The clash of civilizations Part 3
Another Turk used in this affair is Enver Yusuf Turani, also
featured in Sibel’s Gallery, who is Prime Minister of Xinjiang, with the US being the only country
to recognize it as “ East Turkistan.” In fact, Abramowitz and Fuller were key
players in the establishment of “ East Turkistan,” and according to TurkPulse,
“proclaiming the government in exile in May 2004, and completing the
proclamation in mid-September. The ceremony was held at Capitol Hill under American flags in Washington.” 37 East Turkistan is the home of the Eastern Turkistan
Islamic Movement, a UN-nominated terrorist organization funded, according
to China Daily, “mainly by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network and received
training, support and personnel from both the al-Qaeda and the Taliban regime of Afghanistan.”38 Uighur
nationalists, with ties to al Qaeda, constitute as many as 22 of the Guantanamo
Bay detainees. Five of those have been set free, and were eventually sent to Albania
amid much controversy.
The Gülen Movement
founded madrassas all over the world in the 1990s, most of them in the newly
independent Turkic republics of Central
Asia, including Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan
and Russia. The madrassas, says Luke
Ryland, “appear to be used as a front for enabling CIA and State Department officials to operate undercover in the region, with many of the teachers operating under diplomatic
passports.” 39 The FSB, the Russian intelligence organization
formerly called the KGB, has repeatedly
taken action against the Gülen movement
for acting as a front for the CIA. The
FSB has claimed that the Nurcu religious
brotherhood in Turkey has engaged in espionage on behalf of the CIA, through the companies connected with
Fethullah Gülen. Russia has banned all
of Gülen’s madrassas, and in April of
2009 banned the Nurcu Movement completely.
Ryland called Sibel
Edmonds, now founder of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC),
to ask her to comment on those developments. Her highly astute observation is
as follows, in full:
You’ve got to look at the big picture. After the fall of
the Soviet Union, the super powers began to fight over control of
Central Asia, particularly the oil and gas wealth, as well as the
strategic value of the region.
Given the history,
and the distrust of the West, the US realized that it couldn’t get direct
control, and therefore would need to use a proxy to gain control quickly and
effectively. Turkey was the perfect proxy; a NATO ally and a puppet regime.
Turkey shares the same heritage/race as the entire population of Central Asia, the same language (Turkic), the
same religion (Sunni Islam), and of course,
the strategic location and proximity.
This started more than a
decade-long illegal, covert operation in Central Asia by a small group in the US
intent on furthering the oil industry and the Military Industrial Complex,
using Turkish operatives, Saudi partners and Pakistani allies, furthering this
objective in the name of Islam.
This is why I have been saying repeatedly that these illegal covert operations
by the Turks and certain US persons dates back to 1996, and involves terrorist
activities, narcotics, weapons smuggling and money laundering, converging
around the same operations and involving the same actors.
And I want to emphasize that this is “illegal” because most, if not all,
of the funding for these operations is not congressionally approved funding,
but it comes from illegal activities.
And one last thing, take a look at the people in the State Secrets Privilege
Gallery on my website and you will see how these individuals can be traced to
the following; Turkey, Central
Asia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia—and the activities involving
these countries.
In 2009, Sibel Edmonds
was required to give sworn testimony on videotape, in which under-oath she
revealed allegations involving a number of these individuals including bribery, blackmail, espionage and infiltration of the US government
that resulted in the sale of nuclear weapons technology to black market
interests including Pakistan, Iran, North Korea, Libya and others. Though Edmonds was careful
to not “discuss the intelligence gathering method by the FBI,” she notes in her deposition that her
claims are “based on documented and
provable, tracked files and based on…
100 percent, documented
facts.” 40
In addition to Marc Grossman and Graham Fuller, Sibel’s “State Secrets
Privilege Gallery” includes notorious hard-core Zionists and neoconservatives Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. Feith served as the Under
Secretary of Defense for Policy to
George W. Bush. Prior to 2001, Feith was part of the DC law firm of Feith &Zell which he
co-founded with Marc Zell who was based in
Israel. The firm engaged in
lobbying efforts for, among others,
the Turkish, Israeli and
Bosnian governments.
