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Erica's WLS Book He's History You're Not - Surviving Divorce After 40  |
For Darn Good Writing Ask Erica SKEPTICS GUIDE TO THE NEW AGE (This essay is available for purchase)
CHANNELING Channeling has nothing to do with either switching TV stations or digging a tunnel under a body of water. "Channels" are people who tend to go into trances and speak in guttural voices with weird syntax and fake English accents (only if they're not English) which they claim belong to spirits from the other side. Such "entities" offer profound insights recycled from self-help books. These dead folks take over the body of a someone who is desperate for TV exposure or a book contract.
The question is, what's in it for the dead? After all, it must be tiring enough to go through dying and reuniting with all your dead friends and relatives and meeting God and touring around heaven without having to give advice to people who should be on Prozac. Maybe the quest for fame doesn't end with death. Maybe even the dead want that elusive 15 minutes. After all, most channeled spirits are unknowns. No one is channeling Shakespeare, or Moses or even Liberace. Channeled spirits have names like Emmanuel or Seth or Ramtha. And who wants to hear from them anyway?
AURAS Auras are basically old-fashioned halos. You see them in those pre-Raphealite paintings of Jesus where he's gazing soulfully downwards while his head is surrounded by light. Auras are not limited to Jesus, however, according to people who tend to hallucinate easily. Some VSP's (very spiritual people) can see auras around everyone. No one knows what the hell auras are but the Russians, who are irrational in general and particularly when it comes to psychic phenomena, claimed to have photographed auras using something called "Kirlian photography."(see under "K") According to some aura-ologists, our auras are composed of electromagnetic radiation including microwaves. This may lead to advances such as more portable heating up of leftovers, but other than that it's hard to envision a future for auras.
Some auras are pure and shimmering, but most of us have dull, dirty ones because we're such un-spiritual slobs. You can brighten up your aura, of course, but you have to meditate constantly, stop being such a materialistic creep and start developing inner peace. To find inner peace you must avoid such negative emotions as fear, jealousy, anger and lust and get in touch with your inner self. How do you find your inner self? Call out: "Inner self, where art thou, speak to me." If your inner self doesn't answer, don't lose hope. Your inner self may be on vacation but eventually will contact you.
ASTROLOGY The popularity of astrology, which purports to predict behavior from the movements of the stars, can be attributed to its effectiveness as an excuse. Your horoscope gives you a label at birth which can be used to explain bad behavior. If you're a Gemini, for instance, the two-faced sign, you might toss off, "I'm a Gemini, I can't help it," when you're caught in that motel room with a person not your spouse. After all, it's in your nature to lie like a rug.
For those of you who, like me, don't resemble our signs a whit, there is always a convenient explanation in the planets. After all you not only have a "sun" sign, but a rising sign, a moon sign, and a bunch of planets in different "houses." For instance I'm a Capricorn--a very thin, neat, driven, success-oriented personality. How to explain that I'm sloppy, overweight and a failure? It must be that my moon's in Aries, a more laid-back "air sign."
Astrology, which has been popular for thousands of years-- way before its more boring successor, astronomy, started actually explaining the makeup of the universe–lends an air of intriguing mystery to the most mundane events.. "I'm in the dumps because Mercury is retrograde" sounds so much more interesting than "I have PMS." Song titles like "The Age of Aquarius," are much more romantic than "A Bunch of Hippies Getting Naked."
Even Nancy Reagan lived by her astrologer's predictions. Since intelligence and competence certainly didn't account for Reagan's popularity, maybe intervention from the stars held the key. No matter how skeptical they are on other new agey subjects, almost everyone sneaks looks at those newspaper horoscopes. They're like fortune cookies. How can anyone resist the hope that good things will happen to them, no matter what the reality is. . Horoscopes typically say things like "Be careful about finances –don't overspend. New job opportunities will open up for you soon." They never say, " No one will ever love you. You are doomed to poverty, abject failure and early death."
GUIDED VISUALIZATIONS Guided visualization is a re-invention of old-fashioned hypnosis. Typically, guided visualizations take place in new age workshops where everyone lies down on the floor and is taken to the beach or some other relaxing place by the workshop leader, who, hopefully, has a hypnotic voice without a New York accent. While the borderline psychotic find it easy to travel to Miami while lying on hard, cold surfaces, the rest of us wonder if the workshop leader is kidding. We know we're on the goddamn floor. At some point, after you've been snorkeling for a while, your guide will say something like: "Imagine you're speaking to your dead mother. Tell her all the things that went unsaid while she was alive."
Do not say things like "you were a lousy cook, mom." A more appropriate sentiment might be, "I still love you mom, even though you moved and you didn't tell me where."
Here is my favorite stress-reduction visualization: Close your eyes and breath deeply. Picture yourself near a stream. Birds are softly chirping in the crisp, cool mountain air. No one knows this secret place. You are in total seclusion from the stresses of the outside world. The soothing sound of a gentle waterfall fills the air with a cascade of serenity. Look at the sky, the water, the white patchy clouds on this glorious June day. See how the water flows over the rocks, notice the differences in color as it meanders downstream. Listen to the gurgling sounds of the rushing water. Hear how that sound changes as the water moves over the rocks. Feel the soil under your fingers. Pick up a branch and run your fingers over it, noticing where it is smooth and where it's bumpy. . Put your feet into the water. Allow the stream to flow around your feet soothing and refreshing them. Look into the water. It's completely clear. You can easily make out the face of the person whose head you're holding under the water. Look. It's the person who caused you all this stress in the first place. What a pleasant surprise. You let them up...just for a quick breath...then ploop... back under they go. Keep breathing deeply until you feel comfortable opening your eyes. Feel better?
