New Age Cargo Cults - Part 2

Heaven's Gate Founder

This is part two of a three part series on New Age Cargo Cults and Critical Thinking.

Cargo Cult by Extension

Although the term cargo cult was used by anthropologists to describe a very specific cultural phenomenon, it found its way into the common vernacular to describe other phenomena not associated with the effects of a superior culture affecting a more primitive culture. The term began to represent any people who imitate a process or a system in a superficial fashion without understanding either its structure or the underlying substance.

The key point is that the islanders reversed the logical sequence of causation, mistaking a “necessary condition” (building an artificial representation for the receiving points of cargo) for a “sufficient condition” (building the infrastructure to actually manufacture cargo).    

What is indicated in the more general use of this term is that something is being promoted as true but is actually using a flawed model of causation. This more general definition has been used to describe poor scientific research methods as well as business models, plans and even software engineering.

I have now used it to describe erroneous methods and ideas that are promoted in the New Age and occult communities. The term generally has the meaning of a shallow imitation or attempting to gain true spiritual effects and personal transformation without applying any of the actual work or effort. Belief systems are usually not put to any kind of rational examination or testing, so at times even the most absurd concepts and ideas can be held as some kind of sacred truth, and in time, produce disastrous results.

An example is the New Age fascination with the book and the movie called “The Secret,” which has popularized the dubious “Law of Attraction.” I have already dealt with this issue in regards to the practicalities of magick, and you can find that article here. However, the Law of Attraction basically states that merely by projecting positive and empowering self affirmations, the desired state will somehow miraculously manifest. It belies the old adage that if you want something, you need to plan and work for it. Another example is the UFO cult Heaven’s Gate, whose members thought that by imitating the appearance and behavior of aliens they could attract a UFO to come down and take them away. As you can see, both of these examples are guilty of reversing causation, and thereby acting in a manner very similar to the cargo cults of the islanders.

One of the truisms of the New Age, which is actually quite misleading, is that people have the power to make their own reality. Of course, the opposite is also true and important, that reality shapes the minds and actions of individuals. By proposing one perspective and ignoring the other, people can act as if they have unlimited power to determine their fate, which is a false assertion. Actions are always limited by circumstance, which is obvious to most people, but the New Age would turn that bit of logic on its head. The lesson here is that critical thinking will automatically force someone to examine more than one possibility, and to see things in a practical manner - an important criteria for success. 

In the discipline of magick, flawed models of causation seem to abound, and many individuals appear to take quite literally what is, after all, a kind of imaginary speculation that is used to put the mind in places where it normally wouldn’t be able to go. This is what I call the “as if” paradigm of magickal operations; but just because someone uses a mental tool to gain a different perspective, it doesn’t follow that the underlying assumption represents a physical reality.

For instance, astral travel can be likened to a kind of visualization exercise, and at times can have a powerful and even physical kind of manifestation and corroboration. That doesn’t mean that operators who practice this technique can actually levitate or fly. It is an “as if” mechanism to aid the mind in its perception, and therefore, not to be taken literally.

Another example can be found in the list of attributes associated with Goetic demons, whose evocation will produce all sorts of miraculous occurrences, particularly those that can enrich the operator with unearned wealth. Although more complex and involved than the New Age maxim of the Law of Attraction, using Goetic evocation to somehow attract or acquire unearned wealth is just as erroneous. Still, many magicians ardently believe that their kind of magick is superior to New Age thought and will produce the desired results, even though they are actually making the same error of causation. 

(These are some of the same points that John Michael Greer has made in his class on pagan ceremonial magick, regarding certain cautionary issues confronting adherents of this path. He covered these points without giving any extensive examples, but I was on the same wave-length as him and have followed up with a more in-depth discussion. Thus, I have added these points to this article, but I must credit him for making them more apparent to me.)

