One of the con­cepts that repeat­ed­ly comes up in the ‘teach­ings’ of Ramtha is the idea that con­scious­ness and ener­gy are the dri­ving forces cre­at­ing real­i­ty. Basi­cal­ly, we’re all (or at least the Aryans) beings of divine con­scious­ness and the uni­verse exists as our con­scious­ness­es’ cos­mic col­lec­tive tapestry/playground. Or some­thing.

So as the Unit­ed States once again asks the ques­tion, “what am I thank­ful for?” as part of this year’s Thanks­giv­ing Day fes­tiv­i­ties, it’s worth remind­ing our­selves that you can’t be thank­ful for any­thing with­out con­scious­ness, so we should prob­a­bly all be thank­ful for con­scious­ness! But it’s also worth not­ing some recent research into the nature and ori­gins of con­scious­ness that actu­al­ly points towards an ori­gin of con­scious­ness that’s sort of of oppo­site of Ramtha’s ‘teach­ings’ and real­ly quite cool and amaz­ing if true: Con­scious­ness might sim­ply be an emer­gent prop­er­ty in com­plex net­works (like your brain) when enough of the var­i­ous cog­ni­tive sub-mod­ules start talk­ing to each oth­er. In oth­er words, con­scious­ness is sort of like the col­lec­tive con­ver­sa­tion between the neu­ronal neigh­bor­hoods of our brains. There’s prob­a­bly some­thing tucked away in all that to be thank­ful for:

News@Vanderbilt

Net­work the­o­ry sheds new light on ori­gins of con­scious­ness

by Melanie Moran | Mar. 9, 2015, 1:00 PM

here in your brain do you exist? Is your aware­ness of the world around you and of your­self as an indi­vid­ual the result of spe­cif­ic, focused changes in your brain, or does that aware­ness come from a broad net­work of neur­al activ­i­ty? How does your brain pro­duce aware­ness?

Van­der­bilt Uni­ver­si­ty researchers took a sig­nif­i­cant step toward answer­ing these long­stand­ing ques­tions with a recent brain imag­ing study, in which they dis­cov­ered glob­al changes in how brain areas com­mu­ni­cate with one anoth­er dur­ing aware­ness. Their find­ings, which were pub­lished March 9 in the Pro­ceed­ings of the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences, chal­lenge pre­vi­ous the­o­ries that hypoth­e­sized much more restrict­ed changes were respon­si­ble for pro­duc­ing aware­ness.

“Iden­ti­fy­ing the fin­ger­prints of con­scious­ness in humans would be a sig­nif­i­cant advance­ment for basic and med­ical research, let alone its philo­soph­i­cal impli­ca­tions on the under­pin­nings of the human expe­ri­ence,” said René Marois, pro­fes­sor and chair of psy­chol­o­gy at Van­der­bilt Uni­ver­si­ty and senior author of the study. “Many of the cog­ni­tive deficits observed in var­i­ous neu­ro­log­i­cal dis­eases may ulti­mate­ly stem from changes in how infor­ma­tion is com­mu­ni­cat­ed through­out the brain.”

Using graph the­o­ry, a branch of math­e­mat­ics con­cerned with explain­ing the inter­ac­tive links between mem­bers of a com­plex net­work, such as social net­works or flight routes, the researchers aimed to char­ac­ter­ize how con­nec­tions between the var­i­ous parts of the brain were relat­ed to aware­ness.

“With graph the­o­ry, one can ask ques­tions about how effi­cient­ly the trans­porta­tion net­works in the Unit­ed States and Europe are con­nect­ed via trans­porta­tion hubs like LaGuardia Air­port in New York,” Dou­glass God­win, grad­u­ate stu­dent and lead author on the research, said. “We can ask those same ques­tions about brain net­works and hubs of neur­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion.”

Mod­ern the­o­ries of the neur­al basis of con­scious­ness fall gen­er­al­ly into two camps: focal and glob­al. Focal the­o­ries con­tend there are spe­cif­ic areas of the brain that are crit­i­cal for gen­er­at­ing con­scious­ness, while glob­al the­o­ries argue con­scious­ness aris­es from large-scale brain changes in activ­i­ty. This study applied graph the­o­ry analy­sis to adju­di­cate between these the­o­ries.

The researchers recruit­ed 24 mem­bers of the uni­ver­si­ty com­mu­ni­ty to par­tic­i­pate in a func­tion­al mag­net­ic res­o­nance imag­ing (fMRI) exper­i­ment. While in the fMRI scan­ner, par­tic­i­pants were asked to detect a disk that was briefly flashed on a screen. In each tri­al, par­tic­i­pants respond­ed whether they were able to detect the tar­get disk and how much con­fi­dence they had in their answer. Exper­i­menters then com­pared the results of the high-con­fi­dence tri­als dur­ing which the tar­get was detect­ed to the tri­als when it was missed by par­tic­i­pants. These were treat­ed as “aware” and “unaware” tri­als, respec­tive­ly.

Com­par­i­son of aware and unaware tri­als using con­ven­tion­al fMRI analy­ses that assess the ampli­tude of brain activ­i­ty showed a pat­tern of results typ­i­cal of sim­i­lar stud­ies, with only a few areas of the brain show­ing more activ­i­ty dur­ing detec­tion of the tar­get than when par­tic­i­pants missed see­ing it. The present study, how­ev­er, was inter­est­ed not sim­ply in what regions might be more acti­vat­ed with aware­ness, but how they com­mu­ni­cate with one anoth­er.

Unlike the focal results seen using more con­ven­tion­al analy­sis meth­ods, the results via this net­work approach point­ed toward a dif­fer­ent con­clu­sion. No one area or net­work of areas of the brain stood out as par­tic­u­lar­ly more con­nect­ed dur­ing aware­ness of the tar­get; the whole brain appeared to become func­tion­al­ly more con­nect­ed fol­low­ing reports of aware­ness.

“We know there are numer­ous brain net­works that con­trol dis­tinct cog­ni­tive func­tions such as atten­tion, lan­guage and con­trol, with each node of a net­work dense­ly inter­con­nect­ed with oth­er nodes of the same net­work, but not with oth­er net­works,” Marois said. “Con­scious­ness appears to break down the mod­u­lar­i­ty of these net­works, as we observed a broad increase in func­tion­al con­nec­tiv­i­ty between these net­works with aware­ness.”