She listed Eric
Edelman, a former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy who was US Ambassador to Turkey from 2003 to
2005.
Also, Brent Scowcroft
who served under Presidents Nixon
and Ford and under George H. W. Bush as Chairman of the President’s
Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and assisted President Barack Obama in
choosing his national security team. Critics have suggested that Scowcroft
employed unethical practices in his lobbying for the Turkish and Azeri
governments because of his ties with Lockheed Martin
and other defense contractors that do
significant business with Turkey. 41
Larry Franklin, a former US Air Force Reserve colonel,
pleaded guilty to passing information about US policy towards Iran to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee ( AIPAC), the
foremost pro- Israel lobbying organization in the U.S, while he was working for
the Defense Department.
She listed John Dennis “Denny” Hastert, the longest-serving Republican Speaker
in history. Hastert currently works as a
lobbyist for private corporations and foreign governments, including a $35,000
per month contract working on behalf of Turkey. 42 Edmonds claimed
that Hastert was “[T]he recipient of
both legally and illegally raised donations, campaign donations from… Turkish
entities.” 43 In fact,
Hastert has been shown to have spent more than $1 million on
his office space and staff from 2008
to 2010. 44 Each month, taxpayers provide
$40,000 worth of office space, cell phones, staff, and an SUV for
Hastert.45
In the list is Tom Lantos, a Democratic member of the US
House of Representatives. According to Edmonds, he was involved in bribery, disclosing
high-level intelligence and weapons technology information to both Israel and Turkey. 46
There is also Bob
Livingston who was a DC-based lobbyist and a former Republican Representative
from Louisiana. He was Chairman of the Appropriations Committee from 1995 to
1999. He was chosen as Newt Gingrich’s successor as Speaker of the House of
Representatives late in 1998 but chose to withdraw and retire after an extramarital
affair was discovered. According to Edmonds’ deposition, he was involved until
1999 in “…not very legal activities on behalf of foreign interests and
entities, and after 1999 acting as a conduit to, again, further foreign
interests, both overtly and covertly as a lobbyist, but also as an operative.” 47
Sibel named Alan and David Makovsky. David Makovsky is the
director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy Project on the Middle East Peace Process (WINEP). WINEP was
founded in 1985 with the goal of helping advance US interests in the Middle East, with particular focus on Turkey
and the rise of Islamic politics in understanding the political trends in the
postSoviet Middle East. Also at WINEP,
who Edmonds also names, is Professor Sabri Sayari of the Institute of Turkish
Studies, Georgetown.
Edmonds listed Mehmet
Eymür, a retired Turkish
intelligence official, who was found to have connections to Gülen.48 Eymür led the counter-
terrorism department of the National Intelligence Organization (MST), and was assigned
to Washington as a representative of Turkey’s National Intelligence
Organization (MIT) to US intelligence agencies
and security firms. Turkish government
investigations also discovered that he was linked to Ergenekon through MIT’s Counterterrorism
Department, and was discharged and his department disbanded in 1997. 49
Eymür finally left the MIT in 1999, and moved to McLean, Virginia, the seat of
the CIA.
The New Age part 1
The Clash of Civilizations is merely the most recent front of
attack in the West’s attempt at colonizing the rest of the world with its value
system of Humanism. There are of course a number of positive aspects to what
are proposed as human rights, but they are used to package what amounts to a
challenge to traditional values. Through the theories of the Authoritarian Personalityand
the covert operations of the CIA was developed the modern concern for “women’s
rights.” Not to deny that there were certain serious concessions to be made to
the rights of women, but to suggest that the man’s role is typically exploitive
instead of altruistic is simply deceitful. The man and woman’s roles in a
traditional marriage are different, but commensurate with their respective
natures and of course equal in merit and in importance. But, with the age-old
arrangement between man and wife brought into question, it was also possible to
question the basis of the male-female role itself, and of traditional attitudes
towards extra-marital and heterosexual sex. Thus was opened the way for the
acceptance of other “rights,” such as “gay rights,” which are deceptively
equated with more conventionally accepted rights, like “civil rights.” All
disapproval of homosexuality is characterized as hatred, through the use yet
again of a disingenuous Freudian interpretation, calling it “homophobia,”
suggesting that it is the result of the opponent’s conflicts over his own “repressed” desires.
