Coming off of Conspirituality 22 with Rebekah Borucki, Matthew casts a wider net over Hay House’s cultural influence in two parts: a brief survey of some of their top authors, and then an examination of a root text in the Hay House world: A Course in Miracles.ACIM’s corrupt and emotionally manipulative philosophy is the basis for the work of authors Marianne Williamson and Gabby Bernstein, overlapping almost perfectly onto “The Work” of Byron Katie. Louise Hay, for one, was fond of quoting it. Matthew proposes that A Course in Miracles is the unacknowledged in-house bible for Hay House. He has a lot to say about it as a former member of a cult called Endeavor Academy in Wisconsin Dells, which used A Course in Miracles as its core text, and primary tool of psychological abuse.Show NotesLouise Hay quotes A Course in MiraclesWayne Dyer quotes A Course in MiraclesHow Byron Katie emotionally dominatesBryon Katie on feeling God as babies die and how Hitler maybe brought people to enlightenment (pp. 37-39)Julian’s open letter to NorthrupJivana Heyman on Louise Hay (and more)Louise Hay and AIDSApplying “The Work” of Byron Katie to the PandemicAt the heart of ACIM’s influence on New Age wellness is the absurd contempt for the process of becoming sick expressed by “Jesus” in Lesson 136Letter from Centre for Science in the Public Interest to the FDA detailing Joseph Mercola’s fraudulent COVID curesAn early marked version of A Course in MiraclesA history of A Course in Miracles editing
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Coming off of episode 22 with Rebecca Barucki, I wanted to cast a wider net over the Hay House phenomenon and its influence, and to do it in two main parts.
A brief survey of some top authors, and then an examination of a root text in the Hay House world, A Course in Miracles.
It's corrupt and emotionally manipulative philosophy is the basis for the work of Hay House authors Marianne Williamson and Gabby Bernstein, and it overlaps almost perfectly onto the work of Byron Katie, and Louise Hay herself was fond of quoting it.
I'm going to propose that A Course in Miracles is the unacknowledged in-house Bible for Hay House, and I have a lot to say about it as a former member of a cult called Endeavor Academy in Wisconsin Dells, which used A Course in Miracles as its core text and primary tool of psychological abuse.
Now, if you look through the Hay House site, you'll see that they pitch their roster of writers kind of like they're a Quidditch team.
Like, look at these fabulous wizards and all of their magical things.
And let's just say that they play up the Gryffindor, but they hide the Slytherin.
And I believe the hiding comes from the fact that The really noxious neoliberalism and hyper-individualism and conservative narcissism, really, of Louise Hay's work has never been fully examined.
She was really the Phyllis Schlafly of the new age, but I'd say more dangerous in a way, because she was warmer.
She seemed nicer.
As our episode nine guest Jivana Heyman recounted, Hay was the influencer who told gay men, this is back in the 80s, that they were getting AIDS because they didn't love themselves.
And this was such a powerful and manipulative statement because it resonated with gay men who had been marginalized and repressed by women and men of Hay's own generation, and that they had been told that they were unlovable.
So that's kind of where we're starting.
An untrained new age health influencer who offers this double-edged sword of condemnation but then also fake safety to gay men who are dying in an epidemic.
So does that sound familiar in the age of COVID?
So with Hay, who died with a net worth of between 50 and 80 million dollars, as the headmaster of a kind of New Age Hogwarts, I've put some of the writers into some categories, rough categories, and this of course is not a complete list.
So, there's a category that I'd call like Boomer, New Age, Legacy, Writer, and we've got Carolyn Mace, Esther and Jerry Hicks, and Byron Katie.
We have Legacy, Boomer, Wellness, Christiane Northrup, Bruce Lipton, who wrote Biology of Belief, and also Wayne Dyer, the late Wayne Dyer, and Joseph Merkula.
The B-list wellness category includes Dr. Oz, Joe Dispenza, Kelly Brogan, Anthony William who's the celery guy, and you know people like Paul McKenna who has a book on their catalog called I Can Make You Thin.
And then we have celebrity new spirituality.
Eckhart Tolle provides content for Hay House, and then of course Marianne Williamson.
But, you know, Hay House also puts her into the wellness category because they print her Course in Weight Loss book.
