CHAPTER 12

The New World Religion

We have meditations at the United Nations a couple of times a week. The meditation leader is Sri Chin, and this is what he said about this situation: “... The United Nations is the chosen instrument of God; to be a chosen instrument means to be a divine messenger carrying the banner of God’s inner vision and outer manifestation. One day, the world will ... treasure and cherish the soul of the United Nations as its very own with pride, for this soul is all-loving, all-nourishing, and all-fulfilling.”1
• Donald Keys,

president of Planetary Citizensand author of Earth At Omega

In times past, when critics of the United Nations described the organization as a modern Tower of Babel, most were making reference to man’s act of spiritual arrogance that the book of Genesis tells us earned God’s displeasure. To back up such an unflattering characterization today, they could point to the confusing and combustible mélange of tongues, cultures, ideologies, and politics for which the “house of peace” has become justly famous. The UN, along with its programs and policies, is becoming ever more worthy of comparison to the Tower of Babel, as rampant idolatry and militant paganism thoroughly permeate the organization.

The United Nations is steadily becoming the center of a syncretic new world religion, a weird and diabolical convergence of New Age mysticism, pantheism, aboriginal animism, atheism, communism, socialism, Luciferian occultism, apostate Christianity, Islam, Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. The devotees and apostles of this new faith include the kind of strange admixture of crystal worshipers, astrologers, radical feminists, environmentalists, cabalists, human potentialists, Eastern mystics, pop psychologists, and “liberal” clergymen one would normally tend to associate with the off-beat, sandalsand-beads counterculture of the 1960s.

But today’s worshipers in this rapidly expanding movement are as likely to be scientists, diplomats, corporate presidents, heads of state, international bankers, and leaders of mainstream Christian churches.

Go East, Young Man

During the 1960s and ’70s, droves of disenchanted intellectuals and alienated youth from Europe and America trekked to India and other points East seeking “enlightenment,” “wisdom,” and “truth” from an endless array of gurus, swamis, yogis, and other “illuminated masters.” Most never realized as they began their search that they were following in the footsteps of one who a century earlier had laid the groundwork for the present cult explosion, and whose work is central to the spiritual character of the United Nations today.

That person is Helena P. Blavatsky (1831-1891), widely revered as the high priestess of the New Age movement, who founded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875. In her scrapbook for that year she wrote:

The Christians and scientists must be made to respect their Indian betters. The Wisdom of India, her philosophy and achievement, must be made known in Europe and America....2 [Emphasis in original]

Madame Blavatsky’s theosophy taught esoteric “wisdom,” the universal brotherhood of mankind, and unity among all religions, except the monotheistic religions — Christianity, Islam, Judaism — which could not be reconciled with individual “enlightenment.” An early Theosophical Society statement left no mistake about the organization’s special mission:

To oppose ... every form of dogmatic theology, especially the Christian, which the Chiefs of the Society regard as particularly pernicious ... to counteract, as far as possible, the effects of missionaries to delude the so-called “Heathen” and “Pagans” as to the real origin and dogmas of Christianity and the practical effects of the latter upon public and private character in so-called Christian countries.3

 

“Esoteric Philosophy has never rejected God in Nature, nor Deity as the absolute and abstract [End],” Blavatsky wrote. “It only refuses to accept any of the gods of the so-called monotheistic religions, gods created by man in his own image and likeness, a blasphemous and sorry caricature of the ever unknowable.”4 (Emphasis in original)

The Wrong God

The high priestess of theosophy cursed the God of the Bible as “capricious and unjust.” He was merely “a tribal God and no more,” she maintained.5 In Madame Blavatsky’s twisted mind, the Bible had it all backwards; it was really Satan who was the victim of :

The appellation Sa’tan, in Hebrew Satan, and Adversary ... belongs by right to the first and cruelest “Adversary” of all other Gods — ; not to the serpent which spoke only words of sympathy and wisdom.6

According to Blavatsky’s biblical hermeneutics:

Once the key to Genesis is in our hands, the scientific and symbolical Kabbala unveils the secret. The Great Serpent of the Garden of Eden and the “Lord God” are identical.7

In the Blavatsky scheme of things, Satan is God the Creator, the Savior, the Father; and Jesus Christ is “the first born brother of Satan.” She explains it thus:

