The New Spiritualist Worldview with Dr. Jeff Myers, part 4
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Dr. Jeff Myers: The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was an Indian guru who founded a movement called Transcendental Meditation. TM is not as popular today as it once was – when I was a kid, there was actually a set of curriculum that was prepared to be taught at all of the nation’s public schools that would teach all of America’s children Transcendental Meditation as a way of helping them focus more on their studies.
Now, there is a famous picture of the Maharishi along with four other famous people – namely, Paul, John, George and Ringo… the Beatles – who had tried sex and drugs as their path to enlightenment without finding fulfillment. So, they got on a plane, went to India and met with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to learn TM and ended up producing an entire album based on their experiences with Transcendental Meditation.
Years later, George Harrison recorded a hit single called “My Sweet Lord”, which is an ode to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and the things that he taught. The song is not about Jesus.
Now, after his interaction with the Beatles, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi became an international phenomenon, especially in the U.S. He came to America and began to establish training centers all around the country. People could then come to these training centers, pay their money, and learn Transcendental Meditation, which he believed would not only help center them and help the individuals lead better lives, but actually if they all meditated together, could change the world around them.
In Fairfield, Iowa, there is the Maharishi University of Management. Students are taught TM at the University, even today, as a way to improve their worldly success. John Hagelin, the university’s president, claims that TM is not religious or metaphysical, but scientific, real, and provable. In fact, he believes that if we would all take part, we could create a better world. In his book, Manual for a Perfect Government: How to Harness the Laws of Nature to Bring Maximum Success to Governmental Administration, Hagelin calls for a “coherence-creating group” of 5,000 to 10,000 troops to rush into trouble spots to meditate. This “prevention wing is fully capable of preventing the outbreak of war.” He believes that if we can collectively harness the power of this force, this oneness, we can make things work better in our global society… even in regards to putting an end to war.
In other words, if enough people meditate “correctly” and tap into this power, we can force the universe to bend to the will of enough people who want it to do something. Hagelin’s book is filled with situations that attempt to prove this. There was a group of people who went to Washington, D.C. and meditated. Afterward, students’ test scores went up by several points. They went to another city and meditated and crime stats went down by an incredible number of points. So, he took the correlations that might exist based on many, many factors and tried to develop a causation – “our being there is what caused these things to happen.” Engineers call this “overfitting the model”, where someone tries to take an abundance of variables and attempt to make sense of them. But, even smart people can fall victim to an idea if they really, really want to believe it.
So, in the 1990’s, John Hagelin attempted to start a political party called the Natural Law Party (NLP). In fact, this part is still on many ballots across the country. While the party may not have seen much success over the years, it has been well funded and highly publicized. It’s lack of overarching success may be attributed to the fact that most Americans look at Hagelin’s platform and simply say, “I just don’t buy it.” Even if they believe that God is a cosmic force, they just don’t believe that having these “coherence-creating groups” will change the world. But, Hagelin, and those in his camp believe it because they believe that 1) Everything is spiritual; 2) God is within; 3) Everything is about the search for higher consciousness; and 4) If we all work on this together, we can find great success. All this follows neatly within the frame of the New Spiritualist / Cosmic Humanist worldview.
So, how does this fit together, keeping in mind that we are not saying that any of the worldviews we have discussed are completely devoid of truth. In fact, most of them have identified some truths. So, we are not saying that they are absolutely false. We are saying that they don’t account for all of reality.
Regarding Cosmic Humanism / New Spiritualism, their theology is based on Pantheism (belief that everything is god). Regarding philosophy, or asking questions like “What actually exists? How do we know this? What is right? What is wrong?”; or addressing topics such as metaphysics, epistemology, or ethics. All of these are parts of the study of philosophy, to which the Cosmic Humanists subscribe to Non-Naturalism (the belief that everything that happens has a non-natural or supernatural explanation). Regarding Ethics, New Spiritualists embrace Moral Relativism, or Karma. The law of Karma simply says “what comes around goes around”. Many people who align themselves with Karma also believe in reincarnation, so what you do in this life will come back upon you in your next life. To them, this explains suffering. The reason why someone may be suffering in this life is because it is due to them from the bad that they did in a previous life. Therefore, we should not help them today nor alleviate their suffering, as that would prevent them from fully cleansing themselves of the bad Karma they had collected in a previous life, and therefore, they will end up having yet another lifetime of suffering ahead of them. So, the best way to help suffering people is to ignore them and allow them to remain in their suffering as they work it out for their own future. This is why you will find almost no hospitals begun by Cosmic Humanists, nor works of charity. This is also why, when you visit India, almost every single ministry of compassion has been started by Christians, not by people who embrace India’s own national religion.
So, Karma relates to Moral Relativism in that people believe, “You have to do what you think is right for you. The law of Karma will decide for you, but I can’t tell you what is right or what is wrong.”
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