.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/17/2009 08:39AM by The Anticult.

on page 14, he tells a story about how he and they healed a woman's rare kidney disease with his own type of New Thought treatment (a type of alleged prayer, like Christian Science), and no transplant was needed.
Notice he did not tell that story on Oprah, and actually said the opposite about cancer.

But who is this woman with the kidney disease?
Where are the accredited documents for the healing?
Of course, there are no details, no names, no nothing.
Sadly, its a pitch out to those who are seriously ill, and desperate.

This Michael Beckwith is an extremely aggressive entrepreneur, he clearly will say anything.
and this is only by page 14 of 250 page book.

around page 88, Michael Beckwith is telling tall tales of meeting with a Shaman named Baba in Ghana Africa.
He says that these Shaman can shapeshift, (shamanic shapeshifting) and literally change their physical form. Baba an 80 year old man, changed himself into a woman, and his voice came out of a tree, telling Beckwith he was going to be involved in bringing "world peace".
(here is the delusional megalomania again, literally. You know you are a delusional megalomaniac when trees are telling you that you are going to bring World Peace).

Also, the rest of the people Beckwith was with on the trip, were not there at the time, he was alone with the Shaman, which is convenient.

This sounds like stories people used to tell when they dropped some LSD acid and went to party in the woods.
People have to be out of their minds to follow Michael Beckwith. This one is going to bite Oprah in the ass too.
This is very serious megalomania.



____________________________________
[www.amazon.com]
Spiritual Liberation: Fulfilling Your Soul's Potential by Michael Bernard Beckwith
Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: Atria Books/Beyond Words; 1st edition (November 11, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1582701997[/quote]

There are some analyses starting of "Dr." Michael Bernard Beckwith. It will take a while, but now that he is getting famous, some journalists will go and do some digging, and start to turn up some of the wacko stuff.

Its interesting that he uses the LSD comment below, without knowing about the Talking Tree that told Beckwith he was going to save the world.

Here is a blog article from Salon, that just starts asking a few questions about the "Dr." Beckwith.


_______________________________
[open.salon.com]
DECEMBER 27, 2008 11:45AM
The Kool-Aid Acid Test Redux

In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe examined The Sixties counter-culture’s experiment with "subjective reality”. Today’s counter-culture has its own “subjective reality”, one in which “spirit guides” offer up their version of a separate reality every bit as strange as that of Timothy Leary’s “tune in, turn on and drop out” LSD acid trips.
One of these “spirit guides” recently showed up on Larry King Live. His name is Michael Bernard Beckwith, and he's the founder of something called the Agape International Spiritual Center in Culver City, California.

Why is it always California?

King has a well-earned reputation for serving up softballs to his guests, and this interview was no exception. King lobbed the set-ups, and Beckwith hammered them home with chutzpah and charisma. With his long dreadlocks and striking features, Beckwith is a guru right out of central casting; so in this uncertain and gullible age, it's not surprising he has found an audience. But his success still begs the question:

Who’s drinking the Kool-Aid?

Judging by the woman who appeared with Beckwith, the answer is scary. King asked her several questions, but before she answered, she stared nervously at Beckwith, as if trying to read in his eyes how she was supposed to answer the question.

Can you say cult? Comparisons with Jim Jones are unavoidable.

Like Jones’ followers, Beckwith’s are likely disaffected outcasts of society, people who probably grew up in the church, but were turned off by the politics and hypocrisy. Still, they were desperate for something – anything – anyone – to believe in, for anything or anyone that promised a better life than the one they were experiencing. Who wouldn’t believe in anything or anyone that promised that?

Answer: Someone who took the trouble to look behind the curtain at the wizard.

There’s little on the Internet about Beckwith other than promotional materials. One site had a vague reference to his having a doctorate in religious science, but offered no mention of where or when. Even on the Agape International Spiritual Center website there are no curriculum vitae, as one would expect from someone who puts ‘doctor’ in front of their name. The site did offer this:

“Dr. Beckwith’s achievement as a humanitarian and emissary of peace have been widely acclaimed. In 2003, his activities were enumerated when he was written into the Congressional Record of the 107th congress. He is the recipient of numerous humanitarian awards, some of which include: The 2004 Africa Peace Award, Thomas Kilgore Prophetic Witness Award, Howard Thurman Stained Glass Window Award by Morehouse College, a commissioned oil portrait for Morehouse’s prestigious Hall of preachers, and the Humanitarian Award of the National Conference for Compassion and Justice.”