The problem, more precisely, is not what are proposed as
“rights” per se, but how they are used for ulterior political objectives. Where
once Christianity was used as the pretext to “civilize” the “savages,” the West
now resorts to “human rights.” The underlying aim is still the same:
imperialist conquest. There is no doubt that the Muslim world is in need of
much reform, but Western conceptions about Shar iahare largely fabricated.
Rather, Muslims must return to their genuine traditions, not adapt them to
conform to modern Western notions of right and wrong. Yet, the egregious cases
of the Wahhabis, Salafis and their Frankenstein creation the Taliban, are to
serve as alarming examples of the consequences of adopting not just Shar iah,
but of theocratic rule at all, and to therefore offer contrast to the supposedly
more favorable secular values which includes “democracy” and “human rights.”
However, as Saadia Toor has pointed out in “Imperialist feminism redux,” the
ideals of feminism have been exploited to provide a pretext for the America’s
invasion of Afghanistan, providing a
more palatable justification than the more extremist pronouncements of the
neoconservatives:
The fact that the meme of the Muslim woman who must be saved
from Islam and Muslim men—through the intervention of a benevolent Western state—11
years after the very real plight of Afghan women was cynically deployed to
legitimize a global war, and long after the opportunism of this imperialist feminism
was decisively exposed, points to a serious and deep investment in the
assumptions that animate these claims. These assumptions come out of a palpable
disease with Islam within the liberal mainstream and portions of the Left, a
result of the long exposure to Orientalist and Islamophobic discourses that
ideologues such as Bernard Lewis have continuously fed for several decades, and
that is being supplemented and affirmed by a new generation of intellectuals,
many of them trading on their ‘‘authenticity’’ as Muslims. 1
The lie is that the Western “rights” are “inalienable” and,
therefore, ought to be universally accepted. And, using the pretext that
various religions can put aside their differences through “interfaith
dialogue,” traditional faiths are being coerced into modifying their beliefs to
conform to these modern Western values. What the approach truly entails is an
attempt to create a oneworld religion based on the philosophy of the New Age, a
mission supported by the United Nations, which is seen as an important step
towards establishing world-government.
Contrary to the lie proposed by the New Age, true unity comes
from people learning to respect one another’s differences in beliefs, not
condemning them for failing to accept what is perceived as the single universal
truth. The danger inherent in the New Age agenda, therefore, is that tolerance
is then not extended towards traditional faiths. Even if the Islamic world were
to fully revive its true traditions, and purge itself of the more barbarous
practices of recent fundamentalists, the fact is that Muslims would still
adhere to beliefs that Westerners would not agree with. The blatant
contradictions inherent in the so-called interfaith perspective is
typified by Hans Küng, one of the world’s best-known theologians, in
Global Responsibility: In Search of a New World Ethic, where he states:
Any form of… church conservatism is to be rejected… To put it
bluntly: no regressive or repressive religion—whether Christian, Islamic,
Jewish or of whatever provenance—has a long-term… If ethics is to function for
the wellbeing of all, it must be indivisible. The undivided world increasingly
needs an undivided ethic. Post-modern men and women need common values, goals,
ideals, visions. But the great question in dispute is: does not all this
presuppose a religious faith?… What we need is an ecumenical world order. 2
According to Bailey, Freemasonry would form the basis of the
coming Universal Religion. Agreeing with Bailey is Benjamin Creme, a Scottish artist andone of
her leading followers. When the Age of
Aquarius will begin, according to Creme, it would be a time of peace, world
unity and one-world government under the Ascended Masters, by way of the United Nations. Creme, who is editor of the New
Age magazine Share International, was the Vice-President of the Aetherius Society, from 1957 to 1959. In 1958
he met George Adamski and says he can personally
vouch for the authenticity of
Adamski’s UFO contacts.
