Katie, bar the door!

NOTE: I've added to this post since I first published it. It occurred to me that some readers might not be familiar with Byron Katie, so I added a little bit of biographical information, as well as additional insights, opinions, and links. ~ CC

"...we all want to be special, and hiding underneath this desire is the thought that we also really feel we are special, and we all think we are right. This can be the reason that sometimes we start to believe in our own legend or myth."
~Janaki, former devotee of Byron Katie


This being the fortieth anniversary of the last day of the original Woodstock (and Happy Anniversary to everyone who attended, wanted to attend, or lied about attending), I didn't want to let the day go by without a nod to "the event that defined a generation." There's been way too much written and spoken about it, so I won't add to the fray; all I'll say is that if you didn't celebrate Moon Day by watching A Walk On The Moon, as I suggested here last month, you can observe Woodstock Days with the same flick, because it covers that celebrated event as well. Of course there are other films, both new (Taking Woodstock) and old (Woodstock (1970)), that cover the territory in more detail. I urge you to hurry, though, Dear Ones, because the 1960s' Major Anniversaries are almost over, and the next big fortieth-anniversary observations will be the deaths of Jimi, Janis, and Jim...and then, before we know it, Watergate. Ugh.

So now to the matter at hand. Over the past couple of years, several people have mentioned to me that I ought to do a blog post about Byron Katie, the sweet-faced, silver-haired perp behind The Work (not just work, mind you, but "The Work").

Many of you have heard of Byron Katie and The Work, but for the benefit of those who haven't, here's a bit of backstory. Born Bryon Kathleen Reid, she was, once upon a time, merely a mom and businesswoman living in the desert town of Barstow, California. But she wasn't happy, and suffered from depression, anger, mood swings, agoraphobia, overeating, addiction to alcohol and codeine, and thoughts of suicide. She was, by all reports, not a nice person to be around.

Then in 1986, while sleeping in the attic of a now-defunct L.A. halfway house where she was temporarily residing to work on her eating disorder, she had her epiphany. (She was sleeping in the attic because the other residents were afraid of her.) As the story currently goes, she awakened one February morn and found that she had been transformed into a giant cockroach. She was lying on her back and had trouble getting out of bed in her strange new body; all she could do was wiggle her six legs helplessly. Wait...that's another story entirely.

The "real" story goes that Katie was awakened by a cockroach running across her feet. That would have made most of us scream and jump out of bed looking for a shoe or a can of Raid, but Katie says that when she opened her eyes, it was as if something else had awakened within her and was seeing the world anew, through her eyes. This new being was "intoxicated with joy," according to Katie. She claims that it was at this moment that the four questions central to The Work appeared in her consciousness. She applied those questions to her own life and immediately felt all of her suffering lift. She now claims The Work can end all suffering.

By many accounts besides her own (most notably, those of a therapist at the halfway house, and her own kids), the person who woke up that day in 1986 was completely different from the rage-filled, mood-swingy bee-yotch who had entered the halfway house. (Katie herself has been quoted as saying she hasn't been angry or sad since 1986.) She attributes the sudden dramatic change to "waking without memories," and claims that she couldn't even recognize her own husband or kids at first.

Subsequent to leaving the halfway house, Katie says she dropped 75 pounds, stopped eating meat (it made her tongue bleed), and began meditating, often sitting motionless for hours, though formerly she'd been a salt-of-the-earth type who had no experience with Eastern traditions. (There has, however, been some speculation that she had exposure to esoteric ideas at the halfway house.) She also took to wandering the streets of Barstow embracing strangers and vagrants (there are a lot of the latter in Barstow), eventually inviting some to her home...and her following grew. Many folks claimed to be healed in her presence, but she said they were healing themselves. Though she rejected many of the labels that others tried to place on her – "mystic," "enlightened," "self-realized" – it was clear that something had been set in motion.

Her kids were puzzled, her husband was baffled, the marriage became strained and eventually broke up. But the seeds of The Work had been planted, workshops were developed, the business grew and grew...and, love her or loathe her, today Byron Katie has an international presence and is truly a force to be reckoned with in the New-Wage/selfish-help bidness. And maybe it's just me, but, despite her apparent humility when it all began, it seems that all of that adulation has gone to her head a little bit.

* * * * *

I'm not the only blogger who has been asked to blog about Katie. Many have prodded Steve Salerno over at SHAMblog to do the same. He has yet to do so because, as he explains...

...If you're going to attack a public figure in a (reasonably) visible venue like SHAMblog, it shouldn't just be 500 or 1000 words of clever, lively snark; it should be a fully researched piece of journalism that could stand up to formal scrutiny, if it had to.

Fortunately, I have no such standards here on this Whirled. I won't knowingly print untruths, and I do nominal fact-checking, but I will print snarky opinions. How clever and lively they are is up to the reader to decide.
There has also been some heated controversy in the past about Katie on the site of another of my blogging mates, Jody Radzik of Guruphiliac fame – most notably here and here.

And the discussion about Katie on Rick Ross's forum, which began in December of 2005, is 238 pages long as I write this, and shows no sign of fizzling out. Here's a portion where participants speculate on the Great Cockroach Legend (as well as that "waking without memory" phenomenon). They raise an excellent point; after all, The Work is supposed to be all about losing your "story," but much of the BK mystique – not to mention her marketing – is based on her story. New-wage marketers, and indeed, hucksters of all types, know that you can never underestimate the power of stories. Rhonda had her Wallace Wattles experience, Werner had his drive over the Golden Gate Bridge, and Bryon Katie has her cockroach in the attic.*

Speaking of stories...
One source quoted at length on the Rick Ross discussion is the long blog of a Dutch writer and life coach who goes by the name of Janaki. Janaki is a former Katie devotee/assistant who was with "BK" in various capacities for about twelve years. Someone sent me a link to her blog several months ago, and I finally got around to reading it. It is pretty straightforward and detailed, and while it is obvious that the blog is a catharsis for the author, it does not seem mean-spirited or snarky; further, Janaki doesn't hesitate to document her own shortcomings and weaknesses that made her especially vulnerable to BK's influence.

In many ways Janaki's story is all too typical, both in her own self-description and that of her fearless leader's behavior. Much of it mirrors what I have either experienced firsthand or have heard and read from former devotees and friends of other New-Wage gurus.

Katie appears to share many traits with those other gurus: most notably, an enormous ego, bordering on megalomania; a gift for manipulating individuals as well as crowds; and a tendency towards passive-aggressive behavior that often leaves even the closest friends or colleagues stunned and reeling, wondering what they did wrong and scrambling to make it "right." For people who have supposedly done so much work (with or without a capital "W") on themselves, and have been through years and sometimes decades of every kind of therapy and workshop on the planet, and who now make their living teaching others how to be better people, some of these gurus are genuine a--holes, if you'll pardon my saying so. Of course the gurus and their followers would just dismiss that opinion as "my stuff." And in a way it is, because (to name but one example) I too can be passive-aggressive. Just ask Ron. The problem is that I don't like that trait in myself, and, even worse, I'm not getting paid for it.

The gurus are getting paid because not only are they easily able to disguise, or at least put a good spin on, their private foibles, but, more importantly, they are adept at convincing the hordes that they are providing something of enormous value. And, "value" being so often a subjective judgment, perhaps they are, for some. I'm reminded of something a wise friend noted in the context of a fairly recent discussion: even the most imperfect, broken, and egregiously hypocritical gurus can inspire hope in many people.
Sometimes that's a good thing, sometimes not. All too often, what the New-Wage gurus do is simply inspire a transitory exhilaration. When the high wears off, the seekers scurry in pursuit of the next level or the next guru or teaching, and many use these as steppingstones, hopping from one charismatic personality or teaching to the next one to the next, in order to avoid the mundane or painful reality of their own lives.