There's a category maybe I'd call Gen Y, neoliberal coaching, female empowerment brand, with props out to Kelly Deals for that amazing construction, and that would be Gabrielle Bernstein, and I'll talk about her a little bit later when I get into A Course in Miracles.
With regard to some details for the lineup, I'll just pick out a couple of writers here and say a few things so we get a sense of the landscape.
Carolyn Mace is the medical intuitive who used the title of PhD until it became clear that her degree was from a degree mill called Greenwich University.
She's kind of a New Age DJ remixing a bunch of old ideas.
There's a site called, that I really like, called the Encyclopedia of American Loons and it has some details.
It says that her idea, The Anatomy of the Spirit or the Seven Stages of Power and Healing, these might be books actually, she combines the Christian sacraments, of which there are seven, with seven Chakras from the Indian wisdom traditions and then also tree of life stuff from Kabbalah in order to create a map of the human quote-unquote energy anatomy.
There's also a book called Why People Don't Heal and How They Can in which he develops the concept of woundology to explain why people do not heal themselves with spiritual energy when they are ill.
And then she also has this idea called the Sacred Contract, which purports to be a set of assignments that one's soul has formed around before incarnation and that it must fulfill in order for there to be health and well-being.
But I've pulled out a quote from a Hay House book by Mace that really exposes what I call the contemptuous attitude that the whole crowd takes towards sickness and sick people.
The quote is amazing because Mace goes way farther than the typical victim-blaming rhetoric that pervades the wellness industry which kind of says, you know, if you're sick you're not spiritual enough or You're not virtuous enough.
Here, Mace basically says that a person will get sick in order to manipulate other people.
In other words, getting sick is an act of violence against others.
So, let's take a listen.
Manipulating or controlling others through the use of one's illness or suffering, for example, was, and remains, extremely effective for people who find they cannot be direct in their interactions.
Who argues with someone who is in pain?
And if pain is the only power a person has, health is not an attractive replacement.
It was apparent to me that becoming healthy represented more than just getting over an illness.
Health represented a complex progression into a state of personal empowerment in which one had to move from a condition of vulnerability to one of invincibility, from victim to victor, from silent bystander to aggressive defender of personal boundaries.
Completing this race to the finish was a yeoman's task if ever there was one.
Indeed, in opening the psyche and soul to the healing process, we had expanded the journey of wellness into one of personal transformation.
So that's from Defy Gravity, Healing Beyond the Bounds of Reason.
Great stuff from an author who is quoted by a long list of Hayhouse and other New Age authors.
Then we have, on the Hay House roster, Esther and Jerry Hicks, again praised by Louise Hay and Hay House celebrity Wayne Dyer.
Esther Hicks especially has been a primary vector for the Law of Attraction virus and things like The Secret, if you remember that.
Esther channels Jesus or says she channels Jesus, the Buddha, and at least some of their wild success is linked to Jerry's successful career in the Amway MLM scheme.
And here in the show notes, I'll link to a very helpful article by my friend B. Schofield that runs down some of these connections.
Next up, Byron Katie, who basically tells people that they are afraid or sick because they're having stupid thoughts, is another key Hay House name.
Now, her secret is that she She works her magic by generally strawmanning the actual thoughts that her clients or her readers have, according to a formula called The Work.
Now, back in 2017, I wrote a piece picking apart how Katie dominates a woman in public who is scared of what Donald Trump is capable of.
So, I'll link to it because I think it's aged particularly well.
It's truly horrifying stuff.
But even more horrifying is this little radiant turd of a book from 1998 called Losing the Moon by Byron Katie.
It's a series of transcript conversations that she had with some acolytes over a weekend gathering in Southern California.
I'll read just one excerpt with all of the trigger warnings.
I hear from you that Nazis throw babies into the pit.
There's nothing we can do with this short of finding understanding inside, within each of us ourselves.
War continues to exist.
That's what we do.
But this is not something that's easy for people to understand.
It takes an absolute love of God.
Is it, I love God?
Or is it, I love God sometimes when he's giving me the reality I want?
War is what is.
It's nature.
It's what is sometimes.
It's not personal.
If someone, God, what is, pulls my baby from me, if that's what it takes, I'm there.
Take the baby.
Tear my baby from me.
