Excerpt from chapter four in: A Catholic Response to the New Age Phenomenon by the Irish Theological Commission in 1994. To see the contents of the whole chapter, click here.
"New Age Movement" is abbreviated as NAM.
A very difficult problem exists when NAM invades the work-place in the name of improved productivity and prosperity. Companies have now woken up to the fact that meditation techniques can help the work-force to unify, and to produce more and better quality work. So the question must be asked: Can these techniques be de-sacralised, that is, used without any religious content or overtones, as the NAM claims they can?
Elliot Miller has a very good discussion on this in his book A Crash Course in the New Age, pp. 98-102. He is speaking specifically about the American scene here, but many of the ideas are beginning to be used in Ireland also. The new language used for business seminars is TT, OD and OT among others. These are human potential seminars that promise greater motivation, 'vision' (to benefit the company), increased productivity and creativity (to benefit the company), improved teamwork and interpersonal skills, all of which should reduce absenteeism, and a lot of minor illness that disrupts the working and productivity of the company.
So, companies invite experts in Transpersonal technologies (TT) and the Movement for Inner Spiritual Awareness (MISA) to come along and transform the work-place. Once the individuals have been helped, then the company as a whole is helped by Organisational Development (OD) seminars which take them a step further in stress management for managers and employees, as well as interpersonal skills at different levels of the company. This in turn leads to OT training, in Organisational Transformation, where the company itself must see its place in the transformation of society, and develop its 'mission' in this field.
Here we have moved from planetising the individuals and groups within organisations to planetising the organisation itself. The methods used are typical of NAM. They consist of meditation, yoga, psychology, and all their related techniques. Miller says that the NAM leaders running these seminars met with practically no resistance because nobody believed that there was any connection with anything but the human mind involved.
Yet as we have already seen, it is not possible to de-sacralise these techniques. Instead, many people who have surrendered to these techniques report that they have ASCs and experience 'feelings of increased creativity, of infinity, and of immortality; they have an evangelistic sense of mission and report that both physical and mental sufferings vanish' (Miller, p. 94). Thus, instead of just relaxing, they have been baptised into psychic power and some are won over to the NAM itself, or to some other occultic grouping.
As Miller points out, the same things happen when these techniques are used in medicine to heal high blood pressure or other tension situations.
Miller quotes from the New York Times of 28 September 1986, which stated that 250 companies had admitted to using 'consciousness raising techniques', that these are the fastest type of executive development programmes in use. It also reported that the techniques used were meditation, chanting, dream work, the use of tarot cards and discussion of the 'New Age Capitalist'. Thirdly, it reported that executives from IBM, AT&T and General Motors met in New Mexico in July 1986 to discuss how metaphysics, the occult and Hindu mysticism could help their executives compete in the world market-place (p. 100).
There is nothing wrong in helping companies and their employees to function better as human beings, and as a group, but not at the price of their soul! Companies cannot presume to take over individuals as if they owned them. They have no right to impose a strange 'spirituality' on their employees just for the sake of prosperity, so great discernment is needed by the individuals involved. If this becomes commonplace here in Ireland, people will have to be alerted to their human rights to freedom of conscience, and freedom of decision regarding what techniques can be imposed on them in the name of productivity.