I am not saying that every "serial seeker" is trying to avoid life; to the contrary, many are trying to confront it head-on, and spiritual shopping is their means of doing so. Shopping around surely beats resolutely sticking to something that's not working for you. But the point is that one can't entirely blame the gurus for taking advantage of a ready market.

At any rate, the traits and techniques of gurus have been analyzed in painful detail by greater and more thoughtful minds than mine. Janaki herself seems to have a pretty good handle on the dynamics of the guru/follower relationship, even though she still seems to be in seeker mode, though in a much less cultish way now. On her blog she refers several times to the unassuming nonduality lecturer Tony Parsons, who actually has some interesting ideas. Be that as it may, she is right on the button about many things, including this passage where, in simple language, she explains what commonly drives guru/workshop junkies:

Most of the people that I know who do The Work, do it to get out of a bad feeling. In other words, to become happy. We all seek pleasure and want to avoid pain. There is nothing wrong with this. It is what we all want, all day long. However, people who keep doing this are noticing that it ultimately stops working, like any other substance that you use to alleviate pain. You need your fix faster and in a higher dosage.

At the risk of disappointing a few readers, I have to say that my post here will be neither the comprehensive analysis nor the skewering of Katie that some might long for. But I will share a few things that made me raise my eyebrows while reading Janaki's blog. The first two snippets are from Chapter 10, "Working for Katie":

I was in need of making money and I found a well paying job. I told Katie that it was becoming very difficult to combine making money and doing all the work for the Foundation. She offered to put me on the BKI [Byron Katie International] payroll. I agreed and then panicked. The next day, I went to her room and read her the one liners I had written. One of them was: ‘if I start to work for you, you will treat me as an employee and not a friend’. She said, ‘I probably will, I lie about this friendship thing, I am a self realization machine’. She asked me how much I wanted to earn and I asked for $ 2500 per month. Katie told me that she would expect me to work full time for this. Even though I was already doing this above and beyond the call of duty, I took her literally and for as long as I was on her pay roll, I took no weekends off and no vacations. The agreed salary only lasted a few months. Soon I received a phone call from the manager at the head quarters, telling me that BKI was almost bankrupt, and would I work for $ 1000 a month. I told him I would, and I asked him if they would let me know when they were solvable enough to pay me my regular salary. They never did. Finally, when I felt that things must be financially sound again (after 1 year), I requested and received my regular salary.
......
[Katie] told me that she and Stephen [Mitchell, her husband and frequent co-author] had made a pact with each other. She said that if ever either one of them would attract a disease that would involve a slow dying process, they would throw a party, invite all their close friends and both drink a death cocktail.
At the time, even though this information overwhelmed me, I cheered what she had said. But I remember the thoughts that followed later. I happen to think in pictures, so in my mind’s eye, the whole scene flashed before me. I thought, I wonder who gets to clean up the mess, after you are both dead? Would people be seen as accessory, if they know a suicide is going to take place and they don’t try to stop it? How are we going to explain to the world that both the authors of a book called Loving What Is, just committed suicide and one of them was perfectly healthy? And what about all those sessions where she does The Work with people who have cancer, and asks them, ´Do you love your cancer yet?’
Could this be an example of, ‘Do as I say, not as I do’?

In a brief chapter (15) called "Katie Goes Blind," Janaki reports:

Katie was losing her eye sight. In one of the newsletters she announced she had succumbed to a genetic disease called Fuchs Dystrophy, and finally, after she was almost blind, she had a cornea transplantation that restored her eye sight fully.
What struck me was the word genetic.

I was in the car with Katie and some others, when a friend asked her which thought causes blindness. Katie started to go into an explanation about metaphorical blindness, when my friend told her she was actually talking about Katie’s physical blindness that was going on. Katie then told her that her blindness had nothing to do with a thought, that it was a genetic condition.

I remembered how Katie used to say, Body follows mind, and there are old tapes of Katie sessions where she actually said to people, ‘that’s how you cancer you’ and ‘that’s how you heart attack you’. I have never heard her say, ´that’s how I blind me’.

Hypocrisy. Inconsistency. Egotism. Money-grubbery. Yawn...just another day in the life of a New-Wage guru. The more important question is, does The Work work? Like anything else in the New-Wage bidness, that's debatable. For many, though, it doesn't seem to live up to its promise of "ending all suffering." Janaki writes in Chapter 37, "The Downside of The Work":

I know people who made the conscious decision to stop doing The Work and who felt greatly relieved. One particular person I am referring to here was doing The Work all day long, to get out of her anxiety. She said that she found a therapist who claims that he is treating a lot of people whom he has advised to stop doing The Work because it doesn’t seem to help them and it increases their sense of shame and guilt.

There was a girl in one of the recent Schools in the States. During one of the sessions Katie had done The Work with someone.

Afterwards this girl stood up and gave Katie feedback. She commented that she actually didn’t experience Katie as kind and that she also didn’t feel it was very appropriate what Katie had said. Later on in her room, she was visited by a staff member who gave her the message that Katie wanted her to pack her bags and leave immediately. I personally have witnessed this before, that people were asked to leave a School. Katie’s explanation was, ‘it can hurt the curriculum’.

Following that, Janaki says that Katie's take on it is that if people don't like that sort of behavior from her, they can do The Work to work on it.
And so on. You can read Janaki's blog at http://janakisstory.wordpress.com/. A PDF version is available at http://www.theworkingcompany.nl/story.html.**

Finally, one of the most recent comments on the Rick Ross forum concisely describes the workshop hypnosis effect that, of course, is far from a uniquely BK phenomenon. (I've experienced it myself at one of those "crying and screaming" workshop series, which I should probably write about.) This is from a participant using the handle "Meadow":

It has been said before on this forum, but I don’t think it can be said enough, just so that people are warned before attending one of BK’s programmes.

This video shows how [magician, illusionist, and mentalist] Derren Brown robs someone of their possessions by just asking, while using the conversational hypnosis technique. [www.youtube.com]

That is exactly what Byron Katie does. She robs people just by asking. She is clever enough to warn them by announcing that if they want their possessions back, then now is the time to come and get them, because after this they won’t get them back. After this they belong to HER. It has been told before on this thread, BKI's offices are stacked with laptops that came to them through this 'Giving' exercise.

First people have been worn out emotionally through all the crying and screaming sessions. They are on a full ‘workshop high’ by the last day of the school, they have been detoxing and are going through withdrawal through enforced fasting. They are completely infused with the ‘love bombing’ atmosphere. They feel very intimate with complete strangers. They think they are part of a peace movement that is going to end war on this planet. So naturally they will give her anything she asks for. The criminal part is that this whole thing is being presented under the pretence of 'voluntary'.
But Byron Katie is very aware of the fact that, in a crowd of 300 people, it is very hard for a lot of people to ask for their possessions back. They think they will be seen as Indian givers. They feel ashamed and weak if they did so. They don’t want to feel they failed this last precious exercise. They don’t want to lose face in front of the crowd.

The correct term for this is STEALING, and Byron Katie is nothing short of a common THIEF.

At least (if I may digress momentarily) the above-mentioned magician Derren Brown doesn't pretend to be a spiritual leader; whatever he may have tried to get away with in previous endeavors, these days he knows he's an entertainer. (Plus, he gives people's stuff back to them after he takes it.) I've long said that much of selfish-help/New-Wage is expensive entertainment masquerading as something much more profound. The paradox is that in order to keep it truly entertaining, both guru and follower have to pretend, on some level, that it's all for real. Anyhow, this is from the "Criticism" section of the Wikipedia page about Derren Brown:

In his book Tricks of the Mind, Brown writes, "I am often dishonest in my techniques, but always honest about my dishonesty. As I say in each show, 'I mix magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship'. I happily admit cheating, as it's all part of the game. I hope some of the fun for the viewer comes from not knowing what's real and what isn't. I am an entertainer first and foremost, and I am careful not to cross any moral line that would take me into manipulating people's real-life decisions or belief systems."