Throw it in the fire.
What does it take for me to get this thing?
What does it take for me to understand that I am a lover of what is, God?
My discomfort is my war with God.
It's my war with reality, the way it is, and not the loss of my baby.
It's not as though I have a choice.
The baby is me.
You see, there are no choices.
What is, is.
And when you know that, it's over.
And it's beyond full acceptance.
It's the love of itself, the love of God.
There is nothing terrible Shall I say it again?
There is nothing terrible.
There has never been anything terrible.
There will never be anything terrible.
But when we get to the baby thing, we're getting down to our sacred little concepts now.
Let's do away with all of them.
But not the part about my baby, and its welfare, my welfare, me, me, me, me, in the name of the baby.
I'm the one in hell.
It's all about you're destroying my dream.
That's all.
You take my baby from me.
You're messing with the illusion of I'm the mommy.
This is the baby.
There's the daddy.
We're going to raise it.
Happy ever after in the future fairy tale.
But tearing the baby away, that's the hire.
That's the hire, because it snatches your story from you and makes it apparent in your face nothing's real short of reality.
The baby's gone, and you are left with you and your thinking.
That's it.
That's what is.
That's love.
That's absolutely indescribable love.
That's you, God, would even give me that.
Can you know that Hitler didn't bring more people to realization than Jesus?
On your knees, God, God, God, but our stories of reality keep us from the awareness of God is everything and God is good.
That's the purpose of the story.
Until you have a way of meeting your thinking with understanding, it's hell and pure innocence.
Hell is nothing more than mental confusion.
Fight it and you only experience your own lack of awareness of love.
You experience your own cruelty to yourself, and you experience cruelty to others by teaching that such childish illusions are true and real.
We're not evolving.
We're un-evolving.
You cannot do war with God, with reality.
And when?
There never has been evil, and there never will be.
Evil is simply a story about what's not.
I mean, it's gotta be pretty powerful to keep you separate.
Evil is a story of how you think nature should be and what goes on in it, and it keeps you in the illusion of fear and separation.
It's got to be my baby and you.
It's got to be very dramatic to keep it going.
Otherwise, there's only peace.
Like, who would you be without it?
Peace.
And grace.
But I'll stick to the story of, don't throw my baby in the fire.
You see, I'll reorganize everything, get my baby, and then I'll have this love, this peace.
But I have trashed the baby when I have trashed the Nazi.
And still, it's hard to believe she survived its printing.
Okay, moving on, legacy wellness category, we have friend of the podcast, Christiane Northrup.
Especially episodes 7 and 8, you can go back and review those.
And I just want to, instead of talking about her actual content, say a little bit on a side tangent here about how great my co-host Julian Walker has been with his public letters to Northrop over her escalating use of QAnon language and even thinly veiled incitements say a little bit on a side tangent here about how great my co-host Julian Walker has been with his public
Now, if you didn't see his first open letter, you can find it on our site, but I wanted to point out this moment in the second open letter, or sorry, the first open letter that starts at time Q824.
So you can line that up, but I'll just, I'll give the quote here.
Northrop is listening to host Sasha Stone, and he's saying some really awful things, and she's nodding along.
So here's what Stone says.
We are being cult programmed.
I mean, you talk about removing the relationship between a mother and newborn baby and its mother.
This is satanic cult programming.
Let's call it what it is.
This is the cult of Baphomet.
This is Malachi worshipping stuff.
It gets very gory in the basement.
By the way, this is all standard QAnon evangelical rhetoric.
There are many specialists in the world that we've dealt with, with the International Tribunal, who testify to that, and there's many, many millions of souls who have been butchered at the hands of the perpetrators of satanic ritual and ritual sacrifice, ritual satanic abuse, and household luciferianism.
And then Julian cuts the tape there and says to Northrop, do you really think that's true?
Is that what's going on here?
It's a really great moment.
He's asking that because Northrop is nodding along while Stone goes on this bizarre rant.
But, you know, To be fair, and totally accurate, Northrop's nodding along becomes less enthusiastic as Stone continues.
And to me, this seems to convey a moment in which the rules of the influencer ecosystem are really on display.
Because Northrop spends a lot of her life giving interviews on other people's platforms within an economy that depends on networking and allyship.
