ARTICLES

Ransomed From the Darkness

Repents Years as Local Guru

By Moira Noonan as told to Donna Steichen

My insurance company introduced me to the New Age and even financed the introduction. In 1980, I was injured in an auto accident in Hawaii. After two years, I was still in too much pain to raise my own coffee cup to my lips. My sister, a California attorney, called me to recommend a pain clinic in Wisconsin that was achieving results in getting patients off pain killers and back to work. At the pain clinic, I was launched into a way of life that led me deep into the occult.

Years earlier, when I graduated from high school, the seed of this exotic belief system had rooted in me and was germinating as a longing for enlightenment. Many New Agers follow gurus, in a belief that only a living teacher can show them the way to God. I was convinced that I must go to India to find my own guru.

Instead, after graduation in 1970, I went to college, first at the University of Denver and afterward at the University of Colorado. But in the back of my mind I kept an intention to go to India eventually. For my junior year, I went to college in Avignon, France, through a University of Washington transfer program. When the year ended, I traveled to Greece and Turkey, thinking I would take the train on to India. I didn't feel I needed to finish college, but I knew I needed to get enlightened.

My devout and resolute grandmother undid that plan. She tracked me down in Europe by telephone and told me to come home and finish college, or be cut off financially. So I came back to the University of Washington in 1974, when everything our parents valued was being questioned on college campuses. Hindu influence was strong.

By the time I finished college, however, worldly ambition had diverted me from spiritual searching. Having internalized the feminist dogma that an American woman is nothing without a career, I set India on a back shelf. At age 28, I was a publisher with Visitor Publications in Hawaii; I had my own house and the future looked limitless.

That changed the day I crashed in the company car. Pain pushed me back toward a spiritual search and made me receptive to the ideas I encountered when my insurer referred me to the pain clinic in Wisconsin.

The treatment offered was based entirely on "New Thought." New Thought was articulated in mid-19th century America by Phineas Quimby, a faith healer and medium who made a disciple of Mary Baker Eddy when he treated her for back pain. After Quimby died, Mrs. Eddy amplified the ideas she had absorbed from him and others and expressed them in her own writings as Christian Science. International Religious Science, another outgrowth of the movement, was founded in the early twentieth century by Ernest Holmes, author of The Science of Mind. The Unity School of Christianity is the New Thought denomination most widely known.

As New Thought has subdivided, its message about the need for transformation through changing consciousness has separated the person of Jesus from Christ. We are not saved by Jesus, the unique God-Man who atoned for original sin, but by "Christ consciousness."

This system of thought captured me through the interest I had developed in reincarnation when I was in high school. It never gave me the answers I sought, but the expectation of fulfillment, never satisfied but always promised, impelled me on to ten more years pursuing the New Age.

Some patients stayed at the pain clinic for months, and many came back to have the hypnotic effect reinforced. But after a month, I no longer felt unmanageable pain, and I didn't need pain pills. That was the effect of hypnotic suggestion, not a physical healing. To stay well, I would have to keep doing self-hypnosis.

Back home in Hawaii, I started attending a Unity church, and I found it interesting. It is seductive to hear that you are the ultimate power and moral authority

I sampled the Human Potential Movement, by way of Werner Erhard's "est," a program later renamed the Forum, and still later called Transformational Technologies, Inc. I tried Silva Mind Control. Then came A Course in Miracles, which has become an international business phenomenon. Many Christian churches offer it to members, and it is sold in some Catholic bookstores.

A Course in Miracles uses a vocabulary to indicate that its spirit-author is Jesus, bringing a new Revelation to "purify" the teachings of Christianity that are "His old Revelation." The "miracles" referred to in the title are not supernatural interventions in the natural order, but products of corrected thinking, as in other New Thought systems.

The Course was published in 1976, and study groups began using it in New Age churches around the United States. Its success owes a good deal to Marianne Williamson, who discovered it at the West Hollywood Church of Religious Science, a New Thought center noted for the many movie personalities in its congregation. Williamson's psychic counseling practice has involved such clients as Hillary Clinton, Shirley MacLaine, and Elizabeth Taylor.

Nothing is enough in the New Age way of life; there is always pressure to do more, learn more, be more, get more. Its goal is "progressive spiritual evolution" to accrue enough good "karma" to escape from the "wheel of reincarnation" and become one with the Universal Mind. So I studied the "Ascended Masters," spiritual leaders who rule the planet, having advanced beyond reincarnation, yet have retained their individuality, instead of being assimilated into the Universal Mind. In standard theosophical theory and in interpretations of Elizabeth Clare Prophet (Church Universal and Triumphant), Alice Bailey (New Group of World Servers), and similar sects, Jesus is considered one of the Ascended Masters -- but not superior to Buddha, St. Germain, Kuthumi, El Morya or Maitreya.

Next I studied Native American Shamanism, and Native American Medicine Cards, which are tarot cards displaying Indian symbols instead of the traditional tarot symbols, though they are read in the standard way.

In 1983, I was married in an Episcopal church in Seattle; the officiating clergyman was a former Catholic priest who had defected to marry a former nun. By the time we separated in 1991, Roger and I had our daughter, Malia. While I was pregnant with her, I went to Europe on a holiday with my mother. In Paris, Mother said, "Please come to Mass with me."

As we entered the Basilica of Sacre Coeur I saw, behind a bank of votive candles, a statue of Our Lady. The Holy Spirit must have moved me to do what I did next, because I didn't know a prayer of consecration. Leaving my mother behind in the pew, I went over to the shrine, lit a candle, and consecrated my unborn baby to the Virgin Mary. "Blessed Mother, this is your child." I whispered. "I give this child to you."

When our daughter was born, I called her Malia, the Hawaiian form of "Mary."

