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 trance channelling process involves the medium's personality being taken over by this other entity, so that the medium is 'absent' in some way. During the channelling the medium has no control over her body or any of her faculties. Both body and mind are operated by the spirit, who speaks, 'walks around' etc. through this person. During the seminar the spirit appears to use mass hypnosis on the audience while it teaches its doctrines, works miracles, and promises to work others. 46 Baer confirms that the revelations given through trance channelling come from the spirit world, but not from God. The source is the occult, but cloaked in words of love and light in order to deceive. 47
The type of teachings given by these spirit entities are: 'You are your own saviour'; 'there is no death'; 'love yourself and be happy' and 'You are god. Create your own reality'. 48 Their teachings are consistently occultic and anti-biblical. 49 The altered states of consciousness required for this trance channelling are usually induced by specific techniques, rituals, drugs and other volitional efforts of those involved. 50 Baer describes the NAM as Satan's web of 'luminous darkness'. 51 He claims that millions of people are allowing their lives to be guided directly or indirectly by these spirits through books dictated by them, or tape recordings of their sessions.
Helena Blavatsky warns her readers that 'one of the Seven Accursed Sciences - or the Seven Arts of enchantment of the Gnostics ... is now before the public, pregnant with danger in the present as for the future. The modern name for it is hypnotism. In the ignorance of the seven principles (used by occultists), and used by scientific and ignorant materialists, it will soon become Satanism in the full acceptation of the term' (capitals hers). 52 Here we have the greatest teacher of NAM pointing out the danger of using the technique of hypnotism, yet it is used widely and is considered to be harmless by society today.
NOTES
(Full details of the publications referred to in these notes can be found in the Select Bibliography).
46. Inside the New Age Nightmare, Randall N. Baer, pp. 103-4. See also The Beautiful Side of Evil by Johanna Michaelson,who was personal assistant to a psychic surgeon in Mexico for fourteen months, witnessed astounding feats which were acclaimed as miracles, and then went on to discern their source.
47. Inside the New Age Nightmare, Randall N. Baer, p. 99.
48. A Crasb Course in the NAM, Elliot Miller, p.169.
49. Ibid., p. 155.
50. StraightAnswers On The New Age, Bob Larson, ch. 5.
51. Inside the New Age Nightmare, Randall N. Baer, p. 20. See also Understanding the New Age, Russell Chandler, ch. 9.
52. Anthropogenesis: volume two of The Secret Doctrine, Helena Blavatsky, p. 641.