Satan, the Serpent of Genesis, is the real creator and benefactor, the Father of Spiritual mankind. For it is he ... who opened the eyes of the automaton (Adam) created by Jehovah, as alleged.... An adversary to Jehovah ... he still remains in Esoteric Truth the ever loving messenger ... who conferred on us spiritual instead of physical immortality.8

Blavatsky, who had spent several years in India and Tibet, claimed to have experience with astral projection and the ability to communicate with the spirit world. She claimed to have written Isis Unveiled and her three-volume magnum opus The Secret Doctrine under the direction of the “Masters of Wisdom,” Tibetan holy men who communicated telepathically with her in England from the Himalayas. After she passed away in 1891, the mantle of leadership for the worldwide theosophical movement fell to Annie Besant, a militant feminist and a member of the Fabian Socialist Society of England.

A close friend of George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and other leading Fabians, Besant was well-placed to spread theosophical thought in very influential circles. An indefatigable revolutionist and prolific writer, she enthusiastically joined in revolutionary street riots and penned numerous volumes of occultic writings to add to those of Blavatsky.

Besant was followed by Alice Bailey, who together with her husband, Foster Bailey, constructed much of the foundation of what is now known as New Age religion. Unabashedly acknowledging their demonic sympathies, they launched Lucifer Publishing Company, which published the theosophical periodical Lucifer. Realizing later that perhaps the Christian world was not yet ready for their open preference for Satanic religion, they changed the name to Lucis Publishing Company.

The Lucis Trust, established by the Baileys in 1922, continues to serve as the umbrella organization for a profusion of globalist/New Age/occult organizations and programs that are key catalysts of the emerging new world religion. These include the Arcane School, World Goodwill, Triangles, Lucis Publishing, Lucis Productions, Lucis Trust Libraries, and the New Group of World Servers.

UN New Age Network

According to the Lucis Trust, “World Goodwill is recognized ... at the United Nations as a Nongovernmental Organization” and is “represented at regular briefing sessions at the United Nations in New York and Geneva.”9 The “regular weekly broadcasts of talks given at World Goodwill Forum meetings and programs produced by Lucis Productions” in London and New York are beamed by Radio For Peace International in English, Spanish, German, and French, on shortwave, to a “worldwide audience” from the UN University for Peace in Costa Rica.

According to spokesmen at the Lucis Trust, all people of good will, whether they realize it or not, belong to the New Group of World Servers (NGWS) who will bring about “spiritual unfoldment” and “lead humanity into a new age of peace and plenty.”10

“Humanity is not following a haphazard or uncharted course — there is a Plan,” say the Lucis theosophists. And, “Men of goodwill who co-operate form part of the New Group of World Servers which is working to implement the Plan.”

The “Plan” involves a “spiritual Hierarchy of the planet” and the building of a “synthetic unity” that will be manifested in an “inner centre or subjective world government, whose members are responsible for the spread of those ideals and ideas which have led humanity onwards from age to age.” The leaders of the New Group of World Servers “provide the vision and mould public opinion.” But there is yet a higher class of adepts.

“Behind these leaders and the cooperating men of goodwill,” we learn, “are the Custodians of the Plan, ‘the inner spiritual Government of the Planet.’”11

According to these possessors of esoteric wisdom, “People in the world at this time can be divided into four groups”:

1. First the uninformed masses.... They are, however, enough developed to respond to the mental suggestion and control of more advanced people.

2. Second, the middle classes — both higher and lower.... [B]ecause they can read and discuss and are beginning to think, they form the most powerful element in any nation.

3. Third, the thinkers everywhere.... They are steadily influencing world affairs — sometimes for good and sometimes for selfish ends.

4. Fourth, the New Group of World Servers. These are the people who are building the new world order.... They own to no creed, save the creed of Brotherhood, based on the One Life. They recognize no authority save that of their own souls.12 [Emphasis added]

The “Enlightened Ones”

Ah, yes. But if one progresses through these circles-within-circles of higher planetary consciousness, one eventually may reach the exalted plane of “the Hierarchy.” Examining the works of these individuals, we discover:

Behind this four-fold division of humanity stand those Enlightened Ones whose right and privilege it is to watch over human evolution and to guide the destinies of men. In the West we call them Christ and His disciples.... They are also known as the Agents of God, or the Hierarchy of liberated souls, who seek ceaselessly to aid and help humanity.13

No doubt you will now rest easier knowing that your “destiny” and “evolution” have been entrusted to the providential care of the planet’s “Enlightened Ones.”