My fascination with the New Age did not fade, however. We were living in Southern California when I enrolled in ministry training at the North County Church of Religious Science in Encinitas.

My preparation for ministry was the kind of reprogramming I encountered at the Wisconsin pain clinic, but promoted in greater depth, with more sophisticated brainwashing, until I did have a new belief system. It was based on denial of original sin, and offered the same promise Satan offered Eve in the Garden of Eden. With my "I Am presence" thus "activated," my self-image inflated from self-confidence to self-idolatry.

In my first venture as a New Age professional, I became a "prayer practitioner" at the Seaside Church of Religious Science, in Del Mar, where my stipends came from client donations to the church. My work had nothing to do with God or prayer as Catholics use those terms. Prayer practitioners use their "Christ consciousness" to help people "manifest" (i.e. obtain) what they desire by commanding the universal Mind as a magician would command a genie, rather than beseeching God's help. My role in the "prayer" sessions -- called "treatments" -- was to lead clients to get what they wanted by using the right techniques. According to Science of Mind, the individual's will is an expression of perfect Divine Mind and Will, which means that we ourselves are Divine beings, "co-creators" with the power of "gods" to "manifest" whatever we need by visualizing it and commanding it. Like everything in New Thought, it is concentrated at the level of "I": I can do it.

Prayer practitioner work led me into healing and counseling. I became a Reiki Master healer and teacher. Reiki calls on spirit guides of fallen angels (demons) to transmit healing energy through touch or by directed thought, even from a distance. A Reiki Master in Ohio might direct healing energy to a patient in Hawaii -- or back into the past or forward into the future. I took training classes from Barbara Brennan, founder and director of the Hands of Light School of Healing in New York. Hands of Light healing is similar to Reiki, but focuses on diagnosing and treating the "aura" or energy field that is believed to surround and flow through all living things, and is visible to clairvoyants.

I went for psychic training classes at the Teachings of the Inner Christ church in Lemon Grove, to get more connected to my spirit guides, and to learn to see, feel and hear beyond the senses. The standard "service" at the Church of the Inner Christ is a séance, where channelers (mediums) recite formulas to call up spirits of the dead. This practice has been called necromancy and is condemned in Deuteronomy 18:10-12.

The instructors assured me these were steps to "High Sense Perception," in which we would use the five senses but take them beyond normal ranges. And I did become psychic. When I told people I saw something, like their childhood experiences, I did see them. I could sit down beside a stranger and see his past life unreel like a movie. Sometimes I could converse with the people I was seeing. But like other clairvoyant channelers, I couldn't sleep at night because the "messages" demanding attention in my mind became a torment, and I could not turn them off.

My daughter Malia hated the Inner Christ church and refused to be present at services, though I was "in ministry" there.

Next, I trained in Neuro-Linguistic Programming under Anthony Robbins, at his Research Institute in San Diego. This is a system of hypnotic techniques used in communication and persuasion. Developed in the early 1970s by two Jesuit-educated academics, John Grinder, a professor of linguistics at UC Santa Cruz, and Richard Bandler, then a Santa Cruz graduate student in Gestalt therapy, it was designed to incorporate techniques used by Milton Erickson. The developers split in a few years and have sued each other over who owns the "intellectual property" of NLP.

From NLP, I moved into more intense study of Ericksonian hynotherapy. Many people assume Ericksonian hypnotherapy to be a scientific system of psychotherapy. Actually, it is complex of techniques covering the New Age spectrum, from simple insights into psychology to shamanism, trance mediumship, Jungian psychology, Mind Control, "mind mapping," and past-life regression.

I used this training with private clients acquired through the Del Mar and Lemon Grove churches. I helped them draw "mind maps," to unblock places where I thought past life influences were trapping them in unproductive behaviors. I went back to Hawaii in 1990 for a more advanced program and became a certified Ericksonian hypnotherapist. There I was immersed in hypnosis. It led to a deeper "reprogramming" of my mind, a deeper dependence on self-hypnosis, and a weakening of will power.

While waiting in the lounge between classes one day, I came upon an article in New Age Journal by Sondra Ray. It was an account of her trip to the site of apparitions of "Mother Mary." Sondra wrote that she was in London, preparing for a visit to her guru, when she heard reports that the Blessed Mother was appearing in Yugoslavia. She decided to stop on her way to India to see for herself.

As she stood gazing at St. James Church in Medjugorje, the priest invited her to come inside, to be in the upper room during an apparition. Ray said she felt Our Lady's presence but did not see her. She did not have a conversion, but while traveling on through India and back home to America, she decided that "Mother Mary" was a goddess from heaven, come down to meet the earth goddess, "Gaia." In light of that conclusion, she felt she was meant to promote the goddess movement, a strain growing in the New Age movement.

I was stirred with ambivalent emotions. I had heard no claims that Our Lady was visiting anyone in the contemporary world. I was thrilled that Sondra Ray, who was not a Catholic or a Christian, would go to an out-of-the-way place to look into a vision of the Blessed Mother. But some shred of the truth I had learned in childhood assured me that Our Lady is not a goddess.

When I got back to San Diego, I stopped in Long's drugstore, and there I found an issue of Life magazine, with a statue of Our Lady on the cover, above the title "Do You Believe in Miracles"? I bought a copy and read every word, comparing it to the one in New Age magazine. The Life version did not portray her as a visiting goddess. I decided that I needed to go to Yugoslavia, too. That would entail substantial expense, for travel and child care, and I still believed I had to manifest what I needed.

This is the first of a two-part article condensed from a chapter in Donna Steichen's Prodigal Daughters (Ignatius Press). Moira Noonan is available for speaking engagements and can be reached at P.O. Box 231732, Encinitas, CA 92023, or email moirnoonan@aol.com.

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