That sort of filler is all too obvious to anyone who’s ever padded a resume. When you gotta dig that deep and pile it that high, there’s something rotten in Culver City. Even Wikipedia offered little beyond a sketchy entry that included this interesting tidbit:

“In March 2007, Beckwith with partners, Bob Proctor and Jack Canfield, launched The Science of Getting Rich Seminar (SGR Program). After the official launch of the program, Beckwith was removed from the marketing material due to the perceived commercial nature of the program. However, his audio content remains part of the program. After some changes, Beckwith is now again a Part of The SGR-Program.”

Beckwith and his friends are hardly the first to peddle get-rich-quick, self-help schemes. America has a long tradition of more or less unsavory characters doing exactly that – Werner Erhard, Tony Robbins, Napoleon Hill, Charles Givens, Glenn L. Turner, Kevin Trudeau – the list is virtually endless.

Then there are their kin; televangelists like Jimmy Swaggert, Jim Bakker and Benny Hinn. And for those just a bit too sophisticated for the racist xenophobia of Swaggert or the coat-waving swoons of Hinn, there's Joel Osteen, the “you deserve to be rich” best-selling author and pastor of a mega-church in Texas.

Why is it always Texas?

What New Age deceivers like Beckwith do is combine the two scams, mixing positive thinking and glorification of greed with an all but irresistible repackaging of religion, spiritualism and mysticism. Their dark art is a twist on the ancient practice of alchemy – they turn people’s baser desires into gold – gold with which they line their own pockets.

Anyone who doubts that should check out the teaser on one website: “Anyone Can Now Capitalize on $12 Billion Personal Development Market.”

Like all purveyors of superstitious religious nonsense, New Age gurus like Beckwith tap into people’s feelings of powerlessness. They appeal to those who desire to have power over material things, power over others, power over death, power even to decide who they will be born as in their next life. No doubt, the promise of such power has a seductive appeal.

Some will say this dalliance with deceivers is only a harmless diversion, a victimless crime that ought to be ignored. But it’s hard to ignore the fact that this dirty business all too often preys upon the poor and the weak, or that sometimes those who drink the Kool-Aid pay with their lives.

The secret is there’s no secret to The Secret; it’s a shell game as old as humankind. And this latest version is just one more sad carnival come to town to take advantage of rubes. The Kool-Aid Kids would do well to put people like Rhonda Byrne and Michael Beckwith to the acid test:

If they can do what they say they can, let them prove it, let them say what they’re going to make happen. If it happens once, they’ve got a coincidence. If it happens twice, they’ve got a theory. If it happens again and again, they’ve got science. Until then, all they’ve got is just another religion, and not a very good one at that.

©2008 Tom Cordle
___________________________________

Quote

around page 88, Michael Beckwith is telling tall tales of meeting with a Shaman named Baba in Ghana Africa.
He says that these Shaman can shapeshift, (shamanic shapeshifting) and literally change their physical form. Baba an 80 year old man, changed himself into a woman, and his voice came out of a tree, telling Beckwith he was going to be involved in bringing "world peace".

Also, the rest of the people Beckwith was with on the trip, were not there at the time, he was alone with the Shaman, which is convenient.

An interested person with an interest in Beckwith could sit down with copies of Patrice Malidoma Some's book Of Water and Spirit, and Carlos Castaneda's Meetings with Don Juan and see if any of this follows a common theme.

If a common theme were found in these books, some might justify this by invoking the concept of 'core shamanism' .

The problem is, core shamanism originates not from tribal peoples but from a concept in Western European thought termed 'perennialism'--that all religions have a common origin or core.

This originated with Mircilio Ficino, then lapsed when the textual evidence used by Ficino turned out to be of the wrong date and did not support his contention. But perennialism was so emotionally appealing that those who needed it next looked to India as the font of primordial wisdom.

Then, in the 20th century, two persons, Frijof Schuon and Mircea Eliade applied this to Native American beliefs.

Eliade took a more respectable and scholarly approach.


There is a most interesting discussion of both new age and the problems of mis-appropriated shamanism on this dicussion board moderated by Native Americans.

[www.newagefraud.org]
Sarangarel commented:

Quote

The two things that bother me about core shamanism is first the mass appropriation of elements of "shamanic" practices from cultures from all over the world including mine.

For one thing the assumption that all these cultures practiced shamanism as Buryats understand shamanism to be (and this is our word) is erroneous as all of you Native Americans know since it has been inflicted on you for years now, largely because of Michael Harner's writings.

The second thing is that these practices have been ripped out of their ceremonial contexts, without the offerings to the spirits, without the food offerings, performed by people who probably could not even locate the place of origin of the ceremony on a world map!

