Hi, I have recently joined a new site..Gaia Souls, and I am becoming disturbed by some of the activity and posts. Most of the members seem to be gearing up for the 2012 ascension??? I am not a UFO believer and find the site has many cult like characteristics. There are a number of members who claim to be "contactees/channelers, etc." One member in particular, Dennis W. is very avid in encouraging this belief. I would love to have someone take a look at the site and give me some feedback with their impressions. Thanks www.gaiasouls.com

I will go there and come back later with a critique, but for now I want to ay that I am very concerned that the media has been sensationalizing 2012 apocaplyptic scenarios to an extremely irresponsible extent and I am afraid almost every cult that has serious self-destructive tendencies is going to create or experience a crisis because of that.

Vulnerable personalities need to be especially cautious in the meantime.

Here are a couple of useful pages on the warning signs to lookout for:

[www.culteducation.com]

and what you can do initially to help yourself or someone else:

[www.culteducation.com]

Actually, 2012 is very real! All believers should transfer their property to me on Jan 1, 2013 since the world will have ended and you will be safe in the Mothership!

I expect the media (to sell adverts) will ramp the 2012 paranoia up to a fever pitch. Just look at other recent and discredited bogeymen (Y2K, Swine flu, Avian flu, man-caused global warming, etc).

Maybe they can start to milk the super volcano at Yellowstone park's "pending" erruption as well.

Sparky, my uncle in Nigeria died and left a million dollars tied up in my estate. When it is clear I'll send it to you. But first send me your credit card numbers, ok?

New2this, I am looking at the site now. I will give you my critique in steps because I just fell out of my chair laughing at the first page.

The stuff that looks like Latin when you scroll down in the first page? Is that there to fool people? It is a basic pure nonsense paragraph that lay-out and graphic design artists have used for years to show a publisher what a page will look like with one typeface or another, before they have the actual copy that is to be printed. "Lorem Ipsum Dolor" is as familiar to print artists as "do you want fries with that?" is to burger waitresses!

Maybe this site is so new that they left that in while they prepare something for that space, but I never heard of anyone launching a site with Lorem Ipsum in it, before.

I will now go see what is involed in registering. BRB.

ok, I registered and I see what appears to be a typical new age social site except for one thing: the word "progressive" in the "Breaking News" section is purely political and usually identified with the atheist stalinist old left who have re-incarnated themselves in the left fringe of the Democrats since the "New Left" of the 60's fizzled out in a purple haze.

That is a major flag, IMHO. Those stalinists are violence-prone, and certainly have a lot of contempt for believers in any spiritual system because the "Progressives" are 100% materialist. Even though there has been a spiritualization of just about everything in recent years, I think they are more likely to exploit believers for martyrdom tactics than to participate in any kind of spiritual system, themselves.

I will explore the site further, but this is just my first impression.

New2this, care to elaborate on what caused you to get concerned?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/11/2010 09:12AM by dsm.

Except for the reference to "Progressive" which suggests a strong political activism, I don't see anything that is different from most of the other modern New Age social site. They have all the trappings: karma-talk, channelings, starseed children. But that is all ideology. "Cult" concerns are more to do with people getting sucked into group activities that ultimately turn self-destructive and also that this happens via some kind of deceptive or manipulative tactic that essentially short-circuits a person's ability to reject the group.

So, new2this, I guess I will just shrug my shoulders about it and not worry too much unless you can call my attention to somehting I missed. I looked over the forum and the events and I listened to a "ghostbuster" pod-cast.

I don't really mean this site is not cause to worry, this whole entire style of thinking of course gives us all plenty of cause to worry, but a style of thinking is not a cult. I remember being a little credulous about this stuff briefly, in my youth, but I did not join anything. Just read a few of the New Age books and soon outgrew their fantasy life.

dsm, thanks for lkg at the site. I guess my concern arose when one of the members got extremely defensive when I questioned his assertion that the oil rig disaster was a "conspiracy" and following that incident he posted an incredible item on the Glactic Federation of LIght or something, which a lot of the members seem to think is reality. The post I'm referring to is on re, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the member is Dennis W (Whitney) who is a journalist for "Strange Planet". Just seems bizarre to me that so many people would base their thinking on these kinds of ideas without realizing there is absolutely no basis in reality.
I also have investigated the new age stuff and agree with some of it as far as positive thinking/meditation/etc. goes and I joined the site b/c of the initial belief that it was more or less a green/ecological/natural lifestyle kind of thing...then I found myself in a group of Pleiadians/Starseeds and Ascenders!! All new to me...have stayed b/c there is so much weird stuff I have never seen before but I think my curiousity has reached an end. It certainly led me into some new and strange sites via Goggle tho'. thanks again for your response.

Well, new2this, I think that the group around that website do bear watching because there are a lot of these new-age apocalyptic cults and they have their own take on conspiracies and only a few will actually become activist groups.

Sometimes it is interesting to compare right-wing survivalists and new age starseed conspiracy theories just for entertainment ;) Conspiracy theories by themselves are not cults. They are the soil in which cults take root, however, because they grow on fear.

That being said, my experience with meditation groups is that the ones who emphasize the outer-space stuff often sabotage your self-esteem because when you pull yourself down to the very center of the meditation experience, there truly can be a feeling of vast emptiness, and that feeling can be interpreted and used in different ways. It is only one kind of meditative experience, and if the guru exploits the anxiety of the follower, he can convince the follower to believe in the ascension experience which can become a dangerous path to suicidal delusions. The mix of meditation with conspiracy-fear looks very bad to me.

We are not supposed to proselytyze so please take what I say with a grain of salt, because I now will speak from my own belief-base which is Catholic: Christian meditation also can reach that point of emptiness but will acknowledge it and will seek to fill it with the "Holy Spirit" or with Christ instead of telling you it means anything about starseeds, etc.

If you read the mystical saints like Saint Teresa d'Avila they describe that experience in plain language. Christian cultists might do the same as new-age cultists, which is they might try to lead you to that empty place and then place the local pastor or guru into it, but that would be an abuse. All traditional theology warns the meditating person to invite only Jesus Himself or the Holy Spirit to occupy that place, and warns the person to use prayer with the meditation. Furthermore all traditionally Christian theology also makes it very clear that your consciousness or your ego is not that place, and so you do not "channel" Jesus or the Holy Spirit as an individual, which I have seen some claim to do.

I am only posting this part so that you have something to compare while you study different approaches to meditation. Christian meditation is often called "Centering Prayer" and it is controversial because some cultists use it to build Christian cults around their own gurus. But the "Centering Prayer" and meditation as described by the old saints like Saint Teresa d'Avila in "The Book of My Life" (written in the 16th century, still in print!) is not controversial because it does not lend itself to creating new leaders or cult-control groups and a great deal of literature has grown around it for independent study.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/12/2010 01:25AM by dsm.