But surely, you ask, no one actually believes this arcane gibberish? Would that this were true. The NGWS boasts that its followers,

“will be able to swing into activity at any moment such a weight of thought and such a momentous public opinion that they will eventually be in a position definitely to affect world affairs.”14

To be sure, that represents more an aspiration than a true representation of their present level of influence.

But one cannot survey the New Age, occult, satanist, wicca, and hedonist phenomena all around us without recognizing that if these trends continue, the day will not be far off when occult forces will be able to make good on some of those claims. As G. K. Chesterton once observed,

“If man will not believe in God, the danger is not that he will believe in nothing, but that he will believe in anything.”

Messiahs and Megalomaniacs

On April 25, 1982, all across the planet, millions of pairs of eyes blinked in disbelief at the headlines they saw on full-page advertisements in their daily newspapers. “THE CHRIST IS NOW HERE,” trumpeted the massive ad campaign in major newspapers around the world. “Throughout history,” proclaimed the announcement, “humanity’s evolution has been guided by a group of enlightened men, the Masters of Wisdom,” a “Spiritual Hierarchy” at the center of which “stands the World Teacher, Lord Maitreya, known by Christians as the Christ.”15

This same individual, said the ad, is awaited also by Jews, Moslems, Buddhists, and Hindus, though he is known by these believers respectively as the Messiah, Imam Mahdi, the Fifth Buddha, or Krishna.

According to the ad proclamation, “the Christ" was at that moment living in the world and would “within the next two months” reveal his identity to all mankind. The advertising campaign coincided with the beginning of a worldwide speaking tour by one Benjamin Creme, a British theosophist and a spokesman for “the Christ.” In various interviews and speeches, Creme explained that in speaking of “the Christ,” he did not mean Jesus Christ but the “Master of Wisdom,” of whom Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, and others are disciples. Creme’s messianic campaign was coordinated by his New Age religious organization, the Tara Center, from its offices in Los Angeles, New York, and London.

In his 1980 book, The Reappearance of the Christ and the Masters of Wisdom, Creme left no doubt about his spiritual debt to Blavatsky and Bailey. In its pages, he prophesied:

When the physical structures of human living are reconstructed ... the Christ will reveal to man an entirely new aspect of Reality.... The Ancient Mysteries will be restored, the Mystery Schools reopened, and a great expansion of man’s awareness of himself and his purpose and destiny will become possible....

 

Eventually a new world religion will be inaugurated, which will be a fusion and synthesis of the approach of the East and the approach of the West. The Christ will bring together, not simply Christianity and Buddhism, but the concept of God transcendent — outside of His creation in man and all creation.

It will be seen to be possible to hold both approaches at the same time, and they will be brought together in a new scientific religion based on the Mysteries; on Initiation; on Invocation....

Gradually, Christianity, Buddhism and other religions will wither away-slowly, as the people die out of them, as the new religion gains its adherents and exponents, and is gradually built by humanity.16

“Christ” and the UN

According to Creme, “The new religion will manifest itself through organizations like Masonry”17 and will inaugurate a “new world order” to be headed by the United Nations:

At the head of several of the governments of the world and in the great world agencies, like the United Nations’ agencies, there will be either a Master or at least a third degree Initiate. So the great international agencies will be under the direct control of a high member of the Hierarchy.... The Christ Himself will have a great deal to do — with the release of energies; the work of Initiation, as the Initiator, the Hierophant, at the first two Initiations; and stimulating and inspiring the formation of the New World Religion.18

In the Tara Center’s Network News letter of October 1987, New Age devotees were told: “In the coming years the United Nations is destined to be the world’s main focal point for the practical application of love, brotherhood, justice and sharing. We can help bring this about through our support.” This support is essential because when “all the impossible solutions have been eliminated, it will become clear that the only answer to our problems is the U.N.” (Emphasis added)

This being the case, a cosmic prayer was offered for the revered institution:

May the Peace and the Blessings of the Holy Ones pour forth over the worlds — rest upon the United Nations, on the work and the workers, protecting, purifying, energizing and strengthening.19

No-Show

But Creme’s “Maitreya — the Christ" failed to materialize as promised. So it would be reasonable to expect that Creme, his messiah, and his UN propaganda were all discredited and labeled irrelevant. But we do not live in the age of reasonableness. Creme remains a leading light of the vast New Age network, and his occult gospel can be found emanating from numerous UN conferences and programs where the power elite of the Club of Rome, Aspen Institute, Council on Foreign Relations, World Federalists, World Bank, etc. mingle with New Agers of every description.