Beginning in 1959, Creme was contacted by one of the Ascended Masters, who told him he had a
mission to perform for the advancement of the Masters’ plan for humanity. Creme
was instructed to prepare the way for the second coming prophesied by many
religions, a Master named Lord Maitreya,
who would assume human form and begin preparing humanity for the advent of the Age
of Aquarius. In 1982, Creme placed ads in newspapers around the world proclaiming,
“The Christ is now here.” He asserted that
Maitreya materialized a physical body for himself in early 1977 in the
Himalayas and then boarded a plane from
Pakistan to London, just as had been prophesied in 1946 by Alice Bailey.
Lord Maitreya, claims Creme, is living
in an Asian community, in the Brick Lane area of East London, has vast superhuman
powers and is also in regular telepathic contact with the space brothers in
their fl ying
saucers.
Benjamin Creme subscribes to the belief that Nordic aliens, like those mentioned by Adamski, pilot flying saucers
from the Way-Station on Venus
that is thought to exist on the etheric plane. Thus, Creme’s followers assume
that Sanat Kumara and the “Lords of the Flame” visit from Venus in a
flying saucer. Creme’s
acolytes believe that Shambhala, which is
envisioned as a floating city about five miles above
the surface of the earth on the etheric plane, is equipped with numerous flying saucer
landing pads. They believe there is regular flying saucer traffic
between Venus and Shambhala as well as other locations on Earth, especially
where crop circles appear. In addition, says Creme, the Venusians have cigar-shaped “mother ships” up
to four miles long to accommodate the transport of multiple individual fl ying saucers to
and from Venus.
Public awareness of the
New Age subculture was first
raised with the production of the
1967 musical Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, with its opening song
Aquariusand its opening line “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.”
Widespread usage of the term New Age
began in the mid-1970s, reflected in the title of the monthly periodical
New Age Journaland the proliferation of several thousand “ New Age” bookstores.
In May 1974, SRI led a
study on how to transform the US into
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, entitled “ Changing Images of Man.” The
report was prepared by a team that included anthropologist Margaret Mead, psychologist B. F. Skinner,
Ervin Laszlo of the United Nations and
Sir Geoffrey Vickers of British intelligence. The stated aim of the study was
to change the image of mankind from that of industrial progress to one of
“spiritualism.” The report stressed the importance of the United States in
promoting Masonic ideals, effectively
creating the ideal Masonic state.3
Leading the study was Willis Harman, a former consultant to the White House,
who had also been involved with Puharich
in experiments with Geller. In 1968, Harman hadhired Alfred
Hubbard, the “Johnny Appleseed of
LSD” who, although he had no medical training, collaborated on running
psychedelic sessions with LSD at the
International Federation for Advanced Study in
Menlo Park.4
In 1976, Harman wrote An Incomplete Guide to the Futurein
which he advocated a society based on the ideals of Freemasonry. Harman believes that the symbol of
the pyramid with the floating
capstoneon the Great Seal “indicates
that the nation will flourish only as
its leaders are guided by supraconscious
intuition,” and he defines this as “divine insight.” 5 This recalls the words
of Henry Wallace, who was responsible for the adoption of the Great Seal, who wrote:
It will take a more
definite recognition of the Grand Architect of the Universe before the apex
stone is finally fitted into place and this nation in the full strength of its
power is in position to assume leadership among the nations in inaugurating
“the new order of the ages.” 6
Harman had been president of the Institute for Noetic
Sciences ( IONS) in their
first remote-viewing experiments. IONS, where James Hurtak was director,
was established by Edgar Mitchell, the sixth
astronaut to walk on the moon, who claimed to have undergone a cosmic
consciousness experience on his return flight to earth. Mitchell
briefed then CIA director George Bush on the activities and results of
the IONS. 7 IONS was founded
in 1973 to encourage and conduct research on human potentials. IONS, it claims, “conducts, sponsors, and
collaborates on leading-edge research into the potentials and powers of
consciousness, exploring phenomena that
do not necessarily fit
conventional scientific models while
maintaining a commitment to scientific
rigor.” IONS partly funded the
Geller experiments at SRI, as well as remote-viewing experiments, until
the CIA eventually acknowledge
responsibility for them.