The research sug­gests that con­scious­ness is like­ly a prod­uct of this wide­spread com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and that we can only report things that we have seen once they are being rep­re­sent­ed in the brain in this man­ner. Thus, no one part of the brain is tru­ly the “seat of the soul,” as René Descartes once wrote in a hypoth­e­sis about the pineal gland, but rather, con­scious­ness appears to be an emer­gent prop­er­ty of how infor­ma­tion that needs to be act­ed upon gets prop­a­gat­ed through­out the brain..

“We take for grant­ed how uni­fied our expe­ri­ence of the world is. We don’t expe­ri­ence sep­a­rate visu­al and audi­to­ry worlds, it’s all inte­grat­ed into a sin­gle con­scious expe­ri­ence,” God­win said. “This wide­spread cross-net­work com­mu­ni­ca­tion makes sense as a mech­a­nism by which con­scious­ness gets inte­grat­ed into that sin­gu­lar world.”

...

“No one area or net­work of areas of the brain stood out as par­tic­u­lar­ly more con­nect­ed dur­ing aware­ness of the tar­get; the whole brain appeared to become func­tion­al­ly more con­nect­ed fol­low­ing reports of aware­ness.”
Pret­ty neat! And it’s excit­ing research not just because it might help us all learn more about what makes human­i­ty tick, but it also points rais­es the fun ques­tion of just how wide­spread con­scious­ness, on some lev­el, is across all sorts of life forms all around us? Could plants be con­scious on some lev­el? Well, accord­ing to Ramtha, even a car­rot is con­scious and that’s why its hyp­o­crit­i­cal to be a veg­e­tar­i­an (and you all need to become self-actu­al­ized by over­com­ing fear or some­thing) and while that’s clear­ly the rant­i­ngs of a cult-leader, it does raise a fun Thanks­giv­ing Day ques­tion: if we one day dis­cov­er that our car­rots are con­scious, just how thank­ful should we be? After all, it’s not hard to imag­ine how awe­some it would be if we could real­ly com­mu­ni­cate with dol­phins and whales, but just imag­ine talk­ing to your car­rot! What fun! At that same time, con­scious car­rots sure would com­pli­cate our tra­di­tion­al rela­tion­ship with them (albeit a com­pli­ca­tion human­i­ty is quite famil­iar with). And just how thank­ful would the car­rots be to us for first grow­ing them (kind of nice) and then slic­ing and dic­ing and eat­ing them (not so nice)?

It’s all a reminder that while, Thanks­giv­ing Day may have been start­ed by a group of Pil­grims strug­gling to sur­vive the ele­ments on a new con­ti­nent and get­ting some help for their native neigh­bors, as human­i­ty’s knowl­edge base expands to include things like the study of the ori­gins of con­scious­ness per­haps the spir­it of Thanks­giv­ing Day should­n’t just be a cel­e­bra­tion of that which we are per­son­al­ly thank­ful for but also include ask­ing the ques­tion of what all our non-human, yet pos­si­bly still con­scious, fel­low crit­ters might be thank­ful for too. And what are they not at all thank­ful for that we have con­trol over? Those are going to be increas­ing­ly rel­e­vant ques­tions going for­ward, so we should prob­a­bly ask them at least one day a year.

Appeals court upholds rul­ing for #Ramtha chan­nel­er #JZKnight https://t.co/4SefHL5uHp

https://vanwinkles.com/the-sordid-history-of-sleepytime-tea/

Cults, Con­spir­a­cies and the Twist­ed His­to­ry of Sleep­y­time Tea
By Megan Giller • Feb­ru­ary 1, 2016

Its calm­ing com­bi­na­tion of chamomile, spearmint and oth­er herbs might seem benign, almost bor­ing — the ide­al for­mu­la for lulling you to sleep. But there’s a pecu­liar sto­ry lurk­ing in your cup of Sleep­y­time tea, one that con­cerns invol­un­tary trances, com­mu­ni­ca­tion with aliens and a eugen­ics plot to elim­i­nate the “infe­ri­or races” of our great nation.

Before Sleep­y­time became the crown jew­el of Celes­tial Sea­son­ings, with 1.6 bil­lion cups sold per year, before the com­pa­ny became the largest tea man­u­fac­tur­er in North Amer­i­ca, the tea was noth­ing more than a dream in the heads of a few flow­er­chil­dren hik­ing up the Rocky Moun­tains in search of herbs.

One of the friends, Mo Siegel, was serv­ing an Asian herbal tea to cus­tomers in a local shop to much suc­cess in 1969. The con­cept that “tea” could be herbal was inno­v­a­tive in itself, since up until then, all tea in Amer­i­ca and Great Britain was made of the plant Camel­lia sinen­sis. The group want­ed to get into the busi­ness.

On those first hikes, the team har­vest­ed enough herbs for 500 pounds of a blend they called Mo’s 36 Herb Tea, and the sleep-con­jur­ing tea made of chamomille, spearmint and oth­er herbs soon fol­lowed. In no time the friends were saun­ter­ing into the local bank to get a loan for their new busi­ness, “wear­ing jeans, smelling of herbs, and armed with Tup­per­ware con­tain­ers of Mo’s 36 and Sleep­y­time blends.” They called their com­pa­ny Celes­tial Sea­son­ings, after co-founder Lucin­da Ziesing’s flow­er­name.

But there might be anoth­er rea­son they named it “celes­tial.” Mo Siegel and John Hay, two of the founders, were avid believ­ers in a new-age bible called The Uran­tia Book, which fol­low­ers call “an epochal rev­e­la­tion authored sole­ly by celes­tial beings.” The book touch­es upon every­thing from mind con­trol to a eugen­ics plot to elim­i­nate the “infe­ri­or races” of our great nation.

In fact, the reli­gious text is respon­si­ble for much more than the name of the com­pa­ny. In You’ve GOT to Read This Book! 55 Peo­ple Tell the Sto­ry of the Book That Changed Their Life Siegel dis­clos­es that the ideals he gath­ered from The Uran­tia Book guid­ed how he ran Celes­tial Sea­son­ings from the begin­ning and pro­vid­ed a moral com­pass for him­self and his employ­ees. “I had want­ed bold; I found bold,” he wrote. “I want­ed spir­i­tu­al adven­ture, and I was on the ride of my life. I was search­ing for truth and the book was loaded with it.”

The Uran­tia Book, a 4.3‑pound, 2,097-page tome, pub­lished first in 1955, is a mod­i­fied Sev­enth-Day Adven­tist text sup­pos­ed­ly com­mu­ni­cat­ed to an anony­mous man in a trance by aliens. In real­i­ty, it was like­ly authored in the ear­ly 1900s by a psy­chi­a­trist named William Sadler who used it as a ves­sel for his racist ideas. (You can down­load the entire thing for free: Because the Uran­tia Foun­da­tion asserts that its author­ship is super­hu­man, an Ari­zona court ruled in 1995 that it’s not pro­tect­ed by copy­right and is, thus, in the pub­lic domain.)