The Rio Earth Summit

A prime example of this dangerous lunacy could be found at the June 1992 UN Earth Summit in Brazil, where both the official United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) program and the Global Forum “peoples summit” featured a melding of pagan aboriginal rites, ecobabble, and an ecumenical hodgepodge of spiritual tenets from East and West to form an incoherent universal “faith.”

In his opening address to the UNCED plenary session, Earth Summit Secretary-General Maurice Strong directed the world’s attention to the Declaration of the Sacred Earth Gathering, which was part of the pre-Summit ceremonies.

“[T]he changes in behavior and direction called for here,” said Strong, “must be rooted in our deepest spiritual, moral and ethical values.”20

According to the declaration, the ecological crisis,

“transcends all national, religious, cultural, social, political, and economic boundaries.... The responsibility of each human being today is to choose between the force of darkness and the force of light. We must therefore transform our attitudes and values, and adopt a renewed respect for the superior law of Divine Nature.”21

Nutty Goings-On

Delegates and members of the news media were referring to the Rio Declaration and the 800-page blueprint for government action known as Agenda 21 as “sacred” texts. Senator Al Gore, who led the U.S. Senate delegation to Rio, reiterated his call for a new spiritual relationship between man and earth. Shirley MacLaine dropped in to lend the nutty ramblings of her psychic spirituality to the conference. A centerpiece of the Global Forum opening ceremony was the Viking ship Gaia, named for the Greek goddess of earth.

At the culmination of that program, a group calling itself the “Sacred Drums of the Earth” struck up a solemn cadence. The ceremony program said that the drummers would “maintain a continuous heartbeat near the official site of the Earth Summit, as part of a ritual for the healing of our Earth to be felt by those who are deciding Earth’s fate.” The Forum ceremony closed, appropriately, with Jamaican reggae singer Jimmy Cliff performing the song, “The Rivers of Babylon.”

On the eve of the opening of UNCED, a midnight-to-dawn homage to the “Female Planet” was held on Leme Beach. After dancing all night, the worshipers followed a Brazilian tribal high priestess to the water’s edge where they offered flowers and fruits to “Iemanje, mae orixa, mother of the powers, queen of the seas,” and then invoked the blessings of the sea goddess upon the sum’s deliberations. At the first plenary session, Uri Mari, Israel’s Minister of the Environment, issued a New Ten Commandments on Environment and Development.22

No one bothered to ask him what was wrong with the original Ten Commandments. Was the Creator of this planet somehow negligent, or so ignorant of environmental concerns, that his original decalogue is ecologically deficient? As we recall, the first commandment states: “I am the Lord thy God.... Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.” That, understandably, makes many environmentalists uncomfortable. “Thou shalt not steal,” and “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods” can also be troublesome to those whose plans call for expropriating the property of others.

The Union for Natural Environment Protection, an environmental group based in Sao Leopoldo, Brazil, declared the following about the work of the summit: “A world-wide citizens’ movement is born around the UN system and will be in the years ahead a central focal point for the New World Order which Alice Bailey wrote about many decades ago and which is going to be politically free, socially fair, economically efficient and environmentally sustainable.”23

That pretty well ties it all together: the UN, Alice Bailey’s New Age religion, the new world order, and environmentalism. True, there were also “Christian” participants in the summit celebrations. Ministers from the World Council of Churches and Catholic clerics such as Dom Helder Camarra (known as Brazil’s Red Archbishop because of his blatantly pro-communist sympathies) could be found amidst the cymbalclanging Hare Krishnas, diapered swamis, saffron-robed gurus, and witch doctors in loincloths.

But they were there because of their affinity for an ecumenical “spirit” that promotes an anti-Christian and syncretistic blend of Christianity and paganism.