Core Shamanism may have originated under a different name from the work of Mircea Eliade, a European scholar who greatlly influenced the study of comparative religions, and wrote about shamanism.

Eliade tried to study these belief systems with respect instead of considering them deviations from or inferior to Christianity.

But Eliade himself was influenced by his own European background and by an ideology termed traditionalism, which has its roots in the problems of Westerners and would impart biases to anyone trying to study shamanism.

Traditionalism has these elements:

1) Perennialism: a primordial metaphysical basis lies behind all the world's major religions, which could therefore be said to be transcendentally united.

Rene Guenon added the following two features:

2) The principle of “initiation.” This meant that spiritual advancement required a direct link to the supernatural, which usually meant induction into a chain of adepts going back to some historical source of power

3) “inversion,” the principle that all the change in the Western world since medieval times was for the worse, indeed that all historical change is a decline. What the West thinks of as progress is really decay, leading to an inevitable collapse. Guénon defined modernity in terms of the privation of the good: “If everyone understood what the modern world was, it would immediately cease to exist.” Inversion gave Traditionalism its apocalyptic content. In some contexts, it gave Traditionalism revolutionary potential, as adepts sought to hasten the end of modernity.

[pages.prodigy.net]

*It should be noted that some are hardline Traditionalists, others follow a more low key interpretation, where the concepts are less explicit. Not all academics influenced by traditionalism are willing to disclose this and a potential source of bias is with held from their students, and to those who convert to religion through traditionalists who write inspirational material.

Quote

Actually, for followers of a philosophy with a name that suggests reverence for the past, Traditionalists are peculiarly liable to get into trouble when they try to deal with actual history.

Ananda Coomaraswamy, one of the earliest of Guénon's followers, was already in an unassailable position as curator of the Indian collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts when he became a Traditionalist. He continued to do valuable work, and he added an esthetic element to Traditionalism that it never lost. However, even his admirers noted that his interest in history evaporated in favor of metaphysics.

Guénon himself failed to get a doctorate from the Sorbonne because his thesis on Indian philosophy dispensed with the historical-critical method.

When scholars influenced by Traditionalism do not cite to Traditionalist authors, they were not necessarily trying to conceal the connection; the sources are sometimes just too embarrassing.

[pages.prodigy.net]

Quote

Scholarly Traditionalism is even further from Guénon than political Traditionalism, to the extent that it is even disputed to what extent it exists. Its central figure is Mircea Eliade, a Romanian intellectual who in 1958 became professor of the history of religion at one of America's most important academic institutions, the University of Chicago.

As a young man, Eliade belonged to a group of prewar Romanian Traditionalists, some of whom were oriented towards Guénon and some more towards Evola.

Many of the Guénonian Romanians became Sufis, and an important Sufi order in Paris was for many years headed by a former Romanian diplomat who remained abroad after the Communists came to power in Romania.

During the 1930s, many of the Evolian Romanians--including Eliade--were involved in the Legion of the Archangel Michael. This was a spiritually oriented political movement that during the Second World War changed its nature to became barely distinguishable from the Nazi Party.

For obvious reasons, this branch of Traditionalism dispersed after 1945.

Eliade's early politics were little known when he was appointed to the University of Chicago, since from the start of the Second World War he had distanced himself from political activity.

What remained with him from his Romanian years was a non-Sufi version of Guénon's attempt to reassemble the original religion of humanity, carried out in more rigorous and academically respectable. Rather than tradition, Eliade studied "archaic religion," and rather than speak of the perennial unity of humanity's original religion, he wrote of the "unity of the traditions and symbols" that are "the foundation of constituted consciousness and being." The terminology is different, but the basic ideas are much the same.

Through Eliade, something of Traditionalism passed through into mainstream American religious studies, as that discipline was being constructed during the last half of the twentieth century. Non-Christian religions were originally studied in Europe by theologians as a branch of heresiology, an approach that was hard to sustain in the 1960s.

A later approach, typified by Max Weber, studied religion almost as social pathology, and by the 1960s seemed to promise few new discoveries.

The alternative approach of comparative religion that rules today might well have triumphed even without Eliade's influence, but was championed by Eliade.

For many decades religious studies were indelibly marked by Eliade's methodology, which was in itself a product more of prewar Romanian Traditionalism than of any other influence.

[www1.aucegypt.edu]

------

So this is to offer one possible source (traditionalism, via Eliade) of the perennialism which in turn has been projected onto tribal peoples as 'core shamanism' and has allowed some to feel a little too confident that shamanic skills can be obtained if one is not already a member of a tribal community and fully acculturated.