Often imaginary speculation, which can be a powerful mental tool if properly used, can produce all sorts of unsubstantiated claims, all of which would be easily resolved and shown to be false if only they were subjected to a kind of rigorous examination and peer review. Since this does not typically occur, and in fact it is often harshly rejected as a kind of negative or offensive criticism, some very foolish notions and silly ideas seem to be shamelessly promoted by would-be enlightened hucksters. These will-o-wisps are then gobbled up by the unsuspecting masses, who think that they’re going to experience a wondrous change. Should we then find it so strange that the press has a field day with the practices and beliefs of cultists and their leaders? This bad press has the corollary effect of making the public suspicious of the research and experimental work of occultists who are legitimate.

The New Age has its own cargo cults, and in fact these organizations seem to abound, since they promise so much and require so little effort. Perhaps some common sense should tell us that if a proposition sounds too good, then it probably is. If someone wants to sell me a Rolex for $50, then I should be on my guard for a possible fake impersonating the real thing. Similarly, if some guru claims that he can help us attain perfect enlightenment without much in the way of work or effort, we should be just as skeptical if not outright scornful. What these scams do offer us is much more like the proposition of “just putting down your money and suspending your analytical faculties, and everything will be blissfully fine.” The odds are good that it will fail. 

Carefully examining the documentation and lore for legitimate spiritual paths has shown that any amount of self transformation, not to mention actual enlightenment, requires a lifetime of work and devotion. There are no shortcuts to this ultimate goal and nothing is certain.

Perhaps a useful analogy is the discipline required to become an athletic contender for any major sport. A person dedicates their life to the training and regimen and even then, there is no guarantee that he or she will defeat all other competitors and become preeminent. There are also the elements of innate talent, physical genetics and luck.

What I am proposing is that the process of becoming an enlightened sage should incorporate the same considerations as those impacting a professional athlete. Even a person who devotes their entire life to this work may do no better than anyone else who is not so intently engaged. The path of spiritual enlightenment is not like the Special Olympics, where everyone gets an award no matter how they perform. If anything, spiritual paths to enlightenment are probably a bit more like the real Olympics; for every winner there are a multitude of losers.

What makes the bogus promoters of a New Age cargo cult so appealing to average individuals is that they appear to guarantee their results, and that makes the harsh reality of living in a competitive world more palliative and easily swallowed. It mitigates the need for self examination or admitting one’s flaws, as well as celebrating the virtues. In a word, it creates a false and superficial understanding of ourselves and the world we live in. It creates a cargo cult of our life and our spiritual path, and in the end, all such activity is doomed to fail expectations.

However, not every modern spiritual path or undertaking is a cargo cult. Even the most popular trend may be indicative of an actual proven methodology that works. What is needed are a set of tools for measuring truth and validating that some technique or practice is indeed real and authentic. What I am going to attempt next in this article is to propose a set of steps that anyone can take to verify that a trend or spiritual technique is valid and authentic. However, keep in mind the old adage that “the proof in the pudding is in the eating.” Experience should be used to measure the efficacy of any spiritual system. Therefore, experiment, test, and then objectify what has been experienced!

(To be continued..)

Frater Barrabbas

My Santa Fe Adventure - Part 2

This is part two of a three part biography about the time when I lived in Santa Fe. Continuing with my discussion about the New Age community and its foibles that I encountered back in 1990's.

New Age groups and perspectives were very dominant within the limited population of occultists in town. As a witch and ritual magician, I couldn’t have been more unusual or scary if I tried. My perspectives would either be misconstrued or treated as if I were some kind of perversely evil person. Two events that I remember seemed to really highlight the contrast between myself, a very serious insular occult practitioner with years of experience, and the fluffy, arrogant, naive, and superficial adherents of the New Age that seemed to flourish in that town.