Bible Out, Lucifer In

Many militant environmentalists make no bones about their animus toward Christianity. Jose Lutzenberger, former Brazilian Minister of the Environment, decried the foundation of modern education which he argued was “based on the Judeo-Christian philosophy of an evil world which needs to be subdued by man.” He insisted:

“We have to teach our children to dialogue with their world.” And, “We need a moral revolution, and should learn from indigenous people who have successfully integrated our species in to the entire symphony of nature.”24

This blaming of the biblical world outlook for the world’s environmental problems and the romanticizing of aboriginal religions and life-styles were rife among the summit ecocrazies.

Bible bashing is another practice that has become common in environmental circles, and its tone has become increasingly shrill. Tom Hayden, for instance, that pillar of 1960s spiritual rectitude, has taken up the crusade by teaching a college course about “Environment and Spirituality.” “He wants to convince people,” reports the Los Angeles Times, “that Judeo-Christian ethics, which teach that man has the God-given right to ‘subdue’ the Earth, are the root of many of today’s environmental problems.”25

The environmental gospel according to “We are all Vietcong” Hayden holds that “organized religion has either ignored or rationalized the exploitation of the natural environment for 2,000 years.” Reverend Tom’s 16-week course is described by the Times as “a wide-ranging survey of New Age philosophies and Eastern spirituality.”26 New Age philosopher William Irwin Thompson is even more emphatic.

The former professor of humanities from MIT and Syracuse University, and founder of the influential Lindisfarne Association, has said:

We have now a new spirituality, what has been called the New Age movement. The planetization of the esoteric has been going on for some time.... This is now beginning to influence concepts of politics and community in ecology.... This is the Gaia [Mother Earth] politique ... planetary culture.27

 According to this illuminated master, the age of “the independent sovereign state, with the sovereign individual in his private property [is] over, just as the Christian fundamentalist days are about to be over.”28

A former trustee of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies and a member of the advisory council of Planetary Citizens, is no lightweight in the movement. Maurice Strong sits on the board of directors and serves as director of finance of the Lindisfarne Center. The Lindisfarne Center is located in Man’s historic Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine and its work is “made possible by grants from the Lilly Endowment, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Rockefeller Foundation.”29

The Lindisfarne Institute lists among its faculty members eco-radical Amory Lovins and Luciferian adept and New Age author David Spangler.
So, what great wisdom is imparted at this Rockefeller-funded institute of higher learning? We can gain some appreciation by reading Mr. Spangler’s books, such as Reflections on the Christ, wherein we find:

Lucifer, like Christ, stands at the door of man’s consciousness and knocks. If man says, “Go away because I do not like what you represent, I am afraid of you,” Lucifer will play tricks on that fellow. If man says, “Come in, and I will give to you the treat of my love and understanding and I will uplift you in the light and presence of the Christ, my outflow,” then Lucifer becomes something else again. He becomes the being who carries that great treat, the ultimate treat, the light of wisdom.

The reason man has come to fear Lucifer is not so much that he represents evil as because he represents experience which causes us to grow and to move beyond the levels where we have been.... Lucifer is literally the angel of experience.30

Many Groups, Same Goal

Spangler, Thompson, Strong, and a host of other notables (Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, Sir Edmund Hillary, Peter Ustinov, Linus Pauling, Kurt Vonnegut, Leonard Bernstein, John Updike, Isaac Asimov, Pete Seeger) are listed as original endorsers of the world-government-promoting Planetary Citizens. Founded by New Age luminary and former UN consultant Donald Keys, and presided over for many years by the late Norman Cousins (CFR), the Planetary Citizens organization has marshaled the prestige of many influential world figures to support expansion of UN power and institutions. Keys, openly a disciple of Alice Bailey, calls the United Nations “the nexus of emerging planetary values” and expresses the hope that it will establish a “planetary management system.”31

In order to help speed that day, Planetary Citizens is “in consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United .”32

Another original endorser of Planetary Citizens and its “Human Manifesto” (not to be confused with The Humanist Manifesto) was Aurelio Peccei, founder of the Club of Rome. Known more for its role in launching “no growth” environmentalism in the 1970s, the Club has turned increasingly “spiritual” in recent years. Its most recent report, The First Global Revolution, takes special pains to stress this new interest.

“In these difficult and complex times,” say the report’s authors, “we begin to realize that the pursuit of wisdom is the essential challenge that faces humanity.”33

And where do they go for wisdom? Sprinkled throughout the book are numerous quotations from sacred texts, philosophers, poets, psychologists, historians, and sages. Hindus, Buddhists, aborigines, Taoists, humanists, even Aztec cannibals are reverently represented. Their wisdom includes adherence to the Blavatsky mandate holding that monotheism, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are either excluded or denigrated.