There are so many wild ideas in The Uran­tia Book that it’s hard to know where to start. “Lucifer, Satan, Melchizedek, Adam and Eve, and Jesus are all extra-ter­res­tri­al beings who have vis­it­ed earth,” Mo Siegel, who is still inti­mate­ly involved with The Uran­tia Book and the Uran­tia Book Fel­low­ship, tells us in “The Twen­ty Most-Asked Ques­tions”. In fact, Adam and Eve were brought to earth to “upstep the human race” (more on that lat­er).

The first three parts of The Uran­tia Book describe a com­pli­cat­ed uni­verse with invis­i­ble seraphim and spir­it and semi-spir­it beings of all sorts; the last part tells the sto­ry of Jesus’ entire life in detail, all 36 years. Though it has just a few thou­sand fol­low­ers, the book has been trans­lat­ed into 20 lan­guages, includ­ing Ara­bic, Chi­nese, Croa­t­ian and Por­tuguese. There’s even a famous oper­at­ic cycle based on it, as well as at least four fan­ta­sy nov­els.

“The Uran­tia Book itself does not rep­re­sent a destruc­tive cult,” said Rick Ross, a cult expert who helped in Waco with the Branch David­i­ans. “But some of its self-pro­claimed prophets lead groups that can be seen as destruc­tive cults.”

The book also pur­ports that there have been many, many sons of God like Jesus on many dif­fer­ent plan­ets, because there are a bil­lion worlds. When evo­lu­tion is com­plete, each of these worlds will have 100,000 local uni­vers­es with 10 mil­lion inhab­it­ed plan­ets. Our earth is called Uran­tia, and it’s num­ber 606 in a plan­e­tary group named Sata­nia, the head­quar­ters of which is called Jerusem. When we die, we’re rein­car­nat­ed from plan­et-to-plan­et, then final­ly to Par­adise, where the Deity lives. There is a lit­tle piece of the Deity in each of us, called a Thought Adjuster.

The Fel­low­ship will tell you that it’s not a cult, but in The Uran­tia Book, the rev­e­la­tor named the Bril­liant Evening Star of Nebadon calls for Uran­tians to replace Chris­tian­i­ty with a “new cult” that will be the “true reli­gion” of the future.

Urantiabook_inset

“The Uran­tia Book itself does not rep­re­sent a destruc­tive cult. But some of its self-pro­claimed prophets lead groups that can be seen as destruc­tive cults.”

So how did this insight­ful book come to be? Well, there are many ori­gin sto­ries, but every­one seems to agree that it’s a “direct-voice” book, mean­ing that it wasn’t writ­ten by a human. Instead, aliens com­mu­ni­cat­ed the text direct­ly to a per­son, or in the words of the Uran­tia Book Fel­low­ship, “numer­ous super­mor­tal personalities…made con­tact through the Thought Adjuster (indwelling spir­it of God) of a par­tic­u­lar human being on our world.”

Accord­ing to William Sadler, the leader of the move­ment, a “Divine Coun­selor” pre­sent­ed the ideas in a lan­guage called Uver­sa, which had to be trans­lat­ed into Salv­ing­ton and then into Sata­nia before it could be trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish and com­mu­ni­cat­ed to a human being.

The Uran­tia Book, a 4.3‑pound, 2,097-page tome, pub­lished first in 1955, is a mod­i­fied Sev­enth-Day Adven­tist text sup­pos­ed­ly com­mu­ni­cat­ed to an anony­mous man in a trance by aliens.

The most accept­ed sto­ry, found in How to Know What to Believe by Harold Sher­man, quot­ed and sum­ma­rized in Mar­tin Gardner’s Uran­tia: The Great Cult Mys­tery, is that around 1911, a man in Sadler’s apart­ment build­ing began hav­ing fits and spells at night. Even­tu­al­ly he start­ed speak­ing in oth­er voic­es and revealed that he was “a stu­dent vis­i­tor on an obser­va­tion trip here from a far dis­tant plan­et.” William Sadler and his wife, Dr. Lena Sadler, had con­ver­sa­tions with these voic­es for almost 10 years while their adopt­ed daugh­ter, Christy, took notes.

In the 1920s a group of friends (even­tu­al­ly called the Forum) put togeth­er a list of 4,000 ques­tions for these beings, and lo and behold, a few weeks lat­er the sleep­ing man furi­ous­ly wrote a man­u­script that answered all of them.

Along with lat­er com­mu­ni­ca­tions from the “rev­e­la­tors,” that man­u­script became The Uran­tia Book. These “direct-trance” medi­ums were huge­ly pop­u­lar in the sec­ond half of the 1800s, and appar­ent­ly even the famed psy­chol­o­gist philoso­pher William James was lured by one. (In the 1990s many fol­low­ers of The Uran­tia Book start­ed to hear celes­tial voic­es of their own, though the Foun­da­tion hasn’t acknowl­edged that any are legit­i­mate but, instead has done quite a bit to dis­cred­it them.)

“Psy­cho­analy­sis, hyp­no­tism, inten­sive com­par­i­son, fail to show that the writ­ten or spo­ken mes­sages of this indi­vid­ual have ori­gin in his own mind,” Sadler wrote in his 1929 book The Mind at Mis­chief: Tricks and Decep­tions of the Sub­con­scious and How to Cope With Them.

The orig­i­nal human transmitter’s name is nev­er revealed, but in Uran­tia: The Great Cult Mys­tery, from which much of the above is found, author Mar­tin Gard­ner (who for many years wrote for Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can and oth­er legit­i­mate pub­li­ca­tions) makes the case that it was Sadler’s broth­er-in-law, Wil­fred Custer Kel­logg. Sadler had been duped by oth­er chan­nel­ers in the past, most notably Ellen White, the founder of Sev­enth-Day Adven­tism, but he believed his broth­er-in-law was the real thing.
The Spell on Mo Siegel

“I thought that was just the goofi­est thing I’d ever heard,” Mo Siegel wrote of The Uran­tia Book in You’ve GOT to Read This Book: 55 Peo­ple Tell the Sto­ry of the Book That Changed Their Life. “After I read it, I was not con­cerned about who had writ­ten it or how it had been writ­ten because it was so pow­er­ful.”

Siegel, who is now the cur­rent pres­i­dent of the Uran­tia Foun­da­tion and hosts a week­ly study group at his house, dis­cov­ered The Uran­tia Book in 1969, the same year he start­ed hik­ing up the Rock­ies for herbs. In fact, the text was a major rea­son he decid­ed to found Celes­tial Sea­son­ings.