Willis Harman disciple
Marilyn Ferguson in The Aquarian
Conspiracy(1980), depicts the counterculture as the realization of H. G. Wells’ The Open Conspiracy, tried to
popularize them by painting the drive to foster
New Age doctrines as a spontaneous and positive development. According
to Ferguson:
While outlining a not-yet-titled book about the emerging
social alternatives, I thought again about the peculiar form of this movement; its
atypical leadership, the patient intensity of its adherents, their unlikely
successes. It suddenly struck me that in their sharing of strategies, their linkage, and their recognition of each
other by subtle signals, the participants were not merely cooperating with one
another. They were in collusion. It—this movement—is a conspiracy! 8
Ferguson’s book is an overly effusive paean to the array of
practices proposed by Esalen and the Human Potential movement, intoxicated on a
utopian promise and patriotic fantasies about America’s role in bringing about
a profound “transformation” into a new “consciousness,” as the culmination of
centuries of human intellectual evolution. Ferguson traces the origin of this
transformation to the entire gamut of the occult tradition, naming the
“alchemists, Gnostics, cabalists,
and hermetics.” She specifies the
influence of Meister Eckhart, Pico della
Mirandola, Jacob Boehme and Emanuel Swedenborg. According to Ferguson, just as Boehme influenced Swedenborg who influenced
William Blake, so all three influenced the
American Transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Bronson
Alcott, and Margaret Fuller, who sought spiritual understanding from many
sources: intuition, the Quaker movement, the Bhagavad Gita, the German
Romantics, historian Thomas Carlyle, poet Samuel Coleridge, and the English
metaphysical writers of the seventeenth century. Transcendentalists, in turn,
impacted literature, education, politics, and economics, influencing Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, John Dewey,
the founders of the British Labor party, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King.
The book was then praised by Arthur Koestler, who called it “stunning and
provocative,” and UN Assistant Secretary-General and prominent New Ager Robert
Muller described it as “remarkable” and “epoch-making.” Psychologist Carl
Rogers credited her with having “etched, in unforgettable vividness, the intricate
web of changes shaping the inevitable revolution in our culture,” and said the
book “gives the pioneering spirit the courage to go forward.” Philosopher and
religious scholar Jacob Needleman also predicted that the book would help to
make “ New Age” thinking “more understandable and less threatening” to the
general public in America. The Aquarian
Conspiracy steadily climbed the best-seller list, and was credited by USA
Todayas “the handbook of the New Age”
and by New York Timesas “working its way increasingly into the nation’s
cultural, religious, social, economic and political life.”
Ferguson used the word “conspiracy” in its literal sense of
“breathing together,”as one of her great influences, the French philosopher,
Jesuit priest and Julian Huxley
associate, Teilhard de Chardin, of the
Piltdown Man hoax., had done before her, writing of a “conspiracy of love,”
saying: “The only way forward is in the direction of a common passion, a
conspiracy.” Ferguson conducted a survey of 185 leaders of the Human Potential
and New Age Movement and found that they
answered that the most influential
thinkers in their lives were Teilhard de Chardin, followed by Carl
Jung Aldous Huxley, Abraham Maslow and Jiddu Krishnamurti. Others frequently mentioned include:
Hermann Hesse, Alfred North Whitehead,
Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson,
Alan Watts, Sri Aurobindo, Willis
Harman, Erich Fromm, Werner Erhard and Oscar Ichazo, Buckminster Fuller who coined the
term “Spaceship Earth,” Alfred Korzybsk
who developed General Semantics, and
Heinz von Foerster an architect of cybernetics, and Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian philosopher of
communication theory, who is also celebrated throughout Ferguson’s The Aquarian
Conspiracy.
Although Teilard had come into conflict with the Catholic
Church, and was severely
reprimanded and his works
condemned bythe Holy Office,
more recently, Pope John Paul
II indicated a positive attitude towards him, and in 2009, Pope Benedict XVI
mentioned Teilhard’s idea of the universe as a “living host.” Teilhard and his
work have a continuing presence in the arts and culture. An auto mechanic
quotes Teilhard in Philip K. Dick’s A
Scanner Darkly, and the character of Father Lankester Merrin in The Exorcistwas
based on him. Tom Wolfe suggests that Teilhard
de Chardin was a hidden influence on the work of Marshal McLuhan.