A friend of mine who belonged to the Albuquerque Golden Dawn temple (and had to travel the 130 miles round trip to attend meetings) decided that he would sponsor a group discussion on angels and angelology in town to see if he could identify any interesting local individuals or groups. The discussion group was to last several sessions, but it only occurred once. I was invited to attend this group discussion, but others learned about it through the local occult book store. Those who attended were quite a mix of different spiritual perspectives, but I was probably the truly black sheep in attendance, or more accurately, the wolf in sheep’s clothing. My friend started the discussion and then requested that each individual sequentially in the circle of attendees talk about their experiences with angels and state what they believed about them. Since I was sitting on the left side of my friend, I was the last one to speak. However, what I heard everyone talking about was the most fuzzy, warm and diluted sort of religious nonsense that I have ever heard. It was the very sort of insipid things that many were reading and raving about in various New Age circles at the time. According to these folks, angels were beautiful, wholly good, friendly, helpful, guiding, child-like and sweet, as if the folks there were describing the chubby baby-like cherubs seen in various paintings and sculptures of the 18th and 19th centuries.

It was all much too sweet and cute for my tastes, and I found myself disgusted, bored and brooding about how I was wasting my time listening to these people. Almost all of the attendees were middle aged or older women, and all of them were obviously very proper Christians with some minor New Age leanings. When the discussion finally came to me, I stunned everyone by talking about how frightful, awesome and terrible many angels were to human sensibilities. I regaled them about the fierce Seraphim and Kerubim, armed with swords and spears, and that they fought wars, killed enemies and warded the Hebrew God from the profane. I also said that if anyone ever had a real encounter with a supernatural being like an angel, that they would probably shit their pants unless they were properly prepared. Of course, what I had to say was highly objectionable to all (except my friend, who was holding himself from laughing out loud), and they looked at me with loathing and outrage as if I had crawled out of some crypt from the bowels of Hell itself. Needless to say, they hurriedly left soon after I had said my piece, giving me pitying and hurt looks, and I am sure that I was the talk of their social circle for a long while, though I doubt if any of it was positive.

Another strange situation showed me how the New Age community was ravenously appropriating Native American shamanism into their practices, although without the usual care and sensitivity that such appropriations should require.

There was a household of women who had put together a supposed “pagan” New Age temple of the Goddess, and it was run by a matronly woman who had moved to Santa Fe from Dallas, Texas. She kind of reminded me of a Tammy Fey of the New Age community, overly made up and highly pretentious. She and her adult daughter (who was something of a hottie) espoused supposedly pagan sentiments about the Earth Mother and the Great Goddess, and they had gathered together a large social group, consisting mostly of women and couples, to practice a kind of New Age shamanism. I found her and her group to be mostly unschooled and spiritually superficial, but they seemed an earnest and nice enough group of people. Since there was little else that was going on in this vein in Santa Fe, I decided to accept their invitation to one of their gatherings. I should have known in advance what was really going on, because in order to attend this gathering, I had to pay $120 to help defray the expenses. The money collected was used to purchase a quantity of ground up magick mushrooms and XTC tablets, which were taken together to simulate the experience of mushrooms and ayahuasca. Of course, it wasn’t at all the same, and also, none of the important Native American practices and beliefs were incorporated into this event. It was, in a word, a New Age drug party, using some pretty powerful drugs to facilitate the breaking of social boundaries and inducing some kind of ecstatic release.

I had fancied maybe getting to have sex with the matron’s calmly daughter, but of course, that didn’t happen because there were too many people there (and she wasn’t interested). I brought my flute and entertained everyone with my music, but after a time, I found myself more interested in going deep within myself to fully experience the powerful influences of the drugs. Supposedly, that kind of antisocial behavior went against other people’s interest in taking combined baths, naked massages, getting “touchy and feely” and invading each other’s space. (The daughter managed to evade most of these attentions as well, but with better grace than I was allotted.) I endured the long session of being drugged out of my mind, which lasted the whole evening, and then in the early morning, without any apologies to those who acted so concerned about my social reticence (even though they didn’t know me), I got into my car and made my way carefully home to crash and reflect. I had a much better time once I was home and alone with my drug addled thoughts and feelings.