“The ideas [in The Uran­tia Book] were the inspi­ra­tion for the uplift­ing quotes we print on the side of our tea box­es and on our teabag tags!”

“After study­ing the teach­ings in The Uran­tia Book, I knew that it would feel self­ish and waste­ful to sim­ply focus on mate­r­i­al suc­cess,” he said. “So, as a young man, when I began think­ing of what I could do to make a liv­ing, I imme­di­ate­ly turned to the health food industry…The ideas [in The Uran­tia Book] were the inspi­ra­tion for the uplift­ing quotes we print on the side of our tea box­es and on our teabag tags!”

“Mo and John used it as a guid­ing prin­ci­pal and con­tin­u­al­ly quot­ed from The Uran­tia Book,” Car­o­line Mac­Dougall, the company’s fifth employ­ee and the cur­rent founder and CEO of Tee­ci­no told Van Winkle’s. At staff meet­ings they would even use quotes to bol­ster their argu­ments. “It was a guide for mak­ing sure of the moral val­ues that under­lay the com­pa­ny at that time,” she added.

But which morals?
The Hate With­in

In The Twen­ty Most-Asked Ques­tions about The Uran­tia Book, Siegel is care­ful to say that “all per­sons are equal in the sight of God” and that “race should become irrel­e­vant.” But the text itself is weighed down with some of the most racist ideas I’ve read in a long time.

For exam­ple, start­ing around 500,000 years ago, six col­ored races appeared on Uran­tia (i.e., earth): red, orange, yel­low, green, blue, and indi­go

“The ear­li­er races are some­what supe­ri­or to the lat­er; the red man stands far above the indi­go — black — race,” says Paper 51 of The Uran­tia Book, and “each suc­ceed­ing evo­lu­tion­ary man­i­fes­ta­tion of a dis­tinct group of mor­tals rep­re­sents vari­a­tion at the expense of the orig­i­nal endow­ment.” Fur­ther­more, “The yel­low race usu­al­ly enslaves the green, while the blue man [which cor­re­sponds to Cau­casians] sub­dues the indi­go [black].”

“[The Uran­tia Book] was a guide for mak­ing sure of the moral val­ues that under­lay the com­pa­ny at that time.”

On every plan­et through­out every uni­verse, fair-skinned, blue-eyed aliens named Adam and Eve appear to “upstep” the natives. When their prog­e­ny mate with the accept­able inhab­i­tants of the plan­et, the “infe­ri­or stocks will be elim­i­nat­ed and there will be one puri­fied race, one lan­guage, and one reli­gion,” as Gard­ner explains it in Uran­tia: The Great Cult Mys­tery.

But before that can hap­pen, Paper 51 of The Uran­tia Book says, “the infe­ri­or and unfit are large­ly elim­i­nat­ed… it seems that you ought to be able to agree upon the bio­log­ic dis­fel­low­ship­ing of your more marked­ly unfit, defec­tive, degen­er­ate, and anti­so­cial stocks.”

This process hap­pens on every plan­et when Adam and Eve appear. But on Uran­tia (i.e., earth), it didn’t go accord­ing to plan. Adam and Eve messed up. So, “hav­ing failed to achieve race har­mo­niza­tion by the Adam­ic tech­nique,” Part II: The Local Uni­verse sec­tion of book tells us, “you must now work out your plan­e­tary prob­lem of race improve­ment by oth­er and large­ly human meth­ods of adap­ta­tion and con­trol.”

“Bio­log­ic ren­o­va­tion of the racial stocks — the selec­tive elim­i­na­tion of infe­ri­or human strains,” Paper 70 of The Uran­tia Book says, will “tend to erad­i­cate many mor­tal inequal­i­ties.”

In fact, per the text, evil, in the form of ill­ness and dis­ease, exists because “unfit” peo­ples like “Aus­tralian natives and the Bush­men and Pyg­mies of Africa…these mis­er­able rem­nants of the nonso­cial peo­ples of ancient times” haven’t been elim­i­nat­ed. Eugen­ics is the way to cor­rect this error.

“Bio­log­ic ren­o­va­tion of the racial stocks — the selec­tive elim­i­na­tion of infe­ri­or human strains,” Paper 70 of the Uran­tia Book says, will “tend to erad­i­cate many mor­tal inequal­i­ties.”

Com­pare that to Hitler’s words in Mein Kampf: “The demand that defec­tive peo­ple be pre­vent­ed from prop­a­gat­ing equal­ly defec­tive off­spring rep­re­sents the most human act of mankind.”
The Urant­ian Phi­los­o­phy

While Hitler didn’t have any­thing to do with writ­ing The Uran­tia Book, William Sadler did. One of the most well-known psy­chi­a­trists of his era, Sadler got his start work­ing for Dr. John H. Kel­logg at the famous Bat­tle Creek San­i­tar­i­um, which treat­ed celebri­ties like the Rock­e­fellers, Mont­gomery Ward and even Thomas Edi­son. Kel­logg was a noto­ri­ous eugeni­cist and found­ed the Race Bet­ter­ment Foun­da­tion, whose goals were “to call atten­tion to the dan­gers which threat­en the race.”

Influ­enced by Kellogg’s ideas, Sadler pub­lished three eugeni­cist books: Long Heads and Round Heads; or, What’s the Mat­ter With Ger­many (1918), Racial Deca­dence: An Exam­i­na­tion of the Caus­es of Racial Degen­er­a­tion in the Unit­ed States (1922) and The Truth About Hered­i­ty (1927). The Uran­tia Book echoes the ideas pre­sent­ed in these books, and in some cas­es, it repro­duces the text word for word.
WilliamSadler_Main
William Sadler, via Wiki­Com­mons

In Racial Deca­dence, Sadler express­es, among oth­er notions, that the “unfit” should be ster­il­ized, that “moral­i­ty is hered­i­ty” and that “some races are more moral than oth­ers.” And in The Truth About Hered­i­ty, Sadler writes that mar­riage between races “is to be deplored when one of the races would be infe­ri­or as com­pared with the oth­er, which hap­pens to be the bio­log­ic fact as con­cerns the White and Negro races in this coun­try.”

His wife, Lena Sadler, who was John Kellogg’s niece, had equal­ly damn­ing words. In a paper called “Is the Abnor­mal to Become Nor­mal” deliv­ered to the Illi­nois Fed­er­a­tion of Women’s Clubs in 1932 and pub­lished in a col­lec­tion called A Decade of Progress in Eugen­ics, she calls for a manda­to­ry ster­il­iza­tion law and says that if we do not prac­tice good eugen­ics, “ulti­mate­ly this mon­ster will grow to such hideous pro­por­tions that it will strike us down.”