But back to Katie. What struck me even more than the blatant-thievery aspect of the BK workshops was the bit about the workshop attendees feeling they are "part of a peace movement that is going to end war on this planet."
At least the original Woodstock attendees had acid (brown or otherwise) for an excuse. Eventually those hippies grew out of the hallucinogenic phase...well, sort of. A lot of them are now attending New-Wage workshops.

* Of course, the phenomenon of sudden enlightenment is nothing new. Whatever its physical, emotional or spiritual causes (and results) may be, it has a loooooooong tradition. Forty-four years before Werner's experience on the bridge, Bucky Fuller (who is often wrongly credited with inventing the geodesic dome), supposedly had one of those enlightening/out-of-body experiences that led to a life of brilliant innovation, though that story is also suspect. (This is not to discount his subsequent accomplishments in the real world, only to question the veracity of his "awakening" story.) And of course, there was Paul on the Road to Damascus. (You can question that one all you want, but true believers won't budge, and Paul's enlightenment experience did land him a major role in a book that has sold more copies than even The Secret. Paul's revelation has had a lasting influence on the beliefs and actions of uncounted millions, and therefore on history itself.)
And so on. Much has been written about enlightenment/revelation as a spiritual phenomenon, but it seems to me that the most lasting product, at least of famous folks' enlightenment, is the story/legend of how that enlightenment came about. That being said, for some really worthwhile thoughts on enlightenment, you need to check out Blair Warren's No-Nonsense Guide.

** In January 2010, Janaki added an interesting update to her blog. Here's the link.

* * * * *

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Greetings from the "lower levels"

I've previously snarked, albeit briefly, about Dr. David R. Hawkins, inventor of the Hawkins Scale, which purports to be a "map of consciousness." Or, in light of the fact that Dr. Hawkins seems to be extraordinarily protective of his work, perhaps I should capitalize that and put a TM sign after it or something:

Map of Consciousness ^TM

There. I feel better.

Anyway, as it turns out, Joe "Mr. Fire" Vitale is a big Hawkins fan, as he explains in a recent blog post:

I’m a big fan of David R. Hawkins. He’s the medical doctor/psychiatrist who cured himself of various illnesses and went on to muscle test his way to Nirvana. He’s either enlightened or at least mapped out the path to enlightenment. His “map of consciousness” — a roadmap of our spiritual evolutionary potential — is brilliant...

And he goes on to 'splain more about why Dr. Hawkins is so brilliant.

Shockingly, a somewhat cynical response came in to Joe's post, but Joe rose to the occasion:

# mark says
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…oh I’m sorry what are you trying to sell?
April 29th, 2009 | #

# Joe Vitale says
Yes, Mark, what AM I trying to sell here?
Blessings,
joe

Perhaps I am reading it wrong, but it seems to me that Joe is implying to "Mark" that he is not, after all, trying to sell anything. Knowing Joe, however, I think we can safely assume that he is always selling, and that his Hawkins blog post is no different. (The fact that he conveniently provides links to some of his products in the post would be one indication.) To me that is no big deal; after all, he created his blog to promote himself and his products, and he does a superb job of that.

In this post, though, he seems to be selling more than products or services. Apart from my hunch that he either has or is planning some lucrative joint-venture deal with Dr. Hawkins (after all, he rarely wastes time or energy promoting something or someone unless there's a direct payoff for him), what Joe seems to be selling is something a bit more abstract than a product. He is clearly promoting himself as one of those higher-consciousness types, Hawkins-Scale-wise. Which comes right back down to selling stuff, because golly, who wouldn't want to buy a few books or workshops from such an evolved being?

For us lower-level types who might find Dr. Hawkins' work confusing, Joe offers this advice:

I’ve twittered that I was reading [Hawkins' new book] Healing and Recovery and some people said they found Hawkins confusing. Ironically, that makes sense, as Hawkins’ “map of consciousness” reveals where you are mentally.

If you are at a lower level (in fear, for example) his higher levels (acceptance, for example) won’t make any sense to you.

If you are on the lower level of desire, the higher level of unconditional love won’t compute to you.

I’ve been saying for some time now that life is a process of awakening. The goal is to keep going up the ladder of consciousness. By reading David Hawkins — especially this recent book — you can gently expand your thinking, open your heart, and glide upwards.

As a wise friend of mine noted, "Under the guise of informing his readers about Hawkins, he sets himself as someone with a superior 'consciousness,' one greater than his readers. It's a complete power play. I guarantee that when the comments start coming, at least one of them will be something like 'I can't wait until I am at your level, Joe!'"

According to Joe's post, Dr. Hawkins claims that every single line in his book Power Vs. Force was "tested" to, as Joe put it, "be sure the entire volume calibrated at a high level and would be spiritually enriching to read." Joe adds, "As an author, I can’t imagine muscle testing every line in a book. Hats off to you, David."

When I first heard of the Hawkins Scale, I wondered how people were measured or tested. Were they hooked up to some kind of high-tech machine? Nope, apparently it's all done by "muscle testing" via an alt-healing discipline known as applied kinesiology, or AK. According to some of its proponents, AK is a "lie detector" or rather a "truth detector" – it uncovers the "Truth with a capital T!" in any situation, as Joe might say. How books are tested I couldn't say, since books do not have muscles. They do have spines, though, and AK was invented by a chiropractor (George Goodheart, D.C.), so maybe it all works out.

I found more information about the Hawkins Scale and other scientifical consciousness-measuring/raising stuff on the blog of faithful Joebot Frank Butterfield, who describes himself as "a channel for the Communion of Light based out of Austin, Texas."

Some really big numbers
Now, suppose you are really ambitious and want to raise your vibe level waaaaaay above the ultimate Hawkins number of 1,000. Never mind that Jeezus H. Christ, Buddha, etc. were 1,000, and Hawkins himself is something like a 999.8. (And according to this web site, the SpongeBob Squarepants movie scores a fairly impressive 385. Yes, really; I wouldn't lie about something that important.) But let's say 1,000 isn't good enough for you; you want to go higher. Is such a thing even possible? You betcha! At least it is possible if a guy named Bryan James and his Indigo kiddos still perform frequency accelerations for people.

Come to think of it, I haven't received any emails from the James Gang in a long time. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that some time ago, my name was apparently dropped from what I once frequently referred to as "my favorite New-Wage spam service." Either the spam service went out of business, or they finally figured out that they were a rich mine of nuggets for my Whirled. As for the frequency-accelerating James family, I am sure they're busy with all sorts of enlightened projects. But I do wonder if they ever finished their project to empty out Hell, a topic on which I once reported fairly often.

Remind me to Google that and see if there are any updates.

But I digress. I am sure that Dr. Hawkins has nothing to do with the James family, and vice versa. And perhaps it is unfair of me to have even mentioned them in a blog post that is supposed to be about Dr Hawkins, although I have to say that the James' numbers are pretty impressive, according to the blog post I linked to above. Bryan James' daughter Katherine scored 900 Unvigintillion, and his son Kevin scored 500 Novemdecillion. His wife Lisa? A mere 240 billion. But still.

