Molding the Citizens of Tomorrow: Mindfulness and Manipulation
Here comes the submissive new world of feigned individuality meshed into universal oneness for the sake of the greater good – a world rejecting the moldy, cavernous halls of Christian cathedrals and synagogues while grinning like the Cheshire cat as it adulterously embraces everything but the Judeo-Christian. This new world system will forge all religions in the fire of socialist globalization in order to ensure a uniformity that is more easily corralled – because separateness and unique thought only breed rebellion that needs quashing.
You will be happy. You will accept everyone; including all immigrants who fail to assimilate and those who expect you to follow sharia law. You will love everyone – even those who want to run you down on the sidewalk with 5,000 pounds of gas-fueled metal. You will admire other cultures more than your own because you have so much to learn from them. You'll yearn for open borders and seamless societies, though a rebellious few will be shouted down for daring to speak of national sovereignty. You will be social justice warriors.
If a family from Madagascar come to your door escaping the plague, you'll ask them to dine with you and your children, because that is the socially just thing to do. If you still cling to some biblical notions, the church will have already taught you that rejecting the visitors is a mortal sin. It's only fair that everyone share equally in risking The Masque of the Red Death.
It's coming – it's already here – washing your brain with Mindfulness and spreading contagion from patient zero directly to your community via your local "interfaith" organization.
The same messages are coming at us from all directions. The pontificating Roman Catholic Church has numerous outreach programs urging us to empathize, sympathize, sentimentalize, and Share The Journey of the immigrant. Meanwhile, Mindfulness programs are teaching us the compassion we need to accept multiculturalism in anticipation of absentee drone-like global control. As one expert stated, Mindfulness is:
... just a deep knowing 'this is how things are' – that's the field out of which compassion arises – because you recognize 'Oh, we are connected. Our lives have something to do with one another.' So Mindfulness leads to insight, insight leads to compassion. Compassion rests on how we pay attention; so if I were to meet a stranger ... I remember 'look at them. Be here. Open.' Then the compassion might well arise.
So says author and famed Buddhist meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg in the 2015 CBS documentary Meditation, Mindfulness, and Spirituality. This Buddhist Transcendentalism-Taoist-Zen mixture has been skillfully repackaged into a seemingly non-religious, mind-numbing practice known as "Mindfulness" that's already swept the country, from pre-kindergarten classes to the workplace. The last few years have seen Mindfulness covered on all major networks and in books, and popping up in magazines completely dedicated to its practice.
Today's Mindfulness has its unusual roots in the teachings of Reuben Obermeister. The son of London diamond-cutters, he learned about human nature from watching vaudevillian hypnotists and African witch doctors. Obermeister is known to Americans as Roy Masters, founder of the Foundation of Human Understanding (FHU), which has sold millions of relaxation CDs (including to our military personnel) and has a dedicated, cult-like following. The now 89-year-old Masters, who still lives on his expansive compound in Oregon, has been at the center of many controversies. One of the biggest scuff-ups in my memory, which apparently hasn't gone away (and, according to the "Statement of Belief" on his website, he still hasn't resolved), is the fact that he claimed to be converted to Christianity but denied the Trinity.
For over a half-century, traditional conservatives have been drawn into Masters's counseling radio show, Adviceline. An article published in 2014 called Roy's son, Mark Masters, "The Godfather of Right-Wing Radio." They weren't that far off the mark. The founder of Talk Radio Network (TRN), Roy Masters, and his son, who took the mantle, Mark Masters, have wielded a huge amount of power and money while continuing to draw unsavory attention to themselves over the years. (The feisty elder Masters was arrested as recently as last month on menacing and harassment charges.) Still, nothing can change the fact that Roy Masters is credited by many as being "the Englishman who introduced America to Mindfulness meditation." Masters regularly refers to his own work as "Mindfulness meditation" on his websites while simultaneously dissing Eastern meditation. It's a masterful ploy to ensure mass appeal to naïve evangelicals who might open their wallets.