If we prac­tice eugen­ics cor­rect­ly, she con­tin­ues, we’ll elim­i­nate “at least 90 per­cent of crime, insan­i­ty, fee­ble­mind­ed­ness, moron­ism, and abnor­mal sex­u­al­i­ty, not to men­tion many oth­er forms of defec­tive­ness and degen­er­a­cy. Thus, with­in a cen­tu­ry, our asy­lums, pris­ons, and state hos­pi­tals would be large­ly emp­tied of their present vic­tims of human woe and mis­ery.”

Lena Sadler’s speech was writ­ten near­ly 100 years ago. Maybe things have changed for such mod­ern-day fol­low­ers of The Uran­tia Book as Mo Siegel?

Unfor­tu­nate­ly not.

“Ill­ness and dis­ease result from evil and cause suf­fer­ing,” Siegel writes in “The Twen­ty Most-Asked Ques­tions” on The Uran­tia Book Fel­low­ship web­site. “Unfor­tu­nate­ly, sev­er­al fac­tors hin­der progress toward the devel­op­ment of a dis­ease-free world. The laws of genet­ics are immutable, and form the phys­i­cal cor­ner­stone of evo­lu­tion. At the present time mankind los­es about as much progress as it makes by ignor­ing eugen­ics.”

Lit­tle infor­ma­tion on the panel’s cur­rent activ­i­ties could be found, and repeat­ed attempts to reach Mo Siegel and the Uran­tia Foun­da­tion were met with resound­ing silence.

The Fel­low­ship is putting its mon­ey where its mouth is, too. In a 2010 email sent to “read­ers with advanced infor­ma­tion and for­ward look­ing per­spec­tives that are not suit­ed for being post­ed on the web­site,” a fol­low­er named Mar­tin Green­hut writes that the trustees have con­vened a pan­el on eugen­ics. He names all of the pan­el mem­bers, the most strik­ing of which is Ker­mit Ander­son, who at that time was the genet­ic screen­ing pro­gram direc­tor at Kaiser Per­ma­nente in Cal­i­for­nia and the author of much genet­ics research.

Lit­tle infor­ma­tion on the panel’s cur­rent activ­i­ties could be found, and repeat­ed attempts to reach both Mo Siegel and the Uran­tia Foun­da­tion were met with resound­ing silence.
Celes­tial Sea­son­ings Today

So where does this leave Celes­tial Sea­son­ings? The com­pa­ny also declined to com­ment for this piece, which means we don’t know if The Uran­tia Book still guides their busi­ness deci­sions. Most like­ly not: Siegel retired in 2002, and John Hay, the oth­er Uran­tia Book believ­er and co-founder, left even ear­li­er, in 1985, pushed out by Siegel’s desire to become a big com­pa­ny “like Coca-Cola,” Car­o­line Mac­Dougall recalled. (Hay went on to be the CEO of Rudi’s Organ­ic Bak­ery, White­Dove Herbals, and more than a few tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies.)

Siegel got his wish: Since 2000, the com­pa­ny has been part of Hain Celes­tial Group, a mas­sive multi­bil­lion-dol­lar cor­po­ra­tion that also includes Arrow­head Mills, MaraNatha, Spec­trum Nation­als and Jason. Celes­tial pret­ty much invent­ed an entire cat­e­go­ry that we now take for grant­ed: nat­ur­al health foods. And they do it well. How­Good, which rates pack­aged food prod­ucts, told me that Celestial’s prod­ucts receive a “great” rat­ing, which means that in terms of social and envi­ron­men­tal impact, accord­ing to How­Good, they’re 85 per­cent bet­ter than all of the food pro­duced in the Unit­ed States.

Like any big com­pa­ny, though, over the years they’ve faced a few class-action law­suits. The largest one is still ongo­ing: It accus­es Celes­tial of false­ly label­ing prod­ucts includ­ing Sleep­y­time Tea as “all nat­ur­al” even though they alleged­ly con­tain pes­ti­cides. Propachlor, which is said to be in Sleep­y­time Kids Good­night Grape Tea, is “a Bad Actor Chem­i­cal (mean­ing it is tox­ic, car­cino­genic, or a known repro­duc­tive or devel­op­men­tal tox­i­cant), a car­cino­gen and a devel­op­men­tal or repro­duc­tive tox­in.” Hain has coun­tered that it had teas test­ed by the Nation­al Food Lab, but there’s been some con­tro­ver­sy about whether or not it is impar­tial, as the Nation­al Food Lab lists Celes­tial as one of its clients on its web­site, say­ing, “some­where along the line, we have had a hand in their suc­cess.”

That may be. And the same could be said for The Uran­tia Book and its racist celes­tial and not-so-celes­tial cre­ators.

*This arti­cle has been updat­ed to reflect that Ker­mit Ander­son is not deceased.

UFOs: ‘Open-mind­ed’ North­west is fer­tile ground for cos­mic buzz

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/northwest/ufos-open-minded-northwest-is-fertile-ground-for-cosmic-buzz/

Inter­est­ing sup­port for Don­ald Trump–

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/guess-whos-a-big-trump-fan-ramtha-as-channeled-by-democratic-donor-jz-knight/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=article_left_1.1

Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump is chan­nel­ing a new source of sup­port: win­ning over the 35,000-year-old war­rior spir­it named Ramtha.

For years, JZ Knight, the Yelm, Thurston Coun­ty, mys­tic who claims to chan­nel Ramtha, has been a big Demo­c­ra­t­ic donor, send­ing piles of mon­ey earned from her for-prof­it Ramtha’s School of Enlight­en­ment.

That caused embar­rass­ment to the par­ty when videos sur­faced in 2012 of Knight/Ramtha mak­ing offen­sive com­ments about Mex­i­cans, gays, Jews and Roman Catholics. After that flap, the state Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty rid itself of $70,000 in Knight dona­tions.

But like Rust Belt man­u­fac­tur­ing work­ers and oth­er tra­di­tion­al Demo­c­ra­t­ic con­stituen­cies, Ramtha appar­ent­ly shift­ed alle­giances when it came to last year’s pres­i­den­tial elec­tion.

On Mon­day, Knight post­ed video excerpts of a Dec. 8 “prophet­ic vision” in which she declared in her Ramtha voice: “The great­est mis­judg­ment of char­ac­ter came when you thought a woman should win this race.”