All snarking aside (well, not ALL snarking, but MY snarking), Robert Carroll, of The Skeptic's Dictionary / Skepdic web site, has some interesting comments on applied kinesiology and David Hawkins. He writes:

...AK has some formidable proponents, such as psychiatrist-cum-guru David Hawkins. He claims, among many other things, that he has proof that AK is a reliable "lie detector" and can be used to determine the truth or falsity of any statement. Hawkins also has developed a "scale of consciousness" and uses AK to determine how "enlightened" a book or person who wrote the book might be.* Hawkins claims he's calibrated The Skeptic's Dictionary at level 160, "which is that of sophomoric egotism."* Only 15% of humanity calibrate at above 200, according to Hawkins, so I'm in good company. By 'consciousness' Hawkins means some sort of developing spirituality. When you score between 700-1,000 you have reached "enlightenment." George W. Bush calibrates at 460, according to Hawkins, which is in the range of intellectual genius. (Need I add that Hawkins holds spirituality in high regard and has very conservative political values?) Hawkins goes so far as to claim that the Wikipedia article on him would calibrate at 400, instead of 200, if it removed the links to my criticisms.*

It's amazing how high the frequency of a piece of writing can rise when criticism is removed. And who knew Dubya is a bona-fide genius? I wonder how my blog would rate on the Hawkins Scale; I am thinking that it would probably be in the negative numbers. Or at the very least, it would be sharing the realm of "sophomoric egotism"* with The Skeptic's Dictionary.

A more balanced perspective
My friend David Portney, a public speaking expert, has extensive experience with applied kinesiology. David, who hangs his hat neither in Snarky Town nor in the Village of True Believers, has kindly given me permission to share his perspective about this whole Truth-o-meter thing:

I've trained extensively in AK and Touch for Health; I actually did take the 100 hour ICAK "for Doctors only" training with Robert Blaich. I have a ton of experience in this area and have been on both sides of the AK treatment table for many, many years. I feel very qualified to speak out on the topic of what AK and/or muscle testing can and cannot "do" or more specifically, discern.

When I heard that Hawkins was claiming to be able to use AK/muscle testing to discern the Truth of A-N-Y-T-H-I-N-G, I could instantly find a few major holes in such a proposition (I'll spare the details here).

I then sought out and read Power vs. Force, and although I would say that this is an important work, the MAJOR problem (even after reading it closely and investigating his testing procedures) is his claim about discerning Truth using muscle testing.

In my direct experience, in the hands of a trained expert, AK/muscle testing can be used to uncover various kinds of imbalances and determine the needed correction(s). It takes some exposure to AK to get past the "this has to be bullsh*t" phase because it seems quite odd all the way around, but then when your problems start going away, it's pretty hard to argue with results, and it's definitely NOT a placebo effect. Beyond being treated by AK, getting in-depth "doctor level" training then pulls back the curtain, revealing the how and why it works the way it does. AK is some pretty serious stuff.

However, although Hawkins is far more credentialed and experienced than I am, I take SERIOUS issue with his claim to discern Truth via muscle testing. I can't even find a tiny glimmer of validity to his claim to be able to do so, not even a slight opening that might sway me in that direction.

I think his claim to discern Truth via muscle testing is just plain wrong. Yes, AK is a valid and important tool for detecting and correcting certain body imbalances when used by well-trained, sober, experienced persons.... But discern Truth in any context – past, present or (by his own admission limitations on future) future?--no. Uh-uh. Negative. Not-gonna-do-it.

It seems weird to me that this highly credentialed, experienced guy (Hawkins) could write such an important book with a ton of great observations and insights in it - yet at the exact same time make the foundation for everything in it based on what I see as a claim that just isn't true. The only thing I can figure is that perhaps he "needed" to provide some kind of *irrefutable" support for the points and assertions he makes.

Being highly AK trained, I performed my own little "Truth via muscle testing" experiment - I wrote down about 60 verifiably false statements (e.g., Tracy [my GF] was not born in Japan) and verifiably true statements (David was born in the United States), put them all into separate little envelopes, cleared Tracy of anything that might interfere with getting a proper muscle test, then blind-tested all the statements for "truth"; the results were all over the map - in short, no different than random chance.

It's worth noting that Hawkins claims to have discerned truth in 100% OF THE TESTS, WITH 100% OF THE TEST SUBJECTS.

Now, that is a very interesting claim indeed, Dr. Hawkins. I guess the good doctor just has a way of pulling the Truth out of everything and everybody. Or maybe just pulling his own "truth" out of his...oh, never mind.

Well, Dear Ones, I must get back to doing whatever it is we denizens of the lower levels do with our time. I'll have more soon!

*One wonders how the Hawkins Scale would categorize Mr. Fire's constant mentions of his fame, his expensive cars, etc. Graduate egotism, perhaps?

The more things change...

I have a collection of old Reader's Digest magazines that I found in my grandmother's basement years ago. Though it's not a complete collection by any means, the issues, which range from 1937 to 1967, provide some fascinating insights into the things that preoccupied America and the rest of the world in decades past. Magazines can do this in a way that books can't. That's why I am hopelessly hooked on old magazines, even the musty ones that make me sneeze and wonder if I am in danger of getting some gawd-awful ailment from ancient mold spores. It's a risk that we diligent researchers have to take sometimes.

Today while I was in the...um...reading room, I was flipping through a copy of the October 1967 Digest, and came across an article condensed from Today's Health, a general-readership magazine from bygone days (it was published by the American Medical Association). The article was titled, "The Menace of Mail-Order Medicine," penned by one Ralph Lee Smith. I would imagine that this is the same Ralph Lee Smith who wrote the 1960 book, The Health Hucksters: The Shocking Story of How Food and Drug Advertising Exploits Your Health. He also authored a 1969 book called At Your Own Risk: The Case Against Chiropractic, which several Amazon reader-reviewers said was biased and outdated. (Wrote one indignant reviewer: "The author was paid by the AMA to right [sic] this Third Reich dribble. Enough said.")

But this post isn't about chiropractic (and by the way, if you want one contemporary MD's view on chiropractic (among other "alternative" practices), click here). Nor is this about whether or not Ralph Lee Smith was paid off by those Nazis at the AMA. This is about an enterprising fellow who went by the name of Sri Dr. (or Dr. Sri) Abn Donahnji. You won't find much about him by Googling, but a few decades ago he was doing quite a brisk business helping people find health and happiness.

The good Sri Doctor placed a lot of ads, such as the one you see above, in the back pages of magazines. One of these ads caught the attention of a deaf-mute Georgia couple. For those who are offended, I'm sorry, but that's the way they were described in the article. Back in 1967 it wasn't politically incorrect to refer to people as "deaf" or "mute" or even "dumb." The copy that attracted the hearing-and-speech-impaired couple read, in part:

Dr. Abn Donahji, Yogi Healer and Clairvoyant Reader, will solve your problems.

Full of hope, the two wrote to Donahji, explaining that the wife was suffering from cancer and asking if Donahji could help. Well, of course he could! Donahji told the couple that he had cured many people of cancer through his psychic powers; for a $5 weekly "donation" he would cure the ailing wife.

And so the couple promptly began sending him their weekly payments of five bucks, the equivalent of thirtysomething bucks a week in today's dollars. In return, they would periodically receive letters from Donahji assuring them that "the vibrations are building up favorably."

Alas, within a year the woman died of cancer anyway.

Though the Digest article isn't clear about whether the subsequent investigation into Donahji's affairs was in direct response to a complaint by the grieving widower, the fact remains that postal inspectors did at some point begin investigating the mysterious "healer." They discovered that "Sri Dr. Abn Donahji, Ph.D., D.D.N.S."* had actually been born Donald Van Dyke Wilson in Des Moines, Iowa. At one time he had been an assembly-line worker in Detroit, but then he moved to El Lay, where he hit upon the idea of becoming a healer. Changing his name and donning a turban, he studied a bit of esoterica and picked up enough of an "occult vocabulary" to fool Californians. Now, we know that Californians are harder to fool than just about anyone anywhere, so this guy must have been really, really, really good.

The new Sri-Doc set up shop in a house that he renamed "Brmhayati Temple," and hung out his shingle as a spiritual healer, prophet, and marriage counselor. Before long he had acquired a local following, and ads placed in various occult and astrological publications brought him a nationwide clientele. As author Smith put it, "The swami from Des Moines was soon living in a fine house and cruising around in a gold Cadillac."