Teilhard’s concept of the
Noosphere is currently being researched as part of the Princeton Global
Consciousness Project (GCP), which is privately funded through the Institute of
Noetic Sciences ( IONS). GCP monitors a geographically distributed network of
hardware random number generators in a bid to identify anomalous outputs that
correlate with widespread emotional responses to sets of world events, or
periods of focused attention by large numbers of people.
From September 20 to 21, 1983, at the United Nations
headquarters in New York, an international colloquium was held in honour of de
Chardin. In a message to participants, secretary-general H. E. Javier Perez de
Cuellar mentioned that he, as did his predecessors Dag Hammarskjöld and U
Thant, revered Teilhard as one of the contemporary thinkers who exercise great
influence on them. At the colloquium,
the recipeent of the Teilhard Foundation Award was Robert Muller, for his important contribution
to shaping the UN, an “institution that
functions so specifically in the
spirit of the Noosphere.”9 Muller,
who served as Assistant Secretary-General of the UN for forty years, was also
the former vice president of the Teilhard Center. Robert Muller wrote that, “Teilhard [de
Chardin] had always viewed the United Nations as the progressive institutional embodiment of his
philosophy.” 10 He also noted:
…Teilhard de Chardin influenced his companion [Father de Breuvery], who inspired his colleagues, who started a rich process of global
and long-term thinking in the UN, which affected many nations and people around
the world. I have myself been deeply influenced by Teilhard. 11
According to Muller, “We must move as quickly as possible to
one-world government, a one-world religion, under a one-world leader.” 12
Muller’s ideas about world government, world peace and spirituality led to the
increased representation of religions in the UN, especially of the New Age Movement. He was known by some as
“the philosopher of the United Nations.”13
Muller, who won the UNESCO Prize for Peace Education in 1989 for his World Core
Curriculum, said, “The underlying philosophy upon which The Robert Muller School is based will be found
in the teaching set forth in the books of Alice A. Bailey by the Tibetan
teacher, Djwhal Khul.” 14
In the 1980s, numerous projects were sponsored by the United Nations to promote notions of a
universal religion and global citizenship, such as World Healing Day, World
Instant of Cooperation, World Peace Day, Annual Global Mind Link, Human Unity
Conference, World Conference on Religion and Peace, and Provisional World
Parliament. In 1995, the UN asked the
Temple of Understanding, founded by
Bailey’s Lucis Trust, to host the
50th Anniversary of its founding, and to organize two inter-faith services.
The Temple of Understanding is located
in Manhattan’s historic Cathedral of
St. John the Divine, dedicated to St. John, traditionally revered by Freemasons according to the
Johannite creed. The completion of the cathedral was such a prized accomplishment for the Freemasons that it was featured on the front
page of Masonic Worldof March 1925. The Cathedral is replete with occult
symbolism and often features unusual performances.
The presiding bishop of the cathedral was the bisexual Bishop
Paul Moore, whose family were heirs to the Nabisco company fortune, and as a
priest in Indianapolis he gave Jim Jones’s People’s Temple cult its start.
Having been dormant for several years, the Temple of Understanding was revived
at the cathedral in 1984 at a ceremony presided over by Moore and the Dalai
Lama. While the chairman of the Temple was Judith Dickerson Hollister, those
involved with its founding included: Dame
Margaret Mead, Robert Muller, who had been involved as well with the
Lucis Trust, and Winifred McCulloch, leader of the New York-based Teilhard de
Chardin Society.
The Cathedral also houses the
Lindisfarne Center, founded in 1972 with funding from Laurance Rockefeller, brother to David
Rockefeller, by cultural historian William Irwin Thompson, a former professor
of humanities from MIT and Syracuse University.