In the Bre­it­bart-wor­thy spiel, Ramtha/Knight, smok­ing a tobac­co pipe, goes on to attack the Clin­ton Foun­da­tion and says the FBI was behind the leak­ing of Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty doc­u­ments to Wik­iLeaks. “It was nev­er Rus­sia,” she says.

Ramtha cheers the new pres­i­dent: “That man is trump­ing deceit. He doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t do drugs, he does busi­ness!”

As a kick­er, Ramtha pre­dicts Trump will receive the pro­tec­tion of UFOs while fly­ing in his jet: “And the first time he looks out the win­dow … when he sees two sil­ver disks as escort, he is going to know it all — and this is a man who is not afraid — he is going to know it all.”

Mike Wright, a Knight spokesman, said in an emailed state­ment that Knight con­tin­ues to sup­port Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­dates and caus­es in local and state elec­tions.

“She did not vote for can­di­date Trump but she sees what Ramtha describes as ‘pur­pose­ful good’ in his elec­tion,” the state­ment said. “Ramtha’s prophe­cies teach­ing from Decem­ber 2016 pro­vides a dynam­ic per­spec­tive of these dynam­ic times.” . . .

When far right House mem­ber Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene was forced to apol­o­gize a cou­ple weeks ago for her com­ments com­par­ing mask man­dates to the Holo­caust, it may have been tempt­ing to dis­miss the inci­dent as just the lat­est call for atten­tion from one of the GOP’s QAnon ris­ing stars. A ris­ing star for the fringe. But here’s a quick reminder that the stuff that gets MTG in trou­ble is get­ting less and less fringy as the QAnon world­view con­tin­ues to spread.

And as the fol­low­ing arti­cle describes, that QAnon world­view is spread­ing in a com­mu­ni­ty that, on the sur­face, might seem like a sur­pris­ing recep­ta­cle for far right tripe but, of course, is exact­ly the place we should expect this stuff to fes­ter: the new age com­mu­ni­ty, and broad­er yoga and well­ness indus­try sur­round­ing it. As we might expect, the pan­dem­ic and exper­i­men­tal vac­cine cre­at­ed quite a jolt for these com­mu­ni­ties. The kind of jolt that makes QAnon and anti-Semit­ic con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries a lot more pop­u­lar. There’s even a term for the kind of recruit­ment tac­tic that relies on vivid sun­set pho­tos and slick­ly designed “edu­ca­tion­al” slides on Insta­gram, and tar­get­ing pri­mar­i­ly women: pas­tel QAnon

But as we’ll also see, it’s not just that the pan­dem­ic has made well­ness gurus and their fol­low­ers more inclined to sub­scribe to far right con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries. An entire indus­try for Insta­gram-based well­ness gurus has been explod­ing in recent years and it sounds like these new gurus are being taught to embrace con­tro­ver­sial con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries as a brand­ing exer­cise. Yes, true to form, a com­bi­na­tion of junk spir­i­tu­al­i­ty and cyn­i­cal mar­ket­ing is behind the lat­est New Age headache:

The Los Ange­les Times

California’s yoga, well­ness and spir­i­tu­al­i­ty com­mu­ni­ty has a QAnon prob­lem

By Lau­ra J. Nel­son
June 23, 2021 5 AM PT

It seemed like the end of a typ­i­cal rei­ki attune­ment: A group of women wear­ing yoga pants and flow­ing flo­ral skirts, gath­ered in a healer’s home after a course in the alter­na­tive ther­a­py of bal­anc­ing chakras, clear­ing auras and trans­fer­ring ener­gy.

But it was the ear­ly days of the pan­dem­ic and COVID-19 was spread­ing fast. The women in the room stood so close that their bod­ies touched. No one wore masks.

Kath­leen Abra­ham, 61, saw that the Face­book pho­to of the group had been tak­en in the Orange Coun­ty home of one of her dear­est friends, a woman she had known for 15 years who had helped her recov­er from breast can­cer and intro­duced her to the world of New Age spir­i­tu­al­ism.

Weeks lat­er came anoth­er jolt. Her friend announced on Insta­gram that she had been red-pilled, a term used by QAnon adher­ents to describe their con­ver­sion to belief in the con­spir­a­cy. Anoth­er old friend, Abraham’s first rei­ki mas­ter, was also grow­ing more extreme, writ­ing that the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic was a con­spir­a­cy and face masks were tox­ic.

QAnon’s con­spir­a­to­r­i­al belief sys­tem has now pulled in at least a dozen peo­ple in Abraham’s spir­i­tu­al social cir­cle, includ­ing two of her clos­est friends and two friend­ly psy­chics who always claimed the booth next to hers at New Age trade shows.

“I real­ized that I had to release them with love,” said Abra­ham, an ener­gy heal­er and cer­ti­fied crys­tal prac­ti­tion­er from Tra­bu­co Canyon. “It’s hurt­ful — it’s a deep, painful heart hurt. It’s just real­ly sad to lose so many peo­ple. But it just got to the point where I had to let them go.”

A world that has long embraced love, light and accep­tance is now mak­ing room for some­thing else: QAnon.

More com­mon­ly asso­ci­at­ed with right-wing groups, the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry is spread­ing through yoga, med­i­ta­tion and oth­er well­ness cir­cles. Friends and col­leagues have watched with alarm as Insta­gram influ­encers and their New Age peers — yogis, ener­gy heal­ers, sound bathers, crys­tal prac­ti­tion­ers, psy­chics, quan­tum magi­cians — embraced QAnon’s con­spir­a­to­r­i­al world­view and sprayed it across social media.

The health, well­ness and spir­i­tu­al­i­ty world has always been primed for that world­view, fol­low­ers say. Though large­ly filled with well-mean­ing peo­ple seek­ing spir­i­tu­al or phys­i­cal com­fort, the $1.5‑trillion indus­try can also be a hotbed for con­spir­a­cies, mag­i­cal think­ing, dietary sup­ple­ments with dubi­ous sci­en­tif­ic claims and dis­trust of insti­tu­tion­al health­care, includ­ing vac­cines.

“It’s always been the water we were swim­ming in,” said Julian Walk­er, 50, a Mar Vista yogi, ecsta­t­ic dance teacher and co-host of the “Con­spir­i­tu­al­i­ty” pod­cast, which tracks the mar­riage of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries and spir­i­tu­al­ism. “Now we’re see­ing what hap­pens when the water ris­es.”