After an exhaustive investigation, which revealed the extent of his mail-order "medical" practice, Donahji/Wilson was indicted for mail fraud. His files were impounded by postal inspectors and US marshals, who uncovered correspondence with 4,000 people from coast to coast. These folks had been paying Wilson for services such as treatment of cancer, heart disease and multiple sclerosis – treatments that consisted essentially of "setting up vibrations." In addition, he sold his "patients" copper bracelets with "health-giving properties" for prices ranging from $18 to $76 each. (The wholesale cost of the bracelets was a mere 37 and a half cents.) In all, he had brought in about $400,000, which, in 1967 dollars, was equivalent to more than $2,500,000.00.

He was convicted and sent to jail, and, as far as I can Google, never heard from again.

All I can say is, thank goodness we're all far more sophisticated today, and a phony "healer" like Sri-Doc Donahji/Wilson would never be able to fool so many people for such a long time. And if by some odd chance he did manage to get away with it for a while (and he was working in the US), the Federal Trade Commission or some other government agency would come down hard on him and throw him in the slammer, especially since we have much more stringent consumer protection laws now than we did back in the prehistoric 1960s. And once he'd been to prison, the scammer's reputation would be forever ruined, and he would never be able to scam people again.

I'm truly grateful to be living in more enlightened times.

* Presumably Sri Doc's "degrees" were phony. Thank Goddess people can't get away with THAT these days either.

All I need is a miracle...

Note: This post contains some highly scientifical and mathematical technical stuff. In light of some of the subject matter – and you'll see what I mean in a moment – I probably should have published this on Square Root Day, which was 3-3-09 – but, hey, better late than never. I'm certainly not going to wait until the next Square Root Day, which will be on 4-4-16, nearly three and a half years after the world may or may not be scheduled to end. So I settled on Equinox Day. I would call it the first day of Spring or the Spring Equinox, but it's the Autumn Equinox in Other Parts of the World (although, just to add to the confusion a little bit, Autumn officially began in Australia on March 1).

* * * * *

What if you're in a hurry?
What if you need a miracle fast?
What if things for you are urgent and you are desperate?
What then?
That's when you have to pull out all the stops and get help. But not from just any one person, but from a special group of people who are helping each other to achieve real world results.
I'm talking about a new online community where you can state your intention and others can hold that very intention for you...
~ Joe Vitale, from an email promoting his Attract Miracles online community

The teaser page for Joe "Mr. Fire" Vitale's Attract Miracles site bears this large and compelling headline:

"What Would Happen if 8,185 People Held an
Intention for You Personally?"

In the weeks before the site went live in December of 2008, the headline on that page was followed by a mention of "the Maharishi Effect," and then the customary excited but vague promises about the miracles and wonders in store for participants. After the site went live, however, the Attract Miracles page changed. The promises were still there, the bit about the 8,185 folks was still there, but mention of the Maharishi Effect had disappeared. It lives on, however, in Joe's December 4 blog post promoting the site, although he published yet another blog post about the site on December 20, sans any mention of the Maharishi Effect.

But let's talk for a moment about those 8,185 people. Who are these people, and why are there 8,185 of them? Joe claims that is the number of people needed to change the world. He explains that 8,185 is the square root of one percent of the estimated current world population of 6.7 billion souls. (I whipped out my trusty calculator, and by golly, that's pretty accurate.) And Joe's goal is to have at least 8,185 members in his online community, though he implies that he thinks there will ultimately be many more.

While Joe doesn't fully explain this part on the site, the significance of 8,185 is rooted (so to speak) in a "scientific" formula dreamed up decades ago by the late Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who first achieved world fame by briefly being guru to The Beatles in the late 1960s. Don't get me wrong: Joe does write about the formula on the Attract Miracles page, but he doesn't mention the guy who made it up in the first place.

The Maharishi originally predicted that if a mere one percent of the population of any city were to practice his Transcendental Meditation (TM) program, this would reduce crimes, accidents, and illness in that city. This phenomenon came to be known as the Maharishi Effect, and advocates claimed that it established a new formula for the creation of "an ideal society, free from crime and problems." A few years later, however, the "Extended Maharishi Effect" was invented...er..."discovered," and the critical-mass projection was lowered to the square root of that one percent figure, whatever it might be. How the Maharishi figured all of this out, I have no idea, but then again, I don't have a scientifical mathematical mind so I couldn't be expected to understand. (Actually, it probably had something to do with Vedic principles, but I'm equally ignorant in that area.) The important point is that for many years now the Maharishi's minions have been on a mission to prove the existence and efficacy of the Maharishi Effect.

As noted, however, the Attract Miracles page, as well as Joe's December 20 blog post and subsequent mentions of his online community, do not directly mention the Maharishi Effect at all. One other little detail has changed as well. Both the current Attract Miracles page and the December 20 post mention that "more than twenty-three scientific studies" prove the efficacy of group intentions and support. However, on the December 4 blog post, as well as in The Attractor Factor and other earlier writings, Joe wrote that there were nineteen scientific studies. For years it was "nineteen studies," and now it's "more than twenty-three." (Or in some cases, as in that email I quoted at the beginning of this post, it's merely "twenty-three.") The exactness of those numbers is what I find so interesting (Prime Number Day, anyone?). Perhaps four or more additional studies were made up... I mean...discovered between December 4 and the day the Attract Miracles site went live.

But I quibble. The point is that Joe's declarations about the "scientific studies" seem to be a major selling point of the Attract Miracles community, which is not surprising, as science appears to be a New-Wage guru's best friend these days, next to online diploma mills...um...I mean, "universities." (Joe himself recently invented a brand new branch of science, "neurometaphysics.") Regarding the scientific studies relevant to his Attract Miracles community, Joe offers various impressive-sounding factoids about how they were published in respected, peer-reviewed journals, and were independently verified. 

Oh, those pesky naysayers
As is the case with all of his posts, most of the comments to Joe's posts about the Attract Miracles community have been supportive. But at least one person challenged Joe on the "scientific" claims. This comment appeared on his December 20 post:

John Curtis says
Can you send information on where these studies can be found based on this statement above??
“Twenty-three scientific studies prove this kind of group support works.”

Although John Curtis did not provide a web site link, I am assuming that this is the same person who runs the self-help-fraud watchdog site (and is the brains behind Guru-Free Week and the Scammy Awards). As of this writing, Joe has yet to answer the question and I'm guessing he won't, but if he does, more than likely he'll simply refer Dr. Curtis to The Attractor Factor.
What Joe does not mention, either on his blog posts, in The Attractor Factor, or on the Attract Miracles site, is that virtually all of those "scientific" studies he cites were conducted and/or sponsored by people and organizations affiliated with the Maharishi's vast empire (can you say "confirmation bias," boys and girls?). Here's a source I bet Joe wouldn't cite, if he were citing sources to back up that claim about peer review: http://www.behind-the-tm-facade.org/mdefect-peer2.htm

More about the Fales and Markovsky study cited in the link above can be found here, on counselor and researcher John M. Knapp's very informative TranceNet site.

One of the most frequently mentioned Maharishi Effect experiments was a 1993 group meditation focused on Washington DC. According to a piece by John Olmsted on the eSkeptic site:

In 1993, 4,000 meditators gathered in Washington, D.C. under the direction of physicist John Hagelin. Hagelin predicted in advance that the meditations would drive down the violent crime rate in the city by 25 percent that summer. Despite the fact that the murder rate actually rose, Hagelin announced a year later that his analysis proved that the violent crime rate fell just as he had predicted. In his recent book he states that the meditators "function essentially as a 'washing machine' for the entire society."