Lindisfarne functioned as a sponsor of New Age events and lectures, as
well as a think tank and retreat, similar to the Esalen Institute, with which
it shared several members, like Gregory
Bateson and Michael Murphy. Their
aim is participate in the emerging planetary consciousness, or Noosphere. In addition to Teilhard de Chardin, Thompson is influenced by Alfred
North Whitehead, Rudolf Steiner, Sri
Aurobindo and Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian philosopher of
communication theory, who is also celebrated in Ferguson’s The Aquarian
Conspiracy. Lindisfarne has also been
supported by the Lilly Endowment, the
Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and
Rockefeller Foundation, and lists among its faculty members Amory Lovins, Gaia theory biologist James Lovelock, and
Luciferian adept and New Age author
David Spangler. Lindisfarne was founded in 1972 by New Age philosopher William Irwin Thompson, a
former professor of humanities from MIT
and Syracuse University. Thompson said: “We have now a new spirituality, what
has been called the New Age movement.
The planetization of the esoteric has been going on for some time… This is now
beginning to influence concepts of politics
and community in ecology… This is the Gaia [Mother
Earth] politique… planetary culture.” Thompson further stated that, the age of
“the independent sovereign state, with the sovereign individual in his private
property, [is] over, just as the Christian fundamentalist days are about to be
over.” 15
Held at the Cathedral
of St. John the Divine, the Temple called together leaders of the world’s
religions to offer prayers, and invited the world’s leading artists to perform
music, poetry and dance. In 1997 and 1998, with the Interfaith Center of New
York, the Temple of Understanding held
an Interfaith Prayer Service at St.
Bartholomew Church to pray for the work of the General Assembly and the
Secretary General of the UN. It was also at the
Cathedral of St. John the Divine that the controversial “Islamic
feminist” preacher named Amina Wadud led a Muslim Friday prayer in 2005,
breaking with the tradition of having only male Imams, and conducted without
the traditional separation between male and female sections.
The Temple of
Understanding promotes the “ Interfaith Movement” with its centennial celebration of
the World’s Parliament
of Religions. The first Parliament of World Religions
Conference, as a successor to the first
Parliament of World Religions Conference, in effect the Theosophical Congress, gathered in Chicago
in 1883. It had been founded by Reverend Dr. John Henry Barrows, according to
whom, “The best religion must come to the front, and the best religion will
ultimately survive, because it will contain all that is true in all the
faiths.” 16 The Parliament was dominated by Theosophists, such as
Annie Besant, Dharmapala and the Hindu universalist Vivekananda who, in his famous speech, called
for an end to religious conversions, and instead for each to “assimilate the spirit of the other,” and
said, “The Christian is not to become
a Hindu or a
Buddhist, nor a Hindu or a Buddhist to become a Christian. But each religion
must assimilate the spirit of the others and yet preserve its own individuality
and grow according to its own law of growth.” 17 Commenting on the
Parliament, Max Müller told an audience at Oxford University:
Such a
gathering of representatives of the principal religions of the world has never before taken place; it is unique,
it is unprecedented; nay, we may truly add, it could hardly have been conceived
before our own time… It established a
fact of the greatest significance,
namely, that there exists an ancient and universal religion, and the highest dignitaries
and representatives of all the religions in the world can meet as members of
one common brotherhood, can listen respectfully to what each religion had to
say for itself, nay, can join in a common prayer and accept a common blessing,
one day from the hands of a Christian archbishop another day from a Jewish
Rabbi, and again another day from a Buddhist priest. 18
The recent
one-world-religion agenda has been pushed with the reestablishment of the
Parliament of World Religions Conference, the United Religions Initiative (URI)
and United Religions Charter. The URI was founded in 1995 by Episcopalian
bishop William Swing and dedicated to promoting inter-faith cooperation. The
URI, which aspires to have the stature of the
United Nations, was established to “promote enduring, daily inter-faith cooperation,
to end religiously motivated violence and to create cultures of peace, justice
and healing for the Earth and all living beings.”