Traditionalism originated in a European urban context, to accommodate issues and anxieties quite different from those of persons living in clans and close to subsistence level and whose lives depended on knowing and respecting natural rhythms and acquiring extensive knowledge of plants and animals.

My mother spent just 3 years of her life on a farm, and said one needed to know at least 4 times as much to live in the country vs in the city. And that little farm at least had electricity and an indoor water supply!

For more on traditionalism go to www.traditionalists.org

Get a copy of Mark Sedwick's book Against the Modern World.

Anyone interested in Islam or Sufism should know that very many authors of books about Sufism are sympathetic traditionalists. Therefore potential converts should take the trouble to read about traditionalism to make sure they are not bringing a preceptors unspoken biases into their own inner lives.

Traditionalism, especially via Guenon developed in an urban European context to address the anxieties of some people who were perturbed by modern times.

These kinds of concerns would not come up at all or would take a very different form and require different mental and emotional catagories amongst a group of people living in clans and close to the land.



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 01/18/2009 10:16PM by corboy.

Michael Bernard Beckwith does promote ideas about African Shaman, and how he can teach you their methods at his workshops and reatreats, and how to "shapeshift", and the rest of it.
He even mentions Carlos Castaneda in a positive light.
So he is marketing the "learn how to be an Urban Shaman", which is very saleable these days.

Michael Bernard Beckwith quotes Osho a lot in the book. Of course he does not say Osho is Osho/Rajneesh, a notorious cult leader. [www.culteducation.com]

Michael Bernard Beckwith's main pitch is that he can teach people the Christ Consciousness, and that people can learn to have supernatural powers like Jesus in the bible (healing people, doing miracles, walk on water, walk through walls, etc, which is standard New Thought.

So Michael Beckwith is promoting a huge grab bag of almost every type of New Thought, New Age approach out there. You can be sure that his Church, Agape International Spiritual Center, has dozens and dozens of courses and retreats.

Also as mentioned, he has this huge book, full of stories and filler, and he does NOT put in his Visioning Process, and tries instead to sell you a CD program for $70, and many other programs.
Obviously, the book is to serve as a first step to position people into buying all of these CD's , DVD's, books, service tapes, music, gifts, magazines, Ezines, and many other products.
[www.agapelive.com]

Its a hook to draw people in deeper. Each product is always "incomplete" and needs another product. Its a classic method of upselling.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/19/2009 11:21AM by The Anticult.

there is a CD included in the book by Michael Beckwith.
It includes Michael Beckwith's wife singing, and him preaching.

His style is a very loud voice, quickly-spoken evangelist.
But the content is a blend of various new age ideas.

He begins each session, by telling people to relax, and breath deeply.
He then goes into them being "receptive" and not trusting the Ego mind, and to have a beginners mind.
He then powerfully gives people Suggestions.
He also does very loud group Affirmations, and call-response.

Most people don't realize that forms of trance and hypnosis, with suggestion, don't have to be done in a relaxed state. They can be done in an energized, manic state. They work just as well in a hyper-manic state, like the one Michael Beckwith is in, as he speaks so rapidly, its hard to keep track of what he is even saying. (cognitive overloading).



Perhaps someone can look up the Rev. Dr. Michael Bernard Beckwith legal history, to see the extent of it. He says he was selling marijuana to various US cities, so that sounds like a pretty big drug operation. He says he got off on a technicality, maybe there is some more specific information out there?
(just be aware that there appears to be a US Attorney named Michael Beckwith who works in marijuana cases!!)

there are some links out there that say that the Rev. Dr. Michael Bernard Beckwith, is a Rastafarian?
but that could have come from a bogus Wikipedia entry.

Quote
The Anticult
there are some links out there that say that the Rev. Dr. Michael Bernard Beckwith, is a Rastafarian?
but that could have come from a bogus Wikipedia entry.

As always, AC, you are doing TERRIFIC work! Here's another thread for you to check out. MB was close with Coretta Scott King and Yolanda King before their untimely deaths. Both were generally sucked in by New Agey thinking, particularly around health and wellness.

What is most interesting to me is that, towards the end of her life and battle with cancer, Coretta was taken (probably on Yolanda and Beckwith's advice) to go to the shady Baja clinic of "Dr." Kurt Donsbach. You may be old enough to remember the "laetrile scam" where people were told that apricot pits would cure cancer. This fraud was popular in survivalist/Neo-Nazi circles in the early 80s and used to fund their political activities. Eric Rudolph, the abortion bomber, for example, grew up in a family that was involved in the laetrile scam. Donsbach was the originator of the laetrile scam!