Once a fringe move­ment, QAnon explod­ed in pop­u­lar­i­ty dur­ing the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, gain­ing more believ­ers in the U.S. than sev­er­al major reli­gions. Two recent polls have found that about 1 in 6 Amer­i­can adults believes its key tenet: that a cabal of Satan-wor­ship­ing pedophiles are try­ing to con­trol the country’s gov­ern­ment, mass media and finan­cial sys­tems.

Just how deeply QAnon has pen­e­trat­ed the well­ness world is dif­fi­cult to quan­ti­fy, but its effects are tan­gi­ble: bro­ken friend­ships and busi­ness part­ner­ships, lin­ger­ing sad­ness and frus­tra­tion, and a grow­ing num­ber of spir­i­tu­al­ists who are speak­ing out against the spread of the false con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry.

Sev­er­al New Age spir­i­tu­al­ists in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia inter­viewed by The Times said they knew a total of more than a dozen for­mer friends and col­leagues at the Jan. 6 insur­rec­tion at the U.S. Capi­tol with ties to yoga, med­i­ta­tion, ener­gy heal­ing and dietary sup­ple­ments hawked by mul­ti­level mar­ket­ing com­pa­nies.

Jake Angeli, whose face paint and horned head­gear dur­ing the Capi­tol riot earned him the nick­name “the QAnon Shaman,” car­ried a sign at ear­li­er protests that read, “Q Sent Me,” and suc­cess­ful­ly peti­tioned a fed­er­al judge on reli­gious grounds to receive only organ­ic food in jail. One of the best known of the riot­ers is Alan Hostet­ter, a pony­tailed for­mer police chief, yoga teacher and sound heal­er from Orange Coun­ty who spoke at a QAnon con­fer­ence and was indict­ed by fed­er­al offi­cials this month.

Vocal QAnon sup­port has dwin­dled since the insur­rec­tion, New Age watch­ers say, but some of the extrem­ism is cal­ci­fy­ing into some­thing equal­ly con­cern­ing: long-term con­spir­a­to­r­i­al think­ing that encour­ages rad­i­cal auton­o­my and sows dis­trust in vac­ci­na­tions, elect­ed offi­cials and insti­tu­tions woven into the fab­ric of Amer­i­can life.

Much of that think­ing has been on dis­play in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, the heart of U.S. well­ness cul­ture, where many peo­ple with enough dis­pos­able income to pay for raw, organ­ic diets and $250 chakra realign­ments are also dis­en­gaged from their civic respon­si­bil­i­ties, said Derek Beres, a tech work­er who lives in the West­side neigh­bor­hood of Palms and co-hosts the “Con­spir­i­tu­al­i­ty” pod­cast.

When pub­lic health orders closed L.A.‘s yoga stu­dios, med­i­ta­tion rooms and oth­er spir­i­tu­al hubs in spring of last year, those priv­i­leged well­ness seek­ers were told, “some for the first time, that they can’t do some­thing,” Beres said. “Since they don’t have any pub­lic health knowl­edge, since they don’t have any civics knowl­edge, the only place they have to turn is their Insta­gram feeds.”

As the num­ber of yoga stu­dios soared in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia and rents rose, stu­dio own­ers real­ized that offer­ing $3,000 teacher train­ings was more lucra­tive than charg­ing stu­dents $25 per class, Walk­er said. Those class­es cre­at­ed a glut of new­ly licensed teach­ers, some of whom turned to Insta­gram to build a fol­low­ing and secure spon­sor­ship deals.

In behind-the-scenes mar­ket­ing train­ings, aspir­ing well­ness influ­encers were told that “being con­tro­ver­sial, tak­ing defin­i­tive posi­tions that make peo­ple love you or hate you, is a great way to build your brand,” Walk­er said.

That proved true for many spir­i­tu­al influ­encers and plat­forms: A Venice kun­dali­ni yoga teacher who has worked with pop star Ali­cia Keys inter­viewed a con­spir­a­cy the­o­rist for an hour on YouTube. A Sacra­men­to yoga teacher who post­ed, then delet­ed, an abbre­vi­a­tion for the pop­u­lar QAnon slo­gan, “Where we go one, we go all.” And on Gaia, a kind of Net­flix for spir­i­tu­al­ism, sub­scribers can watch a 13-episode series by British con­spir­a­cy the­o­rist David Icke, who pop­u­lar­ized the claim that the world is run by shape-shift­ing, blood-drink­ing lizard peo­ple.

Hold­ing influ­encers account­able for spread­ing those beliefs has proved dif­fi­cult, as the vast major­i­ty of the indus­try is unli­censed and unreg­u­lat­ed.

“It has fos­tered an enor­mous amount of mis­trust,” said Seane Corn, a L.A.-based yoga instruc­tor and co-founder of “Off The Mat, Into the World,” a non­prof­it orga­ni­za­tion that bridges yoga and social activism. “It has end­ed friend­ships.”

Corn was among the well­ness lead­ers who shared a state­ment in Sep­tem­ber warn­ing that QAnon’s tac­tics resem­bled cult psy­chol­o­gy and that the ide­ol­o­gy would sow con­fu­sion, divi­sion and para­noia. Corn esti­mates she knows at least 10 peo­ple who embraced “hard­core QAnon,” includ­ing two peo­ple who par­tic­i­pat­ed in the attack on the Capi­tol — and is aware of more than 30 col­leagues and peers who sub­scribe to some forms of the ide­ol­o­gy, as well as a “count­less” num­ber of yoga stu­dents.

Corn said she has watched bots and real-life QAnon devo­tees try to har­ness her social media com­ment sec­tions as a recruit­ing ground, using “well­ness lan­guage and non­vi­o­lent com­mu­ni­ca­tion” in an attempt to lead her fol­low­ers toward more con­spir­a­to­r­i­al think­ing.

Her crit­i­cism of QAnon also trig­gered a flood of homo­pho­bic and vio­lent­ly sex­u­al mes­sages in her inbox, she said, and her Face­book page was hacked.

After the failed insur­rec­tion at the Capi­tol, QAnon is now some­thing of a “dam­aged brand,” said Matthew Rem­s­ki, a cult researcher and co-host of the “Con­spir­i­tu­al­i­ty” pod­cast. Corn said some of her acquain­tances who have ful­ly embraced the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry would be embar­rassed to be described that way.

When the world shut down in March of 2020, Eva Kohn of San Clemente cre­at­ed a group text to stay in touch with nine oth­er women in the area. Niceties about fam­i­lies and lock­down hob­bies devolved over the months into false con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries: that Demo­c­ra­t­ic elites were har­vest­ing adrenochrome from tor­tured chil­dren to use in satan­ic rites, that the insur­rec­tion at the U.S. Capi­tol was per­pe­trat­ed by antifa, that the COVID-19 vac­cine caus­es infer­til­i­ty.