TAROT Tarot readers make you ask the cards a question while you shuffle and cut them. They then lay them out in a pattern which is supposed to reveal your past, your future, your goals, what is standing in your way. Most tarot decks have lots and lots of colorful pictures of people in vaguely medieval dress doing really strange things with snakes, wands, and other paraphernalia. Even though there are kings and queens, tarot decks don't have numbers or suits, so you cannot play pinochle with them.
The popularity of the Tarot can be attributed to its utter inscrutability. It can mean absolutely anything to absolutely anybody. You have to go to about 10 years of Tarot school to find out whether or not to read the cards right side up or upside down. Therefore anything that card readers say could be right–or wrong. This leaves us with readers who interpret the Hanged Man and Death cards as heralding good news. They have rather lame explanations for these interpretations, but they're not about to tell you that you have terminal cancer. Bad for business. It used to be you got your tarot cards read by gypsy fortune tellers. They had long dark hair, swarthy skin, missing teeth, and colorful clothing. Gypsies, though authentic, were their own worst enemies. Their predilection for telling clients that someone had put a curse on them which would cost major bucks for the gypsy to remove hastened their demise once word got around. Now tarot card readers are mostly self-styled witches (see under "W") who moonlight on the psychic hotline. Gypsies were likely to tell you if you would get rich, marry Mr. Right, or get famous. Witches are likely to tell you how to discover your real self and actualize your inner potential. I don't know about you, but I'd much rather know about money, sex and fame.
WITCHES Witches practice what they call "Wicca" which they insist is an ancient religion deriving from the Celts. Conveniently, witches never reveal that no one knows what religion the Celts actually practiced because all they left was Stonehenge and no one has the vaguest idea what it means. Actually Wiccans are not practicing an ancient religion at all, but one that was made up by an Englishman called Gerald Gardner in the l930s. Seems Gardner, founder of the nudist movement in England, was dissatisfied with the boring old Church of England and wanted to get naked while worshiping as well as on the tennis court. He made up his own religion out of bits and pieces of Aleister Crowley, Rudyard Kipling and the Masons. Gardnerian covens worshiped "skyclad" or in the nude, a practice which most American new age witches dropped pretty quickly, being more uptight than the English. What they didn't drop was worship of the "Goddess," which they understandably found plenty appealing after 4,000 years of the big guy in the sky.
Witches today, despite their convincingly archaic rituals, bear no resemblance to witches of olde.. In Shakespeare's time witches were toothless hags who wore rags, rode broomsticks, and cackled while stirring disgusting stuff in large pots. Modern witches are more likely to be massage therapists who wear L.L. Bean, drive Subarus and eat only organic food. . A large majority are feminists who want to have at least the illusion of a religion of their own, where they get to tell the men what to do for a change.
When questioned about witchcraft's bad rep, modern witches insist they're "good" witches and mean no harm to anyone. However, in their eagerness to counter an image which must be the public relations nightmare of all time, they're taking all the juice out of witchcraft. If witches can't at least cast a few spells to punish their (and your) enemies, what good are they?
ANGELS Angels are all over the place these days, even in the outfield. The notion of heavenly intervention is very appealing to those of us who feel life is has spun rapidly out of control--what with the rise of Dennis Rodman and the fall of communism.
Once upon a time angels used to be conceived of as fierce winged creatures who were messengers from God. They even came in hierarchal order, from seraphim to cherubim to archangels. Now they range from Della Reese to John Travolta. We don't want our angels to be intimidating, but rather warm, fuzzy creatures with good senses of humor who harken back not to biblical times, but to simpler days--the 1940s--when we had A Wonderful Life.
The nice thing about angels is that--unlike God, who is generally fairly indifferent to human suffering–they show up to save your ass when you need it most.
The not so nice thing about angels is that they proliferate unchecked. They show up in every gift shop in the guise of refrigerator magnets, gift bags and door stops. They crowd already overstuffed bookshelves. And they overpopulate the impoverished imaginations of children who grow up on too much television. For all we know, we may be raising a generation of kids who think they can skateboard in traffic because some angel will rescue them.
HOLISTIC HEALTH True new agers elevate the value of health above love, sex, friendship, even shopping. They adhere to rigid "wellness" standards which make the occasional burger a unforgivable sin. In their search for eternal life, they put their faith in holistic health, also known as alternative medicine, which basically is any health practice which has not been submitted to controlled studies or approved by the F.D.A. Holistic supposedly comes from the word "whole," implying that holistic health treats the whole person instead of just their diseased parts. This is a good idea in theory, except when a specialist is called for. I, for one, would not want an holistic surgeon removing my gallbladder.
There are so many different types of alternative treatments that anyone looking for an effective holistic therapy for a health problem has a good chance of dying during the search. The really confusing part is that each therapy has its fanatical adherents, who are sure they've found the holistic grail. They consider any deviation from their particular remedy as apostasy. Either blue green algae, or therapeutic touch or aromatherapy are just the ticket to cure anything from hernias to hangnails. If you show disbelief that eating gunk, smelling the flowers or laying on of hands is going to cure your particular illness, you will be made to feel like a reactionary tool of the medical establishment. If you actually decide to try a holistic remedy and it doesn't work, don't tell your "healer." She or he will undoubtedly look at you incredulously and say "this has never happened before. It always works."
Even some MD's, in the search for patients with private insurance, are calling themselves "holistic" these days. That probably means they won't have a fit if you ask about herbal remedies. However, be aware that "holistic" ends when you get the bill. When it comes to health care, there is no alternative to paying through the nose.
(This essay is available for purchase)
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