Also, in media reports at the time of her death, Coretta was described as being "near death" when she entered Von Donsbach's clinic. HOWEVER, later media reports claimed that she was in better health upon her admittance than had been widely believed. Now, for one of America's greatest civil rights icons to spend her final days in the clinic of a doctor banned from the US, hiding over the border in Baja, who was also the inspiration for what I consider a MURDEROUS scam like laetrile used to fund Coretta's greatest enemies, is pretty hard to take. Couple that with the King's close association with folks like Beckwith and we may be looking at some pretty disturbing patterns. I would also point out that Yolanda King died soon after her mother, just dropping dead one day on the street in Santa Monica, at the age of 50 or so.


[www.mitchhorowitz.com]

"About six years ago, however, she began attending one of the nation’s largest creative-thought churches, the Agape International Spiritual Center in Los Angeles, where she discovered the ideas of Ernest Holmes and others. “I stumbled into a spiritual community that talked about not only being loved by God, but that I was God’s beloved, in whom God was well pleased,” she told Science of Mind."


[www.quackwatch.org]

"In January 2006, Donsbach received media attention when it became known that Coretta Scott King, widow of former civil rights leader Martin Luther King, had died at Hospital Santa Monica. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Mrs. King had checked into the hospital under an assumed name and died in her sleep a few days afterward. The report stated that she was in the late stages of ovarian cancer and was being "evaluated for possible treatment" before she died [6]. In reponse to massive publicity, the Mexican Government ordered Hospital Santa Monica to shut down. However, in 2007, the San Diego Union Tribune reported:

* That hospital had reopened at the same location with no name displayed outside but with the name "Centro de Atención Integral" on a health department certificate displayed inside. The hospital's Web site still identifies it as "Hospital Santa Monica."
* Mexican officials said the facility is not authorized to treat serious diseases or to offer "alternative" treatments.
* Several patients and patient family members at the clinic said that Donsbach represented that he ran the clinic.
* During a 2006 deposition, Donsbach said that he had sold the clinic in 2002 and that he went to there to "visit the sick" and pray for them but was not compensated for these visits. However, during another deposition, his office manager said Donsbach received a percentage of revenue from the America"

Shakti, thanks so much for that info.

That is new info that Coretta Scott King was hooked into Michael Bernard Beckwith and Agape.
There are a lot of internet links out there, people can copy/paste these exact words into Google.

beckwith "coretta scott king"


This is one of the great media deceptions of guys like Michael Beckwith.
His brand of New Thought literally believes that ALL illness can be cured with "mind power", or Christ Consciousness, or whatever you want to call it. They literally believe, that if you believe it hard enough, you can instantly cure ANY disease, with no medical treatment.
There is no disputing that is what they believe. That is what they really think.

But Michael Beckwith did not say that on Oprah, and they don't say it in the media, as they get flack for that. So they modify it for the media, and soften it. On Oprah, some woman talked about her mom having cancer, and Michael Beckwith said something vague about accepting it. (he was doing a media-friendly version of himself to appear more moderate on TV).
But if they were talking to their own insiders, they would tell them their mom could be instantly cured of cancer if she believed she could be cured. (but they have been coached not to say that on TV).

But if someone like Coretta Scott King gets deeply into Agape style New Thought, and they take a belief in Jesus, and combine it with New Thought, then it becomes like Christian Science. They believe they can heal any disease with New Thought mindpower. This then leads to extreme Quackery, and these Mexican health clinics, which exploit dying people to make money off them. These Mexican clinics are lethal, and that's why the are in Mexico, as if they were in the USA, they would end up in prison.

So one can research the specifics more, but the FACT is that New Thought, and groups like Agape and Michael Beckwith, believe any disease can be instantly cured if you believe hard enough that they can.
But for media reasons, they will say its ok if people see doctors. They rationalize it by saying, its the belief in the doctor that cures, not the medical procedure.
But behind the scenes, the True Believers, mostly refuse medical treatment, or delay medical treatment too long, and they die.
Anyone who attends a New Thought church "health" clinic will see people dying in droves.
They get sick, and instead of getting help, they trying doing prayer treatment on it for months. Then by the time they get seriously sick, it may be too late for medical treatment.
Maybe if they has medical treatment earlier, they would have survived.

That is one of the dirty secrets of The Secret and New Thought.

Early death by lack of early and proper medical treatments. Since they usually delay medical treatment until its too late, they are in a sense living in a world from hundreds of years ago, when there weren't any decent medical treatments.

Someone needs to do a study of these New Thought, and Christian Science people. They would probably find their death rates are 10x of the general population who have good medical coverage and treatment.

So The New Thought Secret can kill you, literally.