — 10.5 cycles, the alpha level — and the force takes over. That’s exactly what we’re training our people to do today.

Ankerberg: All right, we’re going to continue this and we’re going to talk about: Is there a down side to the force that is not being explained to our people that are embracing these New Age mystical experiences. So please stick with us. We’ll talk about it when we come right back.

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Ankerberg: We’re talking about the New Age Movement and the mysti­cal experiences that people are having in them. Some of our top people — Shirley MacLaine and doctors such as Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and Bernie Siegel at Yale, Robert Muller at the United Nations and Carl Rogers — these people are having these mystical experiences that give them a world view, a philosophy that we’re all one. And basically there’s no evil. It’s just the dark side and the white side of the force. And the fact is you’ve got to tune in, and once you have the experi­ence, you’ll be persuaded of that. Then you look inside to try and actualize your potential. Is there a down side to the experiences that they’re having? And, Brooks, tell us about this. The Time magazine article leaves us at the point of saying that part of this experience is nothing but sorcery. Why did they use the word “sorcery” and is there a down side to the sorcery that they’re talking about?

Alexander: They use the word “sorcery” because it really is con­nected with the same kinds of techniques of training your attention and mental manipulation that are characteristic of the ancient occult arts.

Ankerberg: Witchcraft.

Alexander: That’s right. Basically witchcraft, sorcery, whatever word you want to use. Yes, that’s definitely a part of it. And I think that you have to take a look at the kinds of phenomena that charac­teristically attend occult involvement to realize that there is definitely a down side to getting in this. There are some very destructive possibilities that can come to pass in your mind.

Ankerberg: Give me an example.

Alexander: Without even mentioning the most lurid ones which are the possibility of being outright taken over and destroyed by some kind of possessing or overshadowing entity.

Ankerberg: Is that actually a possibility?

Alexander: Well, yes. The people who learn to channel their own entities and invite these beings in to take over tempo­rary control of their bodies, it’s a little like walking into Grand Central Station and on your way into the ticket manager you hand a guy your wallet with $100 in it and say, “Here, I’ll be out in just a minute. Will you take care of this for me while I transact my business?” Because you don’t know who you’re getting. You have no idea. There’s no real standard for evaluating who it is that’s going to come up.

Ankerberg: But why did you say that’s a possibility? Is there anybody that’s said that that actually took place with them?

Hunt: I mean, not just critics like us, but “Brain/Mind Bulle­tin”…Marilyn Ferguson’s “Brain/Mind Bulletin”….

Ankerberg: Says what?

Hunt: She says the “following are common to those who get involved in yoga, who get involved in the New Age techniques. Suddenly the Kundalini…”

Ankerberg: The force.

Hunt: “…is released — this serpent force is released. They get tremors. They suddenly find themselves out of their body. You suddenly get thrown across the room. You lose your sense of reali­ty. You end up in the loony bin or you commit suicide.” In fact, to such an extent that these people — the backers of this movement themselves — Stanislaf Grof, for example. They have formed what they call the “Spiri­tual Emergency Network.” It was originally headquartered in Esalen. It’s now head­quartered at the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology in Menlo Park. They’ve got a network of people and hotlines all over the world to meet the needs of people. And here’s the first thing they greet you with when you call in. You’ve got the shakes, you know, some­thing’s gone wrong. And you’ve lost touch with reality. And they say, “Welcome to the club.” And they call this “normal spiritual emergencies on the path upwards to nirvana.” Okay? You didn’t know you were joining such a club. And if they had really told you the truth about this, you would have backed away. This whole thing is based upon misrepresen­tation and it’s founded upon lies. There’s nothing “new” about the New Age. I mean, people think they’re buying health – they’re getting Hinduism. They think they’re getting science – they’re getting religion. It’s mislabeling; it’s misrepresentation, and I think that people ought to be advised of the truth about it.

Ankerberg: In your book you talk about some of these people that are well known that have had bad experiences.

Brooke: Let’s throw one out.

Ankerberg: Go for it.

Brooke: Edgar Cayce, the famous psychic in which the A.R.E. is founded on, is someone who dazzled people for 20 or 30 years apparently reading…by merging with the universe and reading what he called “The Cosmic Mind” — the Akashic Records — he seemed to have all the knowledge in the world. He knew people’s ills. They could be 2,000 miles away and he would say, “Well, you’ve got a carcinoma,” etc., etc., “and it’s right here and this is what you do to cure it.” He’d read apparently people’s so-called past lives. Let me just tell you what happened. He had a tremen­dous following. It’s a big organization today. What a lot of people don’t know is that the final two weeks of his life he was getting wrung out. The final couple of weeks the “Voice” kept saying, “If you keep doing these life readings, your body’s going to fall apart.” Right at the end of that time something happened to him for the first time in years. He said, What? He said, “I was afraid” — Hugh Lynn Cayce, son, quoted him to a private group at the A.R.E. — he was “afraid that a demon was his source of knowledge.” Okay? [Afraid] that he’d been hooking up to a supernatural creature, that it was not the Cosmic Mind, it was not his inner potential. When Andrija Puharich who was linked with Uri Geller spent a long time wondering whether it was Uri Geller’s human potential to supposedly bend spoons and that’s up in the air whether something was working through him. What Puharich found out was that they were beginning to get electro­magnetic voices on the recording tapes when he was with Geller. And his theory was — and here’s the old theory of space aliens or “advanced masters” — was arching over and possessing Geller. It was not some great human potential. Now, what we keep saying on the psychic circuit — Dave mentioned this phone line — are people who have been shredded. I’ll never forget. As an undergraduate at the University of Virgin­ia, a friend that I knew was doing yoga for hours every day. One day he looked like a skeleton. I mean, I saw him a few years later and he’d been in the nut house. And I said…you know, his teeth were kind of green. He’d really lost it. I said, “Well, what happened to you?” And he said, “I reached that point of stilling the mind and something” — and this sounds like a sick joke — “came in there with a baseball bat and popped the perfect cube in me.”

Ankerberg: We’ve got 30 seconds left, Dave. For people that are in that position where they have experienced the horror of the experi­ence. It might have started out fun, but all of a sudden the curtain is lifted and it’s not fun anymore. It’s horrible. And they have never heard of an answer to this and they’re into it now. What’s the answer in Jesus Christ?

Hunt: They’ve been deluded into believing that what they need is power to control their own lives. In fact what they need to do is to acknowledge that there’s only one true God, who created them for a purpose. And unless they submit to His purpose, they will be empty and meaningless forever. And although we have rebelled against Him, He has made a way that we can be forgiven because Christ died for our sins upon the cross, rose again, wants to live His life in us, and if they would invite Jesus Christ to come in and be their Lord and Savior and begin to live His life through them, they would experience what they’re really looking for.

Ankerberg: Would that take care of these experiences? Would they get peace?

Hunt: You will have peace with God; you will have no fear. I’m not afraid of demons. Anybody out there watching TV, you can put all the hexes and curses on me, stick pins in little dolls and every­thing else….

Brooke: Today they probably are.

Hunt: Yeah, I’m sure a lot of them are! But “He has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” “Greater is He that is in us, than He that is in the world.” And when Jesus Christ comes in, then He takes responsibility. Not only for this life, but for eternity.

Ankerberg: Because He is the only God out there.

Hunt: Amen.

Ankerberg: He is God, and therefore what He says goes. Please join us next week. We’re going to take a look at how the New Age Move­ment has influenced the medical profession as well as the psychia­trists in our country. Okay? We’re going to take a look at it, so please join us.

Read Part 4