John Hagelin, as many of you may recall, has been the Presidential candidate for the Maharishi-affiliated Natural Law Party. Hagelin also seems prone to a brand of hubris peculiar to TM-ers; in July of 2007 he claimed that the efforts of his group of meditators, the Invincible America Assembly, was going to create unprecedented prosperity for the US and make the Dow climb to 17,000 within a year. Hey, nice work, Hagelin, et al. According to the article linked to in the second sentence of this paragraph, the group also insisted that because of its efforts, there would be fewer hurricanes and better US-North Korea relations. Again, nice work, guys!

Critics have also pointed to the example of Fairfield, Iowa, location of the Maharishi University of Management, and home to a thriving TM community. Since 1979, Fairfield has contained the largest group of TM and TM-Sidhi practitioners in the US. Yet in that time, there have been several years in which violent crime and property crime in Fairfield and the state of Iowa actually increased.

I'm not dissin' meditation, but...
Just in case it isn't entirely clear, I am not arguing with the notion that meditation can reap personal benefits to the meditator. There seems to be a lot of credible evidence supporting the effectiveness of meditation in stress reduction, relaxation and in some cases pain management, for example, although serious TM advocates seem to be pretty adamant in their insistence that only their brand of meditation is effective. (And they tend not to talk about the potential harmful effects of TM on some individuals.)
At any rate, this isn't about about whether or not meditation, or even specifically TM, can help improve the physical, emotional, mental or spiritual health of individual practitioners. It's about whether or not a group of meditators can, by the simple act of meditating, influence external events such as crime or war or stock market fluctuations.

And, contrary to the claims of the Maharishi folks and purveyors of similar magic and miracles, those claims have not been proven by science. I will not go so far as to say that the Maharishi Effect has been been officially and thoroughly debunked, though many would argue that it has been. At the very best, it has never really been properly researched by parties who didn't have a clear pro-Maharishi/pro-TM agenda. At worst, it is, as former TM teacher Joe Kellett wrote on his excellent web site, Falling Down The TM Rabbit Hole, "incredibly outrageous pseudo-science."

Not that this has made a bit of difference to those who want to believe, and those who want to make money from those who want to believe. 

History, economics, and (of course!) quantum physics
Joe swears that the basis of his Attract Miracles community is completely scientific: "nothing woo-woo about it!" And even though the late "giggling guru's" name is not evoked on the Attract Miracles site, Joe does seem to be promoting the Maharishi mythos by implying that focused group meditations were responsible for everything from the end of the Cold War to a rise in the stock market. He writes [and my interjections are in brackets]:

Want world peace?
Then you'll be glad to know a long term meditation that lasted from 1988 to 1990 coincided perfectly with the end of nearly every major conflict including the war in Afganistan [sic] and even including the historic end of the Cold War. [And there have been no more wars or terrorist attacks since then, right? By the way, people such as Charlie Wilson, Joanne Herring, and Lord knows how many Afghan resistance fighters would be really interested to learn that the Soviet-Afghanistan war ended not because of their efforts but rather because of the mighty meditations of the Maharishi's minions.* ~ CLS]
Are you worried about the economy because of bad news about the stock market, housing prices, or a credit crisis?
Take heart because another experimental study by The Scientific Demonstration Project [another Maharishi-sponsored project ~CLS] showed group meditation corresponded to a dramatic 12% rise in the stock market. [And, of course, the stock market has been on the rise consistently. ~CLS]
I could go on, but there are too many studies to list here.
Over the last 50 years the scientific evidence of the power of group intentions has piled up - and yet the media doesn't mention a peep!

Hmmm. Maybe "the media" don't mention it because it's...well...bunk. Moreover, as the above-mentioned former TM teacher Joe Kellett wrote, "What gets totally buried is that there is a difference between 'correlation' and 'cause and effect.' In other words, just because two things happen in succession it doesn't mean that one caused the other."

By the way, I know I've written about this a few times before (e.g., here, to give just one example), but I can't let a discussion of group intentions pass without mentioning Joe (Vitale's) efforts to rally a large group of believers to tame hurricanes. He did it with Hurricane Rita in his "Help Me Stop Rita" e-newsletter/email blast in 2005 (and later claimed success at re-routing the storm and reducing it from a Category 5 to a Cat 2). Then when Ike threatened in 2008, he copied and pasted from the Rita email and sent out a "Help Me Stop Ike" blast...and, well, we saw how that one went.

More recently, Joe has made a stunningly generous offer to the many thousands of people who may have wanted to attend his third and final Zero Limits Ho'oponopono event with the famous Dr. Hew Len (Austin, Texas, April 17-19, 2009), but won't be able to do so in person. Alas, the $997.00 event, which was limited to 100 participants, is now sold out. However, Joe has decided to offer absentee tickets for only $100.00 per person. What do you get for your $100.00? Do you get a chance to "attend" the event in real time via the Internet, so you can at least watch and listen, even though you can't participate? Do you get a special DVD and MP3 of the event, and maybe a free signed copy of the book Zero Limits?

Nope, sorry – well, at least not as of this writing, although those are actually pretty good ideas. As of now, it appears that in exchange for your C-note you get to have your name written on a piece of paper, along with the names of all of the other absentee "attendees." But wait, there's more! During the event, all of the people in the room – including the great "Dr." Vitale and Dr. Hew Len, of course – will "clean" on you and your fellow absent ones. I don't think you even have to write down your issues or the things you want cleaned on; the Divine always knows. "Obviously," Joe writes, "being in the room and hearing Dr. Hew Len, myself, and everyone else, is the ideal, but if you can't make it there (since the event is sold out), being an absentee participant is the next best thing."

So even though you don't get anything tangible for that hundred bucks, you do get a chance to get worked on from afar by two of the greatest cleaning minds in the whole racket, with the assistance of a whole room full of people who spent nearly ten times more money than you did to be in the presence of those minds. Think of it like sort of a yagya, but with faux-Hawaiian elements (aloha-yagya?). Or think of it as just one more example of desperation marketing the powerful magic of group intentions. (And read all about it here.)

But back to the Attract Miracles group. Naturally, you couldn't have a proper New-Wage $cheme without the invocation of quantum physics:

For the first time in history people from all over the world can gather in a single place without having to physically meet.
Quantum physics and ancient spiritual principles reveal that we're all connected on an energy level.
In fact, studies have proven that time and distance doesn't [sic] matter.
That's why you can hold an intention for fellow members and that energy instantly reaches them.
But now we can connect on a conscious level in real-time, too.
That's because for the first time in history, the Attract Miracles website provides a place for you to go any time you want to connect with the energy of the entire community.

This is far from the first time that Joe has used quantum physics to give credence to one of his mercenary schemes, and, of course, he's far from the only one to do this. It's S.O.P. in the New-Wage biz these days.
But why is he playing down the Maharishi origins of Attract Miracles? My first thought was that he might be trying to avoid possible negative connotations – after all, the Maharishi has been widely criticized over the decades for being everything from a lovable kook to an egotistical sociopath bent on world domination – and Joe wants to attract as large an audience as possible. But my second thought was that he simply wants to stamp Attract Miracles with his own brand. Knowing Joe, the brand-consciousness motive sounds the most plausible, and I wonder how long it will be before we start hearing about "the Vitale Effect," which, no doubt, will be an improved version of the Maharishi Effect, with additional magical and powerful properties. Or, to paraphrase countless New-Wage marketers in the past couple of years, "The Vitale Effect takes up where the Maharishi Effect left off! It's the 'Missing Effect!'" In keeping with the square-root theme, perhaps Joe can exploit a whole new realm by inventing a formula for change that utilizes imaginary numbers. (Here's a cartoon he might be able to use for one of his presentations.)