Typical of the quotations highlighted in special boxes in the book’s text is this “hymn” from India placed alongside a discussion about mining:

Whatever I dig from thee, Earth, may that have quick growth again. O purifier, may we not injure thy vitals or thy heart.34

And sounding very much in tune with current New Age thought is the Club of Rome’s discovery that the,

“spiritual and ethical dimension is no longer an object of scorn or indifference; it is perceived as a necessity that should lead to a new humanism.”35 (Emphasis added)

Moreover, we learn:

The global society we are heading towards cannot emerge unless it drinks from the source of moral and spiritual values which stake out its dynamics. Beyond cultures, religions and philosophies, there is in human beings a thirst for freedom, aspirations to overcome one’s limits, a quest for a beyond that seems ungraspable and is often unnamed.36

We are witnessing here a very important phenomenon, what the New Agers call a “paradigm shift.”

After several centuries of warring with religion in general and Christianity in particular, “science” is now being reconciled with faith. Increasingly, infidel scientists who once expressed supreme confidence in “reeking tube and iron shard” (as Kipling referred to their technological idolatry) are acknowledging the deficiency of their “dust that builds on dust....”

They seek to supply gods of their own choosing. And Blavatsky’s gods of the East are infinitely more compatible with their plans than the Judeo-Christian God. Which may explain the Club of Rome’s heavy reliance on the “spiritual values” of India, as expressed in the following prayer:

May the divine Spirit protect us all; may we work together with great energy; may our study be fruitful and thorough; may there be no hatred between us.37

Aum, Peace, Peace, Peace, Peace— Vedic Prayer [3000 B.C.]

Temple of Understanding

One of the principal channels through which this tilt toward Oriental spiritualism has been spread is the Temple of Understanding, located at the same Cathedral of St. John the Divine that houses the Lindisfarne Luciferians. Launched in the early 1960s as the “spiritual counterpart of the United Nations,” its founding sponsors included the following odd assortment of Establishment Insiders, socialists, humanists, communist frontiers, religious figures, and entertainment celebrities:

• John D. Rockefeller IV

• then-Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara

• Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger

• IBM president Thomas J. Watson

• Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas

• Eleanor Roosevelt

• Time-Life president James A. Linen

• homosexual author Christopher Isherwood

• columnist Max Lerner

• entertainer Jack Benny

The Temple organization, which works closely with the UN Secretariat, the World Council of Churches, and the World Conference on Religion and Peace, is currently aiding and abetting Columbus-bashers with its sponsorship of the UN’s Year of the Indigenous People. In 1993, it will be promoting the syncretic “Interfaith Movement” with its centennial celebration of the World’s Parliament of Religions. This favor toward Eastern mysticism was given a big boost in UN circles during the 1970s and ’80s by New Age VIP Robert Muller, who served as an assistant secretary-general at the United Nations.

Muller, author of the influential book New Genesis: Shaping a Global Spirituality, believes,

“If Christ came back to earth, his first visit would be to the United Nations to see if his dream of human oneness and brotherhood had come true. He would be happy to see representatives from all nations.”38

Of course, when Muller talks about “Christ,” he is not speaking in the Christian tradition, but in that of Bailey, Creme, and Spangler. Muller openly supports Creme and has delivered lectures at the Lucis Trust’s Arcane School. And in typical animist fashion, he refers to “our brethren the animals, our sisters the flowers.”39

Who Is Maurice Strong?

Undoubtedly one of the most influential hands guiding the UN’s unfolding spirituality over the past two decades has been that of the grand poobah of environmentalism, Maurice Strong. An article from the May 1990 issue of West magazine40 sheds considerable light on the man who has been reverently dubbed by some “the custodian of the planet.” Journalist Daniel Wood’s research for the article included spending a week with Strong and his wife Hanne at their Baca Grande spiritual center in Colorado’s San Luis Valley.

While there, he witnessed many strange and troubling things. According to Wood, the Strongs’ goal at “the Baca,” as they refer to their compound, “is nothing less than to alter, utterly, the history of the world.” They see their mystic commune serving “as a model for the way the world should be — and, they say, must be — if humankind is to survive.”