And just like we were talking about with Rebecca Barucki in episode 22, all of the finances of this world depend on cross-marketing, on trading access to contact lists.
So, Northrop has been playing this referral game for a very long time and so it's not surprising that when an event host who's flattering her with purple language then turns the corner from alt-health advocacy to Frothing at the mouth, stark, raving, Looney Tunes mad that it would be hard for her to say, hey, slow down, rock star, what the fuck are you saying?
The path of least resistance in influencer capitalism is to affirm, to validate, and to co-promote.
Now we often talk about toxic positivity in wellness culture, but usually we're concentrating on the intrapersonal element, this tyranny of happiness that we're all supposed to submit to.
But with influencer and affiliate culture, we can see that toxic positivity is actually structural and economic and imprisoning in this space.
Moving on in Wellness Influencer category, we have Bruce Lipton, whose Biology of Belief is kind of this authoritative polestar for alt-health doctors like Dr. Brogan, Christiane Northrup, Nick Gonzalez as well, who we haven't covered yet.
And Lipton comes with really good credentials.
And at a certain point, he kind of left medicine to start talking about the consciousness of cells, which is kind of cool.
But he also then provides this academic legitimacy to a whole bunch of other strange ideas.
In the same category, we have Joseph Merkula, who keeps getting warned by the FDA about sending out fake COVID claims.
And so I wonder about that.
It's like Rebecca told the story about going to Hay House and saying, are you guys concerned that Christiane Northrup is...
promoting anti-vax, anti-lockdown, anti-masking stuff, and also pushing people towards QAnon while you're publishing her books.
And they kind of shrugged and left it at that.
But another one of their writers is out there telling people to breathe nebulized hydrogen peroxide as a prophylactic against COVID-19, which is super dangerous to do.
And is this It's a company that's gonna keep making money selling those books.
Yeah, it's almost like new age content is something like real estate.
It's like, you know, the publisher buys it, but we can't be responsible for what people do in it or something like that.
Okay, next category is second-generation wellness influencers.
We have Dr. Oz, we have Joe Dispenza, who comes out of the Jay-Z Night or Ramtha group.
We have Kelly Brogan, friend of the podcast.
Also, Anthony William, the medical intuitive celery guy.
Again, he just wants you to drink all of the celery juice in the world and that will cure all of your problems.
Just celery juice until basically You Turn Green, and then there's Paul McKenna, whose book I referenced on episode 22.
It's called I Can Make You Thin.
And then finally, we have top-tier celebrity, big-ticket spirituality people like Eckhart Tolle, who provides content for Hay House, and Marianne Williamson.
But, you know, Hay House also kind of gets her wellness stuff, too, because they're still printing her book, which is called A course in weight loss, which applies the principles of A Course in Miracles to, you guessed it, losing weight.
Okay, so this brings me to the book that glues so much of this together in implicit and explicit ways.
Now, it has its antecedents in New Thought and American alt-spirituality that go back decades, but it really hit pay dirt in the late 1970s.
Right at the right time for the commodification of alternative culture to kick into hyperdrive.
And it was super successful in binding a number of key things together.
Now, this is an incomplete list, but I would say that the What would you call it?
The pastiche or the mix of A Course in Miracles includes a kind of reformed Christianity that's influenced by Orientalist non-dualism, a view of psychology that's elevated to the status of religious practice, the individualizable workbook, And then finally, an obsession with perfect health and healing as being under control of one's mind, of one's will.
So yeah, let's talk about A Course in Miracles.
I am love.
Everything in me and outside of me is love.
Today I choose to repeat this, believe this, and commit to this.
I am love.
Anything else I have chosen to believe is false evidence appearing real.
What I choose to see as real today is love and only love.
I am love.
That's a quote from Gabriel Bernstein's May Cause Miracles, a 40-day guidebook.
Okay, so the two most prominent authors in the Hay House stable who use A Course in Miracles, and they use it in the context of spiritual coaching and wellness practices, Marianne Williamson, as I've noted, and Gabriel Bernstein, who is a Jewish Course in Miracles coach who focuses on abundance and manifestation.
Williamson and Bernstein are different people.
They do different things.
People love them for different reasons.
And, you know, I'm sure that they do good work in the world.
