Excerpt from chapter three 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.
The official language for this is 'planetisation' or 'globalism'. 'The Aquarian Conspiracy' is Marilyn Ferguson's term for the conscious effort by the NAM to 'win cultural dominance over secularism and traditional religion'. 185 Their target areas are health care, psychology, education, business and politics (ibid.). Miller reminds us that while there is no central organisation orchestrating the activities, it would 'be wrong to assume that there is no conscious collusion' between all the elaborate networks that feed into the same policies worldwide (ibid.).
Networking is essential to the NAM as its interests cover the whole of society. Since the 1970s networking has become the way that NAM mobilises its adherents with regard to numbers, but also to pool its resources. For example, those interested in politics work together; those interested in education collaborate, just as they do in health, social and religious matters. They contact each other through an international computer-based system called 'Peacenet' which acts as an information pool.186
NAM is targeting the schools: As Brooks Alexander has observed: 'In the ideological contest for cultural supremacy, public education is the prime target; it influences the most people in the most pervasive way at the most impressionable age. No other social institution has anything close to the same potential for mass indoctrination'.187 The infiltration of education began in the 1960s with the introduction of 'humanistic' elements. This was followed in the 1970s with 'transpersonal' or 'holistic' education. By 1980 Marilyn Ferguson could write that 'the deliberate use of consciousness-expanding techniques in education, only recently well under way, is now in mass schooling'.188 Children are taught 'right brain' activities such as meditation, Yoga, guided imagery, chanting, and fantasy role-playing games. Children are, therefore being led into psychic experiences on the premise that this will improve their performance in learning, and help them to gain control and remain calm (ibid.). Of course there is nothing wrong with meditation, guidedimagery and role-playing if the teaching is Christian both in content and in direction.189
NOTES
(Full details of the publications referred to in these notes can be found in the Select Bibliography).
185. Ibid., p. 90.
186. One computerised network which furnishes access to people, research and places is Box 18666, Denver, Colorado 80218. Tel: (303) 832-9264; also Nucleus, 188 Old Street, London EC1. Tel: 01-250-1219. This is a data bank on more than 6,000 NAM groups in the UK. An extensive list of addresses for NAM Foundations and networks is found in The Aquarian Conspiracy, Marilyn Ferguson pp. 465-471.
187. Ibid., p. 95.
188. Ibid., pp. 95-98.
189. Ibid..