The idea for the strange venture at “the Baca” took root in 1978, reported Wood,

“when a mysterious man visited Hanne bearing a prophesy of the coming apocalypse. The dream grew amid omens that defy belief. It has been nourished by the Strongs’ friends, such people as Rockefeller, [former Canadian premier] Trudeau, the Dalai Lama, and Shirley MacLaine.”

Another of the Strongs’ friends, Najeeb Halaby (CFR), former chairman of Pan American and father of the Queen of Jordan, has built an Islamic ziggurat at the Baca. The first groups to join the Strongs in setting up operations at the desert site were the Aspen Institute and the Lindisfarne Association.

Mrs. Strong is a remarkably curious individual.

“Hanne knew from earliest childhood,” said Wood, “that she was different, that she had mystical abilities.... She could recall past lives.”

On one occasion, Wood recounted:

“Hanne invites me to join her in her daily ritual of singing the sun down.... She chants her mantra, an ancient Vedic text, she explains, that goes back to the dawn of civilization.”

But even more disturbing than Hanne’s occult mysticism are Maurice’s spiritual experiences. Strong allegedly told Wood of a freakish omen he had experienced while walking with famed author and public television icon Bill Moyers:

“We’d been walking, talking, heading back to my parked car. Suddenly, this bush — some sagebrush — erupted in flames in front of us! It just burst into flames.”

Pagan Spiritualism

With individuals like these leading the charge, the UN’s pagan spiritualism will grow ever more blatant. There will be many more documents like the UN report entitled The New International Economic Order: A Spiritual Imperative, which brazenly proclaims:

[T]oday a new understanding of spirituality is emerging which recognizes that all efforts to uplift humanity are spiritual in nature. Alice Bailey said, “That is spiritual which lies beyond the point of present achievement....” ... Given this new understanding of spirituality, the work of the United Nations can be ... seen within the entire evolutionary unfoldment of humanity. The work of the U.N. is indeed spiritual and holds profound import for the future of civilization.41

It would seem that predictions concerning religion made half a century ago in the Rosicrucian Digest are coming to pass. The June 1941 issue of that occult journal carried the following prophesy that, tragically, is being fulfilled before our eyes:

What then does the future hold for religion? We predict a mystical-pantheism as the religion of tomorrow. The central doctrine of this religion will be that a Universal Intelligence as a series or concatenations of causes, creative and perfect in its whole, pervades everywhere and everything.

One major effect of this religious conversion, the Rosicrucian oracle predicted, is that “the multiplicity of social states, countries, or nations will cease to be.” Nations would be replaced by “the one United World State.” The occultists are correct in noting that the mystical-pantheism they advocate will, if widely accepted, lead to a collectivist world state. And there are far too few Americans who understand the direct cause-and-effect relationship between the two.

Pantheist Connection

“Pantheism is a favorite doctrine of collectivists,” notes one authority on occult deception, Father Clarence Kelly, “because ... it offers a concept of man which, on religious grounds, subordinates the individual to the collective.”42

Since “God" in this belief system is not the transcendent, personal God of the Bible, but an impersonal, immanent force that pervades all things, then all things — the universe, you, me, the rock, the tree — are “God.” In this pagan world view, man is not a special creation of the one, true God, to whom, ultimately, he is accountable. Nor is he endowed by his Creator with intrinsic, unalienable rights — and responsibilities.

Thus pantheism “functions as an effective tool in the subversion of God-centered religion by making religion man-centered, and thereby giving a religious sanction to the doctrines and programs of political collectivism. At the same time, pantheism can be used as a stage in bringing people from theism to atheistic materialism. In religion, pantheism is most often expressed as Naturalism — ‘the doctrine that religious truth is derived from nature, not revelation....’”43

It was just such neo-Paganism that paved the way for the totalitarian collectivism of the Third Reich. The Nazi high priesthood — Hitler, Himmler, Rahn, Rosenberg, Hess, Feder, Sebot, et al. — were ardent theosophists, and their esoteric societies (the Thule, Vril, Seekers of the Grail) were steeped in the same occultism and pantheism so prevalent in today’s New Age and environmental movements.44

Hitler’s paganism sought to create a nationalist-socialist new world order. And even though it was militantly anti-Christian, numerous Christian churches succumbed to the Nazi scheme and most were captured through subversion and accommodation, not through outright persecution. Today, all people of good will recognize the diabolically evil nature of the Fuehrer’s failed regime.