The Parliament of the
World’s Religions was reconvened again in the city of Chicago in 1993. The
Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, was one of the co-sponsors of
the Parliament, along with the Muslim
World League, which was originally founded by
Said Ramadan and Mufti al Husseini with the assistance of the CIA. Prince Muhammad alFaisal bin Turki, former director of Saudi intelligence, who had worked closely with bin Laden and the CIA during the fight against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, was one of its speakers. The first address was delivered by Robert Müller, titled “Inter-faith
Understanding,” who said:
There is one sign after the other, wherever you look, that we
are on the eve of a New Age which will be a spiritual age… We are
entering an age of universalism.
Wherever you turn, one speaks about global
education, global information, global communications—every profession on Earth now is acquiring a global
dimension. The whole humanity is becoming interdependent, is becoming one… this
Parliament and what is happening now in the world… is a renaissance, a turning
point in human history. So even the astrologers begin to tell us that there
will be a fundamental change. 19
The popularity of the New Age movement had begun to increase
with the release of Shirley MacLaine’s
book Out on a Limb, in 1983, adapted in 1987 into a television mini-series of
the same name. As a result of the large-scale activities surrounding the Harmonic Convergence, the American mass-media
further popularized the term as a label for the alternative spiritual
subculture, including practices such as meditation, channeling, interest in
Eastern mysticism, past lives, and environmentalism. Several New Age publications appeared by the late 1980s
such as Body, Mind & Spirit, Yoga Journal,
New Age Voice, New Age Retailer,
and NAPRA ReViewby the New Age
Publishers and Retailers Alliance. Relevant New Age
works include the writings of James Redfield, Eckhart Tolle, Barbara Marx
Hubbard, Christopher Hills, Marianne
Williamson, Deepak Chopra, John Holland, Gary Zukav, Wayne Dyer, and
Rhonda Byrne.
The Harmonic
Convergence, held in 1987 at Sedona in Arizona, was organized by New Age spiritual leader José Argüelles, based on the concept of the same
name which was part of Alice Bailey’s
“the Plan.” As one of the originators of the Earth Day concept, Argüelles founded the first Whole Earth Festival in 1970. After experimenting
with LSD in the mid-1960s, Argüelles produced a series of psychedelic
art paintings that Humphrey Osmond named
The Doors of Perception, after Aldous
Huxley’s book of the same name.20 Argüelles co-founded the Planet
Art Network (PAN) in 1983, which upholds the Nicholas Roerich Peace Pact and Banner of Peace,
symbolizing “Peace Through Culture.”
In 1987, Argüelles
organized the Harmonic Convergence,
associated with the 2012 phenomenon, at
Sedona in Arizona. Claimed portents of the year 2012 are based from the ending of the
current baktuncycle of the Maya
calendar, which many believe will create a global “consciousness shift” and the
beginning of a New Age. Speculation about the date can
be traced to the first
edition of The Maya (1966) by Michael D.
Coe, an archaeologist who also worked for the
CIA, and married the daughter of
Teilhard de Chardin’s associate, eminent eugenicist Theodosius
Dobzhansky. Coe suggested the winter solstice of December 24, 2011, as one on
which the Maya believed “Armageddon
would overtake the degenerate peoples of the world and all creation.” 21
This date became the subject of speculation by
Frank Waters, whose research in Mexico and Central America in 1970
funded by Rockefeller Foundation resulted
in his 1975 book Mexico Mystique: The Coming Sixth World of Consciousness, a discussion
of Mesoamerican culture and the lost continent of Atlantis, in which he
tied Coe’s original date of 24 December
2011 to astrology and the prophecies of the Hopi. 22
After the publication of Waters’s book, Mayanism experienced a revival in the 1970s.
Mayanism has been promoted by
specific publishing houses, most notably
Inner Traditions - Bear & Company, which has produced a number of books on
the theme of 2012 by authors such as
José Argüelles, Terence McKenna, and also publishes on a wide range of topics
including Freemasonry, the New Age and
the occult, by authors such as Zecharia
Sitchin, Robert Bauval, as well
as synarchists, Saint-Yves d’Alveydre
and Schwaller de Lubicz; Rudolf von Sebottendorff and Nazi grail hunter Otto Rahn; and Traditionalists like Julius Evola and
Martin Lings.