Masters's name appears on websites with other meditation moguls like Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, a teacher and master who oversees a global network of Buddhist meditation centers. Rinpoche is quoted in the CBS Mindfulness documentary saying:
I feel like within Buddhism, within meditation, we are being challenged more than ever. It's not just 'What would Jesus do? What would the Buddha do?' And that challenge is not just being held on the shoulders of leaders, but ... on the shoulders of individual citizens[.] ... [There's a] sense right now that we're at a crossroads, there's a real shift going on, and I think a lot of predictable measures of stability are no longer there[.]
This author would argue that the "stability that is no longer there" lies in the abandonment of traditional Christian and Jewish values that were the glue that held our society together. The age-old conundrum of creating a vacuum that will suck in the "worse things" has played out once again.
More than a few of the floundering '60s generation – motivated by the likes of The Beatles and the world-traveling Maharishi Mahesh Yogi – went to India to learn how to meditate, conveniently popping back into the 21st century to save people lost in the post-Judeo-Christian secular swamp they helped create.
One of the main perpetrators of this old but new movement is Goldie Hawn. Hawn's brainchild, MindUp™, works to get Buddhist concepts into children from pre-K to 8th grade. (Here she is with New Age guru Deepak Chopra explaining her life journey from go-go dancing to an "exploration of her own mind," which apparently led her to repeated trips to India to do the "Ganga Aarti" at the Dashashwamedh Ghat (a ritual prayer event for the River Ganges, which is worshiped as a goddess).
The unstated goal of programs like MindUp is to recreate the benefits of a Judeo-Christian society and biblical teachings without having to be constrained by that nasty old concept of God. One young woman with NYU Generation Meditation, being interviewed for the CBS Mindfulness documentary, expressed it best when she said, "I was always searching for this new way of channeling spirituality but not through a deity. I wanted a contemplative lifestyle practice that permeated everything." For Millennials, it fits in perfectly with the desire for a buffet-style belief system.
Schoolchildren, however, don't have a choice. It's a Machiavellian interfaith indoctrination that won't allow Franklin Graham into your child's classroom to share his views but welcomes Goldie Hawn with open arms because she won't pin the tail on a deity.
The CBS Mindfulness documentary was an "Interfaith Special." It's not a big leap from Mindfulness to your local interfaith organization. The Global Center for Academic and Spiritual Life at New York University was featured prominently in the show, and as the camera shows Muslim women gathering in the Center, the narrators tells us, "They are seeking a democratized way of being in whatever spiritual or religious space they are."
(Enter the burgeoning interfaith movement and the question of who is harnessing its widespread powers and lucre – but that's a subject for another day.)
Even the Mayo Clinic tells us, "Mindfulness is the act of being intensely aware of what you're sensing and feeling at every moment – without interpretation or judgment." We're already told that this leads to compassion for others, and that fits in quite nicely with Pope Francis's vision for expanding the social justice movement of the Catholic Church. Recently at a world congress in Rome discussing "Refugees and Migrants in a Globalized World: Responsibility and Responses of Universities," Pope Francis told his audience, "It is also important to reflect on the basic negative – sometimes even discriminatory and xenophobic – reactions that the welcoming of migrants is provoking in countries with a longstanding Christian tradition." (I guess he never asks himself why this is.)
From thousands of interfaith organizations across the country to the Catholic Church to the mindlessness of Mindfulness, there is a multipronged approach underway to mold hearts and minds into the one-world religion and one-world class that can be most easily manipulated by power-hungry globalists with the most evil of intentions.
Summing things up, I can't help but think of a quote from that genius of a television show, The Twilight Zone – an episode well known to enthusiasts, "Number 12 Looks Just Like You." When the powers that be get us just where they want us, we'll all be saying the same thing: "Life is pretty. Life is fun. I am all, and all is one."
Susan D. Harris can be reached at www.susandharris.com.