I know that there's a lot of people who appreciate Williamson's presence within democratic politics.
There are other people who are very critical of it.
I'll put that all to the side and say that for the purposes of this podcast, What's important to note is that they share a significant overlap, that their authority comes from being popular interpreters of A Course in Miracles.
And as we'll see, this is a book that needs popular interpreters.
What is A Course in Miracles?
Hold on to your crystals.
Here's the story, in brief.
In 1965, New York clinical psychologist Helen Schuchman heard a voice that she believed came from Jesus, and she started taking dictation.
She felt possessed by the authoritarian and patronizing tone.
She wrote in shorthand in notebooks that have never been released.
A colleague, Bill Thetford, both egged her on and did the initial typing from Schuchman's dictation from the notebooks.
Now there's a conspiratorial side story about Thetford.
He was a research psychologist who worked on a part of MKUltra, believe it or not, which has led some folks to speculate that A Course in Miracles is actually a PSYOP or a mind control plot.
I haven't seen any convincing evidence one way or the other, but I'll just throw that out there.
Now, Helen and Bill didn't stop going at this until about 1972, and the original typescript is a fascinating hodgepodge of personal diary, psychological shop talk between Helen, Bill, and Helen's inner Jesus, extended sections, some are puritanical, some are Freudian, about the meaninglessness of sex and the quote-unquote greater error of homosexuality.
There's also commentary on the pros and cons of Jung, Otto Rank, and other famous psychological figures, along with notes on a grab bag of spiritualist keywords.
Various drafts, titled ostensibly by Jesus himself through his initial dictation, like, quote, this is a course in miracles, please take notes, unquote, were circulated amongst Helen and Bill's associates via photocopy, I guess Xerox at that time.
Helen proceeded to edit the book several times with Thetford and another psychiatrist named Kenneth Wapnick, who ended up administrating the copyright for a while.
And the text was scrubbed of all of the inside baseball, all of the sex talk, and basically anything that would make it sound like it came from a 1970s New Yorker with a mouth and a digestive system.
The first formal publication came in 1976, and by the mid-1980s, it was a New Age hit.
There are now over 2.5 million hard copies in print, and since Jesus seems to have waived copyright protection at this point, it's also littered all over the web, perched on sites of uniformly insipid design.
Course teachers seem to have this thing for Times New Romana, palettes of blue and gold, obsessive text-centering, 1980s styles, portraiture against splotchy indigo backgrounds, big-ass perms are very popular, and plastic piece lilies are always making an appearance.
So, it's a very long book.
It's an extremely long book.
It's 1,200 pages.
And it's written in a really condescending tone, but it's also written in a hypnotic way that can really snow job otherwise sharp people, maybe by appealing to unresolved stuff from mansplaining or parental lecturing.
Part of the hypnotic effect comes from the fact that hundreds of pages of this book are written in iambic pentameter.
Now, Course in Miracles lore has it that by the time Helen Schuchman got to lesson 100 of a total of 365 for the book, her connection with Christ consciousness was so tight that everything poured out in iambic pentameter.
Because, as we know, Jesus is a fan of Shakespeare.
The iambic pentameter is an essential aspect of how this book has been so mesmerizing to so many people for 45 years now.
I mean, it's a cultic masterpiece because of its closed logic and jargon, but it's also a mind-control masterpiece from the point of view of hypnotic rhythm.
Most Course in Miracles devotees feel that that rhythm is soothing, but if you really listen, you'll hear just how controlling it is.
For 45 years, A Course in Miracles has tricked shrinks, English profs, rocket scientists.
It hypnotized me.
At one point, my cult leader at Endeavor Academy, Charles Anderson, asked me to make an audiobook of all 1,200 pages.
And it took six months, because I literally fell asleep in mid-sentence hundreds of times, bonking my head against the microphone, and I had to re-record entire passages.
I told an ashram friend all about it, expecting to share a laugh, but the dude says to me, in all seriousness, your ego just doesn't want to hear the message of Jesus.
Falling asleep is a defense mechanism.
I mean, at this point, I think there was a simpler explanation.
So, what does the final published version of A Course in Miracles actually say?
It's too long to quote at length, so I'm going to paraphrase it here briefly, and you can thank me later.
