Nuggets from Occult Invasion—Playing God: The Lust for Power

Nothing is quite so appealing to a child as tales of magic powers. Yet as one leaves childhood behind, one does not entirely outgrow one’s childish dreams. Their pursuit has provided much of the motivation behind science and technology, from alchemy to nuclear physics and everything in between.

Human ambition and desire have no limit. Those who believe in God try to usurp His power as their own (as Satan did) or to persuade Him to dispense it to their own ends (the avaricious goal of most prayer). In Science of Mind and Religious Science, faith is not trust in and submission to the God who created us, but “the key to the God-Power within…the active instrument which takes my every though and manifests it in the world of form and experience.” The business world follows the Pied Pipers of success whose seminars promise the same mind techniques for personal power.

Harold Bloom, author of The American Religion, suggests that “for the American, god is none other than himself.” The serpent’s lie from the Garden (the very heart of the occult invasion), that man can become a god in his own right, still rules the human soul. And how better to prove that man is God than by demonstrating godlike, psychic powers?

The belief that some gifted individuals have already mastered such powers keeps palm readers, psychics, and gurus in business. According to Psychology Today, “Dionne Warwick’s Psychic Friends Network logs 4 million minutes a month at $3.99 a minute and last spring [1996] celebrated its 10-millionth caller.” The hope for magic remedies fuels the alternative health craze and causes thousands diagnosed with terminal illnesses to seek the “miracle cures” promised through mysterious products, foreign clinics, and psychic surgeons. As we have seen, no one trumpets the delusion of infinite potential more persuasively than Deepak Chopra. His monthly newsletter is titled Infinite Possibilities for Body, Mind & Soul. Infinite? Only God is infinite. So man is God.

Nor does the fervent longing ever die that these unlimited powers will become commonplace within one’s lifetime. Norman Vincent Peale claimed that man’s empowerment could be realized by visualizing God as energy (“God is energy,” said Peale) and by breathing this “energy” in. If God is the energy behind the universe, then man can be his own God by learning to control that energy—precisely what the serpent told Eve. David Spangler, co-founder of Findhorn, declares with no sense of irony or shame:

“The being that helps man to reach this point [of godhood] is Lucifer…the angel of man’s evolution….”

The delusionary hope persists that somewhere within each of us infinite powers lie hidden. That fantasy created the New Age movement with its insistence that human potential is limitless—if only we can escape the bondage of negative, fundamentalist thinking that prevents us from reaching that fabled state of “higher consciousness” for fully utilizing all of our innate powers. According to the Dalai Lama:

“From the Buddhist point of view, our consciousness has the potential to know every object. Because of obstructions we are, at present, unable to know everything. However, by removing these obstructions gradually, it is ultimately possible to know everything.”

This is pure nonsense, which the Dalai Lama himself has never been able to demonstrate—even though he claims to be God. Yet millions continue to believe him.