And one more point before we leave the topic of numbers: Mr. Fire seems to display some numeracy challenges when he declares, on the Attract Miracles page, "Today I live with my love, Nerissa, in a multi-million dollar estate and I recently added a $375,000 Rolls Royce Phantom to my growing exotic car collection."

Apart from the fact that I wouldn't exactly consider a Rolls Royce to be an "exotic car," there seems to be another inconsistency in that copy. I'm not real great with numbers myself, but it looks as if Joe may be off a few dollars regarding that "multi-million dollar estate", that is, if he's talking purely in terms of its appraised value, which, according to publicly available information, is currently less than $320,000. Am I missing something? Is he counting the value of his cars too? Or perhaps the total value of the rural subdivision in which he lives?

IM, I said
You might say that the present Attract Miracles site has been a long time coming. Joe was talking and writing about those "scientific studies" about meditation and group intentions even before The Attractor Factor was initially published in 2005, and he hinted that he was planning to do something significant with a form of meditation he invented, which he calls "Intentional Meditation," or IM. He was inspired to create IM when he read a book called Permanent Peace: How to Stop Terrorism and War – Now and Forever. The author is Robert Oates, a senior policy fellow with – guess what? – Maharishi University of Management's Institute for Science, Technology and Public Policy in Fairfield, Iowa.

A few years ago Joe wrote that his mission was "to establish an Intentional Meditation Foundation with hubs around the world, all using my book, and the meditation I teach in it, to lower crime and increase wealth globally. Now THAT is more than a goal, it's a mission." In The Attractor Factor he dedicates an entire chapter to IM. And there's a fairly recent (post-Secret) web site devoted to IM as well. Joe explains that IM differs from TM in that it is request-oriented, that is, you use it to get the Universe to give you specific things:

In the IM formula that I just described to you, you are quieting the mind as in meditation, and even merging with all that is, but you are also placing a request with the universe. That request will radiate out and reach the people who can help you achieve it. From there, magic happens. I know much of this may seem strange, but I'm calling it an Experiment so you can find out, with me, just how powerful this system can be.

I'm just speculating here, but I have a feeling that IM, or something like it, is the focus of a book idea Joe mentioned last November on Twitter. According to his Twitter entry, he was writing a proposal for a book that would "save the world, heal all money problems, and cause lasting peace. But I might be dreaming big." (Oddly enough, two days after he Tweeted about that book proposal, he sent out an email to his list promoting his new book, Expect Miracles, and in that email he wrote that Expect Miracles will very likely be his last book. He said he had no additional books in the works and no plans whatsoever to write another one. Either he is kind of forgetful, or he is banking on the fact that his readers are kind of forgetful, or his publisher looked at the proposal and said, "Forgeddaboudit !")

Joe isn't the first to have big ambitions for a branded meditation program, of course; once again he seems to be taking his inspiration from the Maharishi, or, more accurately, from one of the late guru's more prominent and eccentric followers. Make no mistake about it: although the Maharishi has passed on, there are people working very hard to keep his legacy alive. For example, even though the Fab Four as a group became disillusioned with the Maharishi nearly forty years ago (and/or vice-versa, according to Deepak Chopra), the surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, are slated to headline a benefit concert on April 4** for the Maharishi-inspired David Lynch Foundation. One of the missions of the famously quirky director's foundation is to provide funds for teaching TM to at-risk kids so they can change the world from within. Part of this ambitious program involves taking TM into public schools.

I reckon that some of you cult-watchers will be alarmed at the prospect of the Maharishi's legacy seeping into our schools, but look at it this way: if at-risk kids are preoccupied with meditating, they probably will not be out killing people over a hit of crystal meth, or shooting their teachers and school mates, or setting wildfires, or, far worst of all, sending naughty pictures of themselves to their friends via their cell phones. Even so, the creation of vast new generations of TM drones is kind of an unsettling prospect as well, notwithstanding all those disclaimers on the TM.org site that TM is not a religion, philosophy or lifestyle, and that all TM instruction in schools is free and voluntary. Equally unsettling, for that matter, is Joe's own vision for the future of education, as mentioned here recently (first item).
Not surprisingly, Joe Kellett has something to say about David Lynch's big plans. Quoting from a July 2005 story about Lynch in the (London) Independent, he writes:

Furthermore, Lynch believes this:

Students who meditate, Lynch assured the New York Post yesterday, will: "Start shining like a bright, shiny penny and their anxieties will go away. By diving within, they will attain a field of pure consciousness, pure bliss, creativity, intelligence, dynamic peace. You enliven the field, and every day it gets better. Negativity recedes."
There's more. With his new outfit, Lynch also intends to ease tension for all the rest of us by putting together "peace-creating super groups of 8,000 meditators" around the world, who will all chant simultaneously for peace and harmony. It is important that each group [emphasis mine. ~ CLS] has 8,000 participants because "it's the size of the square root of one per cent of the world's population."

Hmmm. Is any of this beginning to sound familiar? Of course, the big difference is that David Lynch envisioned multiple groups of eight-thousand, while Joe's Attract Miracles community presumably involves only one group of eight-thousand-plus – a minimum of 8,185, to be exact. Maybe it's that extra 185 folks who give Attract Miracles the edge. Maybe it's the power of the Internet. Or perhaps Joe's magic is stronger than David's or the Maharishi's. Must be that Vitale Effect at work.

I don't know about those "hubs around the world" that Joe mentioned in some of his writings about IM (and that David Lynch seems to be advocating as well), but it appears that the Attract Miracles site is definitely set up to increase wealth – Joe's wealth, anyway, as well as that of his partner in the current scheme, Craig Perrine, who calls himself the Maverick Marketer (a name he came up with well before the McPalin campaign laid claim to the title of "Maverick").

As it turns out – and I know this will come as a shock to you – the Attract Miracles community is basically a multilevel marketing setup. It costs a mere $1.00 to join, but you get $12.50 per month for every person you refer, for as long as those people remain members. That sounds like an amazingly good deal till you get further down the page and discover that the $1.00 is just a trial membership, and after 30 days, you get to "keep the service" for "only" $37.00 a month ("less than a cable bill!" Joe enthuses).
It's kind of like a prayer circle, or, perhaps more accurately, like Marcy From Maui's Powerful Intentions site, except you have to pay actual money to receive the prayers or powerful intentions of other members.

Your definition of "skeptical" may vary...
For the benefit of those who might be skeptical, Joe has this advice, which is a variation on the New-Wage credo that although doubting is perfectly normal, it will only impede your "progress."

Truth is, the only thing stopping you is your own doubt.
Admit it. You're asking yourself things like...

• Will this really work?
• Will this really work for me?
• Should I trust this guy about what he's telling me?

All good questions, of course.
But it's that very voice of doubt that is keeping you from moving forward.
I know it's tough to swallow, but doubt is the reason most people don't take action, and consequently why most people stay stuck...

Joe eases the doubter's concerns with his "priority assurance policy," which he says is "beyond fair." Once you register, you gain instant access to the Private Members Area, and if you're not "thoroughly convinced" that AttractMiracles.com is for you, all you have to do is contact Joe's office within 30 days and your membership and access to the Members Area will be canceled.

I'm not sure how this reconciles with the fact that your trial period, the part that only costs a buck, is only seven days. Presumably if you cancel within that time period, you won't be charged $37.00 for your first month. Seven days seems to me to be a pretty short amount of time to determine whether or not something so momentously life-changing is working for you. The sign-up blurb (as opposed to the "priority assurance policy") says you can cancel any time, but, if I'm understanding it properly, it seems pretty clear that unless you decide within seven days that the community isn't for you, the Attract Miracles site is going to extract at least $38.00 from you. And maybe more, if you don't time your cancellation just right.