I'm saving you 1,200 pages of mind-numbing reading.
God is perfectly everything and everywhere, and nothing else is real.
And if you don't feel lovingly at one with all things at all times, it's your own damn fault.
You're sleepwalking through your life, having a nightmare about unreal, non-God-type events like racism, war, getting sick and dying.
Your body doesn't really exist, and while you think it does under the spell of your insane ego, you're pathetically denying your union with God, who doesn't even recognize your body because he didn't make it.
He only makes eternal things, don't you know?
You're even more of a denier of God if you feel pain or think you are a person of color or are sick because race stuff and poverty and sickness is stupid and God isn't stupid.
How could you be sick unless you wanted to be sick?
Get it?
Get it?
Not only that, if you try to make yourself healthy instead of just calling on Jesus' name, you're doubling down on your ignorant and selfish belief that your body is real.
In the Course, Jesus says that your beliefs make your world, buddy, so you should really get some better beliefs because your world doesn't seem so nice, does it?
You seem to have created murder and wars and now a damn pandemic with all your twisted little victimized desires, you little sicko.
Yes, every human suffering from loneliness to racism to poverty to terror and all the existential ambivalence in between is the result of your beliefs and conscious choices.
But they're not real.
You're in luck.
You can instantly reverse them all by surrendering your heart to the Holy Spirit.
And in the magical moment you do this, you are participating in the miraculous truth that you are not in this world.
You've never been born.
Time doesn't exist.
You can't get sick.
No one really dies.
And none of this is really happening.
So I hope you feel better hearing that.
But the truth is, it does make some people feel better for a while, so I'm going to say some nice things now.
I personally felt empowered for a few months on the Course in Miracles pill.
I had come to the book with a lot of pain, and it told me that my pain was a lie.
And this gave me a kind of shimmering relief I couldn't explain.
But it wasn't sustainable.
My body flooded with warmth when I read, only love is real.
But then I remember it got a little stiff when I read, quote, at no single instant does the body exist at all, unquote.
I think this is how it generally goes for the casual reader who starts to get deeper into it.
There's relief, and then something is a little bit off.
And if you stick with it, it's because you push your doubts to the side.
So I know that course can be temporarily useful for people recovering from specific circumstances.
You know, involvement with guilt-addled birth religions, for instance, or an abusive marriage in which the partner completely defined one's reality.
It also profitably challenges, in a thought experiment kind of way, this objectivist habit that is both natural to everyday life and then fortified by our scientific materialism.
We mostly grow up with a profoundly objectified vision of ourselves and reality.
And so for a person who has never felt their own subjective experience to be valuable, or who has had their subjectivity oppressed, being told that their internal reality is both infinitely free and that all that really matters can provoke a brief kind of ecstasy, it says a really attractive thing.
Focus on yourself.
And it says there is something inside you that is real, that's worth attention.
A Course in Miracles can also foster a very powerful, but I would say false, sense of intimate care.
The primary rhetorical strategy is the second person omniscient address, and the voice of the text weaves its thrall from the first page.
Quote, there is nothing about me that you cannot attain.
I have nothing that does not come from God.
The difference between us now is that I have nothing else.
This leaves me in a state which is only potential in you.
Now, if the reader forgets for a moment, or if they never got the memo, that the book was authored by a New York shrink, it could be easy for them to be lulled into the fantasy that Jesus is addressing them personally from beyond the veil.
Well...
Combine this with an absence of any formal religious bureaucracy that supports the chorus community.
I mean, there are influencers and they have a pecking order and they squabble over market share, but otherwise there's nothing organized.
The initiate is encouraged to feel that they are in direct relationship with Jesus.
And this can be particularly powerful for folks who feel isolated or folks who might find it useful to continue to dissociate from everyday relationships because while they're doing that, they're giving themselves, they're being given the belief that they're self-treating with the only relationship that could matter, the divine relationship.
Now this illusion of intimacy crescendos around the structure of the daily lessons.
365 mantras in the voice of Jesus that the initiate is advised to work through and recite privately.
At Endeavor Academy, people would disappear at random points in the day to do their lesson.
Anderson called this having quiet time with Jesus.
And this served as a deflection from his own overwhelming charisma, but it also reinforced the newbie's impression that they were self-reliantly progressing.
