Nuggets from Occult Invasion—A New International Delusion?

Most of mankind think primarily of their own comfort and welfare. Obsessed with a self-centered concern for their own health and well-being, many become the gullible victims of “faith healers” and/or of the entrepreneurs of the latest “alternative” therapies and miracle cures. Seeking perpetual youth, they spend their time and money responding to seductive ads promising incredible results. Such was the case with Will Baron, who says, “psychotherapist Peter Blythe completely changed my life. But I have never met him.” It all came about, says Baron, through Blythe’s book, Stress Disease:

“It introduced the New Age ‘holistic’ concept, the idea that body, mind, and spirit are inseparable, and that each needs to be in harmony in order to produce total health…. I was fascinated to read of…acupuncture, homeopathy, psychic energy, chakra balancing, rebirthing, primal therapy, reiki, crystals, and bioenergetics. Descriptions of these treatments talked a lot about ‘energies,’ ‘balance,’ and ‘wholeness.’ Being seduced into the New Age through…alternative healing techniques seems to be a common occurrence.”

One of today’s most popular holistic gurus is Deepak Chopra, whom Time has admiringly called the “emperor of the soul.” The London Daily Telegraph calls his New York Times bestseller, Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, “brilliant and exhilarating.” The Washington Post calls it “dazzling”; the San Francisco Chronicle, “enlightening.” Yet the book is simply a rehash of Eastern mysticism in pseudoscientific and medical terms, a clever presentation of Hinduism in a way that appeals to Westerners:

“In unity consciousness, the world can be explained as a flow of Spirit, which is awareness. Our whole goal is to establish an intimate relationship with Self as Spirit. To the extent that we create this intimacy, the experience of ageless body and timeless mind is realized…. When you get in touch with your own inner intelligence, you get in touch with the creative core of life…. We are made victims of sickness, aging, and death by gaps in our self-knowledge.”

“Gaps in our self-knowledge” cause “sickness, aging, and death”? So we are simply ignorant of our own godhood and immortality? The entire book, so highly celebrated (more than a million hardcover copies have been sold), is an attempt to prove that the serpent’s lie to Eve is really the secret truth and that Chopra can demonstrate it. The seductive subtitle is The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old. Yet Chopra himself is aging like the rest of us. With proper diet and exercise he may live longer than many people, but very soon death will take its toll. Still, his followers believe such folly as this:

“This possibility [of living above disease and death] has always been accepted as fact in the East. In India and China, some spiritual masters are believed to have lived hundreds of years as a result of achieving a state of timeless awareness…. When the spell of mortality is broken, you can release the fear that gives death its power…when you see yourself in terms of timeless, deathless Being, every cell awakens to a new existence. True immortality can be experienced here and now…the experience of timeless mind and ageless body that the new paradigm has been preparing us for.”

So we are each a “deathless Being” deceived by “the spell of mortality”? And intelligent people continue to believe this lie? No one need fear death, says Chopra, because, as parts of the universal energy field, we are all immortal. Multitudes take hope in this fantasy. “We are not individual beings at all,” says Chopra, “but merely local expressions of an infinite, universal field of energy.”

Energy is impersonal and unconscious and therefore has nothing to do with the human spirit and individual personality. Energy takes many forms, including the molecules which make up the cells of plants, animals, and our bodies. It is no comfort to know that when our bodies die and decay, the energy is not destroyed but takes other forms. The issue is the destiny of the eternal soul and spirit, not of the energy which comprises temporal bodies.

While Chopra offers much valid advice for living a more healthful life, he holds out unrealistic hopes. The holistic movement is driven by an astonishing gullibility fueled by self-centered interests.