But $38.00, or maybe more, is chicken feed compared to all of the billions of real dollars, potential dollars and even totally imaginary dollars that are floating around Miracle Town. (Don't underestimate those potential and imaginary dollars, by the way. They can result in lots of real dollars for a few people. Funny how that works.) According to Tweets Joe posted on Twitter just after the Attract Miracles site went live, people were signing up like crazy for his new community, and miracles were being created left and right. To hear him tell it, this is a veritable miracle-making machine.

"What can it hurt?"
Perhaps you're saying, "Oh, come on, Cosmic Connie, enough already with this snarkastic stuff. You're only contributing to the overall problem of negativity, just like that nasty old mainstream media that largely created, and is certainly perpetuating, the so-called 'economic crisis.' Besides, even if mainstream science hasn't validated the Maharishi Effect and the power of group intentions, what can it hurt if people want to get together and support each other with their mutual positivity? And don't forget that members do get a lot of bonus products with membership, and they even get a chance to personally ask Joe questions, so at least they're receiving some tangible value for their thirty-seven bucks a month."

Joe himself implies that he's making a real sacrifice by offering membership so cheap. "Because of how much is included for members of AttractMiracles I've been advised to charge $97 or more each month," he writes. "I know I could and it would be well worth it, but I won't. I want to help as many people as possible." What a guy.

Since "value" is subjective, I won't attempt to argue this point. Joe does offer a bunch of free videos and other products for members, though some of it is available for free anyway (e.g., his December 2007 talk in Maui on creating "15-minute miracles"). I'm sure he also offers members opportunities to ask him questions, though you can also do that for free on his blog, and sometimes he even answers. (Alternatively, if you want access to him I suppose you could just pretend to be with some New-Wage magazine or film production company, and he'd probably jump at the publicity op.) Beyond that, however, I have no doubt that some people believe they are getting good value from their Attract Miracles membership. Just recently, f'rinstance, I saw a comment on Joe's blog from a guy named Barry Thomas Bechta, who thanked Joe for the value he is providing through the Attract Miracles community. And Barry ought to know value; after all, he's one of the people who was smart enough to invest $5,000.00 to ride in the back seat of Joe's Rolls-Royce Phantom.

Okay, so I'm still being snarky, and some might ask me how I am qualified to go on so much about something when I haven't experienced it firsthand myself. What could it hurt for me to invest a buck to take it for a test drive for a week? Am I really that cheap? Or am I, as more than one disgruntled reader has speculated, simply afraid of something I don't understand? Actually, I am afraid, but what I'm scared of is getting my sensitive information into an auto-payment agreement for something like this. (I keep thinking about the problems people have had with folks such as Joe's new pal Kevin Trudeau, although in all fairness I will say that the Attract Miracles site was apparently set up well before Joe met True-dough, and is most likely not affiliated in any way with True-dough. Kevin did give Joe some marketing advice about upselling, though, so that might be a red flag regarding some of his future enterprises, particularly if they involve infomercials.)

Besides, I would imagine that the Attract Miracles community only wants like-minded people, not snarky cynics. I'm sure that even as a lurker I simply wouldn't add to the positive energy they are trying to build. No, joining does not seem to be an option for me. But I'd be glad to hear from those who have joined and have found it helpful (or not).

As for the question, "What can it hurt?", I'll concede that on the surface the whole thing seems harmless enough for those who have $37.00 a month to spare, but a better question might be, "Is it really helpful?" And I don't mean that in the subjective, personal-experience/personal-taste sense. What I mean is, are there measurable positive results that can credibly be attributed to the group intentions of the Attract Miracles crowd?

While we're waiting for those measurable positive results, I'd say that if spending thirty-seven bucks a month to be a member of a New-Wage mutual masturb...I mean...cheerleading group will really make you feel better, go for it. You might make some new friends, get to do some networking, maybe even make a few bucks yourself. I will warn you right now, though, that you'll probably have to put up with a bunch of other people whining and moaning about their awful lives, or bragging about their small triumphs, as they sometimes do on Joe's blog. But remember, you're there to support them, and they're there to support you if only they can stop focusing on their own stuff for a few minutes.

Most importantly, of course, you'll be helping support Joe, and at least one of his cronies, Craig, in the style to which they've become accustomed. At the very least, you'll enable them to continue to buy those pricey Siglo cigars so they can sit around together with a couple of their other cronies and mastermind even more creative new ways to separate you from your money... I mean, to save the world. You really can't put a price on that.
All I'm saying is this: Don't delude yourself that you are participating in an experiment that has actually been validated by science. And don't blame me, or any of the other "naysayers," if that thirty-seven-dollar-a-month investment does not reap world peace, an end to crime, an ever-rising or at least stable stock market, or even the miracles that you so desperately want in your own life.

The monkey on our backs
By the way, when Googling for information about critical mass, group intentions, and spirituality, I came across this page, which is one of many that cites the "hundredth monkey" phenomenon. The hundredth monkey myth has been even more thoroughly debunked than the Maharishi Effect. Very simply, the monkey tale did not unfold as it has been spun by New-Wage believers, who were inspired by a 1979 book, Lifetide, by the late Dr. Lyall Watson. When pressed by skeptics, Dr. Watson ultimately admitted that the hundredth monkey phenomenon was, as he wrote in 1986, "a metaphor of my own making, based...on very slim evidence and a great deal of hearsay. I have never pretended otherwise." (Actually, he did pretend otherwise, at least until he was called on his pretense.)

Not that the truth really even matters. Some myths just never die. Especially the profitable ones.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I GOTTA find me a scam.

PS ~ In case you missed it earlier, here is the link to my November 2007 blog post about the Maharishi and related matters.
And here's a link to a TM discussion on RichardDawkins.net.

And here, one more time for your convenience, is a link to Joe Kellett's site, Falling Down The TM Rabbit Hole, which offers a detailed critical opinion of TM, including a good debunking of the Maharishi Effect.

Oh, and don't forget John M. Knapp's marvelous TM-Free Blog.
Last but emphatically not least, for another snarky but very knowledgeable perspective, do check out Jody Radzik's Guruphiliac blog; he has written extensively about the late Maharishi. In a recent blog post about the above-mentioned David Lynch Foundation and its mission to get TM into schools, Jody wrote:

TM™ is not secular meditation. TM™ is a religion, and a destructive cult in every sense of the word. While we agree that meditation is good for all regardless of faith, TM™ meditation comes with so many strings attached to a wildly fantastic mythology (including all their so-called "science") that you may as well be dunking kids in full-on Christian baptisms.

Amen, Brother Jody.

Addendum 29 March, 2009: Skeptico wrote a good post about a related topic, remote healing and the power (or lack thereof) of focused intentions. This was in response to an article on distance healing that recently appeared in the Huffington Post. Here's Skep's take on it. Darn it all...more inconvenient truths for miracle seekers and sellers. But read it. It's good.

* If you're interested in that Afghanistan-Russia conflict, From That Flame is a fascinating fictionalized account involving one of the heroes of that war. Oddly enough, there is no mention in the book of the Maharishi Effect. (In the interests of full disclosure: The publisher of this book is a friend of mine, but I'm not getting any compensation for mentioning it.)

** Gullibalooza alert: If you can't make it to the David Lynch wingding, don't worry. Also on April 4 is a big to-do at the Unity Church of Dallas: the Conscious Community Expo & Concert, sponsored by The Peace Project. There will be messages, lectures and performances by scads of New-Wage luminaries, including Mr. Fire himself. According to the write-up on The Peace Project's web site, the rationale behind the big expo/concert is that "a collective, united consciousness has been scientifically proven to manifest results." The event is the culmination of the Peace Project's 10-month-long "Crime Reduction/Peace Enhancement Study" for AGNT (the Association for Global New Thought). One stated purpose of the gala is "to provide each community that uses THE PEACE PROJECT protocol substantial proof that these kind of community events are effective in increasing harmony and reducing crime – without cost to their city." Sound familiar?

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