What is now desperately needed is a widespread recognition of the fact that the neo-pagan, internationalist-socialist new world order being promoted by and through the United Nations is as militantly anti-Christian, as malevolently totalitarian, and as satanically evil as that jack-tyranny of our recent past.

This time, its headquarters is not in Berlin, but in New York City.

Notes

1. Donald Keys, “Transformation of Self and Society,” an address at a symposium, “Toward a Global Society,” held in Asheville, NC on November 11, 1984, quoted by Dennis L. Cuddy, Now Is the Dawning of the New Age New World Order (Oklahoma City: Hearthstone Publishing, Ltd., 1991), pp. 268-69.
2. Golden Book of the Theosophical Society (1925), pp. 28-29, quoted by Constance Cumby, The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow: The New Age Movement and Our Coming Age of Barbarism (Shreveport, LA: Huntington House, 1983), p. 44.
3. From a Theosophical Society brochure, quoted by Cumby, p. 45.
4. Golden Book, pp. 63-64, quoted by Cumby, pp. 45-46.
5. Tal Brooke, When the World Will Be As One (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 1989) pp. 175- 76.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., pp. 175-76.
9. From “The Lucis Trust,” a pamphlet distributed by the Lucis Trust.
10. The New Group of World Servers, a pamphlet distributed by World Goodwill, an activity of Lucis Trust, p. 3.
11. Ibid., pp. 2, 8-10.
12. Ibid., pp. 6-7.
13. Ibid., p. 7.
14. Ibid., p. 10.
15. Troy Lawrence, New Age Messiah Identified: Who Is Lord Maitreya? (Lafayette, LA: Huntington House, 1991), pp. 7-11.
16. Benjamin Creme, The Reappearance of the Christ and the Masters of Wisdom (London: Tara Press, 1980), p. 69, quoted by Lawrence, pp. 60-61.
17. Benjamin Creme, quoted by Lawrence, pp. 60.
18. Ibid., p. 123, 178.
19. Tara Center’s Network News, Tony Townsend editor, October 1987, p. 1.
20. Statement of Maurice Strong at opening of UNCED in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, June 3, 1992, UNCED release, pp. 11-12.
21. “The Declaration of the Sacred Earth Gathering, Rio 92,” Earth Summit Times, June 3, 1992.
22. “Ten Commandments on Environment and Development,” extracts from an address presented to UNCED by Dr. Uri Marinov, June 3, 1992 — text provided by UNCED at Earth Summit in Rio.
23. World Goodwill Newsletter, 1992, No. 3, p. 7.
24. Jose Lutzenberger at Rio Earth Summit, The ’92 Global Forum, Release #115, June 5, 1992.
25. Bob Baker, “Hayden on Earth,” Los Angeles Times, October 16, 1991, pp. B1, B4.
26. Ibid., B4.
27. William Irwin Thompson, Quest, Spring 1991, quoted by Cuddy, p. 311-12.
28. Ibid.
29. From a pamphlet distributed by the Lindsfarme Center.
30. David Spangler, Reflections on the Christ, 3rd. ed. (Scotland: Findhorn Publications, 1981), p. 41.
31. Donald Keys, quoted by Douglas R. Groothuis, Unmasking the New Age (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1986), p. 118.
32. “Planetary Citizens,” a pamphlet from Planetary Citizens.
33. Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider, The First Global Revolution, a report by the Council of The Club of Rome (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991), p. 218.
34. Ibid., p. 154.
35. Ibid., p. 244.
36. Ibid., p. 237.
37. Ibid., p. 245.
38. Robert Muller, quoted by Brooke, p. 207.
39. Robert Muller, New Genesis: Shaping a Global Spirituality, Image Books ed. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984), p. 167.
40. Daniel Wood, “The Wizard of Baca Grande”, West, May 1990.
41. UN report The New International Economic Order: A Spiritual Imperative, quoted by Cuddy, pp. 255-56.
42. Rev. Clarence Kelly, Conspiracy Against God and Man (Appleton, WI: Western Islands, 1974) p. 179.
43. Ibid.
44. See, for example, Chapter 8 “The Secret Origins of Nazism” in Jean-Michel Angebert, The Occult and the Third Reich (New York: Macmillan, 1974).

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