Now, of course, progressing in terms of the lessons means being gradually stripped of your self-sense, your individuation, and the particulars of your life.
Like, for instance, whether racism, or the neoliberal economy, or the military is slaughtering you.
Jesus' words become your own.
You begin to tell yourself, in Jesus' voice, who Jesus thinks you are, and what Jesus would have you do, and how Jesus would allegedly have you see yourself, and you're doing all of this kind of as Jesus.
And you're doing this all while believing that you are acting freely.
So in some ways, it's a course in self-hypnosis.
Now, if we recall Bill's stint with MKUltra, perhaps mind control, who knows?
But it also follows a classic deconstruction to reconstruction track.
You tear the person down and then rebuild them according to the message and ideology.
This is classic within the culture of cults.
So for instance, lesson number one states, Listen to this, quote, Nothing I see means anything, unquote, which initiates a possibly interesting deconstructive track.
But by lesson 253, the full reboot is in full swing with, quote, Myself is ruler of the universe, unquote.
I'm not making that up.
Like, it really is like He-Man.
I have the power.
So I think the course's ersatz effectiveness also has something to do with the fact that an unmanageable psychic state can be very responsive to what seems like a radical solution.
Consider the statement, I am not my body, I am free.
The second sentence replaces an objectification of the person with a state of feeling.
Now, cognition can be really powerful, and jargon can temporarily override an emotional paralysis.
Happiness can, I believe, very briefly feel like a willful decision.
Or maybe the neural circuitry of depression can suddenly be flooded by the dopamine of fascination and reverie.
And I think this is what was happening to me when I sat at Anderson's gouty feet and gave him my fully fixated attention.
The content of his radical solution via the course didn't have to be coherent.
It didn't have to be consciously interrogated or even understood or harmonious with the material things in my life like class and gender and economics.
All it had to do was to communicate novelty, along with a powerful phantasm of authoritarian or parental care.
I sometimes wondered if this was partly why, in Anderson's community, I was one of the few students who wasn't also dealing with some kind of addiction recovery.
A lot of folks were using the very stern comfort of Alcoholics Anonymous' Blue Book in conjunction with A Course in Miracles.
And my sense is that this addiction recovery slash radical salvation connection holds for the broader A Course in Miracles community as well.
Oh, and virtually every person there was also profoundly alienated from their parents.
Now, this is all in the past for me, but A Course in Miracles remains profoundly influential in New Age circles and in the public sphere.
Marianne Williamson wouldn't have been anywhere close to political power without the popularity she gained as a Course in Miracles teacher.
Today we see ACIM in The Echoes of the Secret and The Law of Attraction, wherever that's showing up.
We see it in open contempt for science and biomedicine, which is a key factor in conspirituality in the age of COVID.
We see it in neoliberal, it's-all-goodism or you're-on-your-own-ism.
We see it in a kind of radical, subjectivist, moral relativism, like it's good if it feels good for me.
We see it in a rejection of structural and political analyses.
Course in Miracles devotees know, for instance, in their hearts, that racism is an illusion.
Because the Course goes way further than preaching colorblindness.
It devalues the body altogether.
So not only are you neither white nor black, your ass isn't even here.
So what possible point could there be in working for material, worldly justice?
And in fact, working for material, worldly justice means that you're invested in an illusion, according to this ideology.
In the cult I was in, people were literally laughed at for caring about social justice issues.
Finally, we see ACIM in the belief that health is a matter of willpower and a sign of spiritual virtue.
All of this adds up to an ideology that we spend a lot of time on this podcast trying to illuminate.
It's transrational, super self-focused, locked in black and white thinking, fantasizing about alternative universes instead of dealing with the one we have, And it's ultimately antisocial.
And so when Rebecca Baruchi writes to her editor at Hay House and says, what are we going to do about your author Christiane Northrup pushing people towards anti-lockdown, anti-vax, and pro-QAnon materials?
It's really no surprise that the answer is silence and a shrug.
Because the spirituality here, traceable to A Course in Miracles, which molds the whole landscapes that Hay House is part of, it's not about mutual care or the common good or justice.
It's actually an overt abdication of responsibility for worldly problems because they are presumed to be unsolvable because they are affirmed to be unreal.
