Flashbacks
I remember now. Emmanuel is one of the entities I was specifically warned against by name.
The memory took days to surface. I'm thinking it would be 1985 or 1986, either my year of hell when I was fourteen or just before it. Lying in bed hearing my parents' voices next door, trying not to hear but unable to block it out entirely. Mum reading some book or other, raising various objections, Dad fearful and not wanting to talk about such things. The Emmanuel story particularly had the makings of most of my nightmares: the idea of contacting an entity which could 'sound so right' but 'be wrong' left me feeling groundless, without any way of judging reality. I remember knowing that the first contact with this 'deceiving angel' was made through Transcendental Meditation; that left me with a terror of TM and of any other kind of meditative practice, including merely sitting in the quietness, even the words 'inner peace'.
And that the name Emmanuel is of course one of the names for Christ; that scared me sideways for a year. Because if you can't trust a voice which uses Christ's name and says the things Christ says... what can you trust?
I'm trying to recall what the more substantive complaints against Emmanuel were. (Also interestingly, I thought this memory had to have been around 1985/86 - but the first Emmanuel's Book didn't come out until 1987. Am I misremembering the year?)
Also I note the interesting reader response about Emmanuel's attitude to homosexuality, which does not appear to be at all a blanket endorsement. This seems very similar to the comments in the Ur-Text of A Course In Miracles which state that homosexuality is always an error based on a misperception of the other (while heterosexual relationships are only sometimes/often that). This makes me immediately feel a lot safer about Emmanuel, because gender as a basic cosmic principle (as in Walter Russell) rather than a socially constructed and malleable thing is one of those core intuitions I feel is very important.
I think the two complaints my mother had, other than TM being involved, is that the Emmanuel entity did not identify itself as or use the name Jesus, and that it mentioned reincarnation. I'm not sure if the Timothy Leary links through Ram Dass were as much of a problem.
The reincarnation thing is still one of the aspects of Emmanuel versus ACIM that I find offputting (but it does show up in other sources I'm more comfortable with, like Stephen). My mother certainly did believe in the preexistence of the soul, if not reincarnation as usually described. Stephen (and I think Zodiac) suggests that there's something more complicated going on with 'reincarnation' that's more akin to a kind of holographic clustering than a linear sequence. Whether any of these ideas are flatly incompatible with orthodox Christian views of the resurrection (and whether that in itself is a critical enough theological matter to outright reject an entity talking about love and forgiveness) is perhaps still open to examination.
October 28th, 2007 - 17:58
The fact that somebody talks about love and forgiveness does not mean a thing!
October 28th, 2007 - 18:16
The Problem with both Stephen and Emanuel is that they are a case of bringing up the dead and having a “familiar spirit”. Never mind whatever they have to say. They are not saying anything new anyway.
October 28th, 2007 - 18:34
If you are a genuine Christian you have access to truth and answers through THE HOLY SPIRIT, who is given to you to “guide you into all truth”. Others don’t have that, so they resort to all kinds of sources for answers, by hook or by crook.
November 1st, 2007 - 21:25
“The fact that somebody talks about love and forgiveness does not mean a thing!”
That’s a very forceful and rather startling statement to make. Are you sure you’ve entirely thought through what it means, and are you prepared to stand behind it?
Certainly *talking about* love and forgiveness is not quite the same thing as *practicing* them. But neither love nor forgiveness are empty concepts. There are plenty of modern philosophers, and some New Age spiritual advisors, who don’t talk about these ideas at all, or actively consider them to be bad.
Nietzsche and Ayn Rand, for example, both considered altruism to be literally evil, and the individual and the individual’s search for physical advancement the only true thing. Margaret Thatcher, advocating the similar ideas of neoliberal economics, famously said ‘there is no such thing as society’.
Some recent New Age publications (for example, The Secret) give the impression that spiritual advancement is all about forming desires for one’s self (mostly about money) and achieving them. ‘Love’ in the Christian sense of compassion for others doesn’t really come into this mindset at all.
As for forgiveness, that’s really controversial today – if you don’t realise just how controversial, have you actually thought about its implications? Restorative justice programs, which try to apply Christian concepts of forgiveness in the very real world of the law courts, constantly come under attack from loud advocates of ‘decent citizens’, ‘sensible sentencing’ and ‘victims rights’ who claim that it is literally immoral to do anything less than punish lawbreakers to the fullest extent. Preemptive war and preemptive ‘anti-terrorism’ arrests stand directly against not only the idea of forgiveness, but of any kind of shared humanity between us and our ‘enemies’.
A recent popular book arguing for muscular foreign policy was titled ‘Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos’, and argued precisely that Christian ideas of forgiveness are out of place in the ‘real world’.
So taking a principled stand for love and forgiveness is a huge philosophical break with many of the deepest ideas on which our current world is based. And it’s exactly the same thing that Jesus commands us to do. Why then would you consider people who take this stand to be doing a meaningless or unimportant thing – regardless of where they got the idea from?
Do you think it’s more important to *say* we are Christians, or to *do* the things that Jesus told us to do? How do you think Jesus would suggest that we deal with people who *don’t* say they are Christians – perhaps who even angrily shout that they aren’t – but nevertheless *do* do what he says we should?
I seem to recall a couple of parables along those lines, and to me it’s not an empty question. I know several people who are self-confessed atheists and pagans who nevertheless have a spiritual intuition that leads them toward doing practical things to change their community in ways that promote love and forgiveness.
November 1st, 2007 - 21:30
As for speaking with the dead: the Catholic (and I think Orthodox) traditions have long held the belief that the saints literally hear prayers and work miracles. Automatic writing is accepted by the Catholic church in several cases – see, for example, the writings of Katya Rivas.
Some of the Protestant traditions find the idea of invoking literal saints disturbing, but there is of course one famous dead person who Christians of all beliefs *are* comfortable in psychically communicating with.
Does Jesus communicate with us through the Holy Spirit, or through some other means?
November 2nd, 2007 - 01:22
I am all for love and forgiveness in general. I just meant that you cannot judge a person on the basis of their “talking” about something. Just from the fact that somebody talks about forgiveness e.g. you cannot conclude that he actually is a forgiving person, neither does his talk proof he is in harmony with your idea of what makes a Christian. As they say: talk is cheap.