Afterwards, I politely told the matron that I wasn’t interested in any future gatherings and quickly disconnected from her and her group. I later heard that one of her sessions had ended in disaster when a young woman who was attending had passed out and died from taking the combination of drugs. She supposedly had an allergic reaction to the XTC and it killed her. Her death may have occurred because she was taking other medications and forgot to tell anyone, or perhaps due to some preexisting health condition - who knows. That event not only terminated the group’s activities, but likely put the matron and her drug procurer (and others) into jail for awhile.

I wasn’t surprised by anything that had happened because I felt that they were too inclusive, unknowledgeable of what they were doing, and that sooner or later, someone would have an adverse reaction to the combination of drugs. It proved to me that what you don’t know can kill you, and that a loose amalgamation of New Age naivety, illicit spiritual appropriation and a lack of spiritual discipline can be highly disastrous.  My periodic loneliness made me reach out to groups and individuals that I wouldn’t have normally bothered to contact, and such attempts only showed me that I, like Tigger in Winnie the Pooh, was the only one of my kind in town. However, unlike Tigger, I wasn’t happy about that fact.    

As a single man, I also made many attempts to find a lover, but they usually fell short, too. The one girlfriend that I did acquire (after living in Santa Fe for over two years) was also living with a flamingo guitar player who had been one of the local town drunks, now rehabilitated. He had the reputation of being quite a jealous and violent man, so we had to engage in our clandestine relationship at times when he was otherwise disposed. (This duplicity went on for a year or so until her lover finally got angry at her reticence to marry him, and left her when he found a suitable Trust Fund Brat.) She was one of the better known local belly dancers in town and was introduced to me by some mutual friends. She lived many miles north of town on a small ranch (exemplifying the term ‘land rich and money poor’), and we would discretely meet up at my place in town. 

We seldom went out, since too many knew her and would ask questions about me, so our relationship had some pretty severe boundaries. I taught her some rudimentary magick and initiated her into witchcraft, while she entertained our more carnal interests. She was quite a beautiful woman, but was also high strung, willful, emotionally volatile, stubborn and independently minded, even though she sought and did receive some financial support from me. That relationship lasted until I moved away from town some years later, although she never seemed interested in making me her primary relationship. I was always, and conveniently, the “other” man in her life. I later found out that this situation is rather typical of Santa Fe since there is a dearth of potential mates outside of the Hispanic and gay communities.

As for my career, I had the wonderful opportunity to work for a woman named Jo who ultimately guided and helped me to change the entire direction of my career. Through her I got the training I needed to transform myself from a mainframe programer and business analyst to a decision support analyst, UNIX programmer and database administrator. I learned the arcane art of data warehousing and I have continued to expand on that knowledge and capability all of the years since that time. It was a brilliant career move for me, since it meant that I wouldn’t likely experience any kind of downsizing or employment interruption due to the later fad of off-shoring technology jobs, which started to happen only a few years later. 

My area of expertise was in government health services (such as Medicaid and Medicare) in combination with my knowledge of developing, building and maintaining data warehouses that served as the source systems for all credible reporting, analytics, fraud and abuse detection, and policy management. This was obviously a level of expertise that couldn’t be exported to some DBA in India or China, since such policies didn’t exist anywhere in the world except in this country. Therefore, I had a certain amount of job security because of what my boss did to push my career in a certain direction.

Jo also was something of an occultist, and was steeped in the study of the Fourth Way, which consisted of the writings and practices of Gurdjieff and his followers (such as Bennet and Ouspensky). She managed to find a very important group in Santa Fe that actually practiced what the Fourth Way followers called the “Work,” so her move was spiritually fortuitous. Having a boss who was also an occultist was also very helpful, and I relaxed my typical discretion and reticence concerning my own studies and practices. This would come back to haunt me later on, but luckily it never caused me to lose a job promotion or get terminated. Later on, I would resume that discretion, but that single period of relaxing my boundaries did cost me something of my anonymity for a while.

(To be continued..)

Frater Barrabbas