Kohn, who stud­ied engi­neer­ing, pushed back again and again. What’s the evi­dence? What are your sources? Here’s a sci­en­tif­ic study that dis­proves the the­o­ry.

“I have a pret­ty ana­lyt­i­cal brain,” Kohn said. “No mat­ter what evi­dence I would present, they would not hear it. They have gone through a rab­bit hole and they won’t come out.”

By the end of the year, sev­en of the 10 women in the group chat had embraced QAnon. Kohn even­tu­al­ly excused her­self, but one of them still texts her anti-vac­cine pro­pa­gan­da. She esti­mates that she knows of more than 30 peo­ple who’ve embraced Q‑related con­spir­a­cies. For some, she said, “the influ­ence of nat­ur­al well­ness is what has dri­ven them to this type of think­ing.”

Last spring, extrem­ist researchers began to note with alarm that big­ot­ed, far-right ide­ol­o­gy was being laun­dered through vivid sun­set pho­tos and slick­ly designed “edu­ca­tion­al” slides on Insta­gram. That recruit­ing tac­tic, aimed large­ly at women, has since been dubbed “pas­tel QAnon.”

“Insta­gram is the plat­form where yoga and QAnon inter­sect­ed,” said Cécile Guerin, a yoga teacher and extrem­ism researcher at the Insti­tute for Strate­gic Dia­logue in Lon­don. She said the ide­ol­o­gy was a clear fit for a com­mu­ni­ty that has long been taught to search for and decode hid­den mean­ings and pat­terns.

Fed­er­al offi­cials have clas­si­fied the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry as a domes­tic ter­ror­ism threat. An intel­li­gence report released last week sug­gest­ed that while some adher­ents will pull back as false prophe­cies do not come true, oth­ers will shift from “serv­ing as ‘dig­i­tal sol­diers’ towards engag­ing in real world vio­lence.”

The theory’s promised “Great Awak­en­ing” echoes the yog­ic views of ascen­sion and con­scious­ness. The anti-mask and anti-dis­tanc­ing rhetoric focused on bod­i­ly auton­o­my and sov­er­eign­ty, themes embed­ded in New Age prac­tices, too: that you are your own guru, that you know your body bet­ter than any­one else.

Those who have embraced the con­spir­a­cy belief and search for hid­den clues often describe them­selves as hav­ing been “red-pilled,” a ref­er­ence to the 1999 film “The Matrix.” In a famous scene, Keanu Reeves’ char­ac­ter is offered a choice between a blue pill that will keep him in a clue­less but con­tent­ed dream state, and a red pill that will reveal the world’s harsh real­i­ties.

Yoga teacher Lau­ra Schwartz saw that rhetoric rear its head last year, when one of her acquain­tances in the yoga com­mu­ni­ty in Alexan­dria, Va., began to rant on Insta­gram that the COVID-19 vac­cine, which was still in devel­op­ment, con­tained abort­ed fetus­es.

Then came a flood of even wilder con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries: that Bill Gates was using the vac­cine to depop­u­late the world, that the Roth­schilds were con­trol­ling the world’s banks, that Don­ald Trump would expose and arrest a glob­al ring of elite pedophile Democ­rats.

“Every talk­ing point QAnon had, she checked them off,” said Schwartz, 41, who has a master’s degree in pub­lic health and watched in hor­ror as the posts piled up.

Schwartz even­tu­al­ly sev­ered ties with the acquain­tance and moved to Carls­bad in San Diego Coun­ty. Over the next year, as she watched more New Age clients, peers and acquain­tances ven­ture down the rab­bit hole, Schwartz coined her own term for the phe­nom­e­non: “Woo-Anon.”

“Peo­ple aren’t tak­ing QAnon as seri­ous­ly as they should, giv­en how per­va­sive it is in these worlds — evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians, yogis — that oth­er­wise have very lit­tle in com­mon,” Schwartz said. “They’re cre­at­ing a world where truth is what­ev­er you feel like it is.”

The extent to which influ­encers are con­scious­ly embrac­ing QAnon belief sys­tems, or just pick­ing and choos­ing the types of details that will do well online and attract a wider fol­low­ing, is “still a mys­tery,” Rem­s­ki said. “Nobody will give you a straight answer.”

Jen Pearl­man, a cer­ti­fied life coach who has dab­bled in holis­tic heal­ing for years, also watched the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries grow­ing last year.

First, the­o­ries that COVID-19 was caused by 5G wire­less tech­nol­o­gy. Then an explo­sion of posts shar­ing the viral anti-vac­cine movie “Plan­dem­ic,” cou­pled with crit­i­cisms of mask rules. In the sum­mer, the embrace of the “Save the Chil­dren” cam­paign, an anti-sex-traf­fick­ing cam­paign co-opt­ed by QAnon. By Novem­ber, Pearl­man said, peo­ple were talk­ing about their 2nd Amend­ment rights and Trump’s reelec­tion cam­paign.

Most alarm­ing, she said, was that many of the posts seemed anti­se­mit­ic, with allu­sions to a New World Order and com­par­ing the Unit­ed States’ pub­lic health shut­downs and vac­ci­na­tion poli­cies to the con­cen­tra­tion camps of Nazi Ger­many.

It felt “ter­ri­fy­ing,” Pearl­man said — a reminder that “even though as a com­mu­ni­ty we’re real­ly pep­py, we love every­body, and it’s all very ‘kum­baya,’ there is a dark under­ly­ing world­view.”

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“California’s yoga, well­ness and spir­i­tu­al­i­ty com­mu­ni­ty has a QAnon prob­lem” by Lau­ra J. Nel­son; The Los Ange­les Times; 06/23/2021

“Last spring, extrem­ist researchers began to note with alarm that big­ot­ed, far-right ide­ol­o­gy was being laun­dered through vivid sun­set pho­tos and slick­ly designed “edu­ca­tion­al” slides on Insta­gram. That recruit­ing tac­tic, aimed large­ly at women, has since been dubbed “pas­tel QAnon.””

Come for the yoga train­ing. Stay for the slick­ly designed QAnon “edu­ca­tion­al” slides. Any­one can teach you yoga, but only some teach­ers include the spe­cial lessons on the secret Demo­c­ra­t­ic pedophile rings run­ning the world. It’s the brand­ing solu­tion for today’s Insta­gram guru:

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As the num­ber of yoga stu­dios soared in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia and rents rose, stu­dio own­ers real­ized that offer­ing $3,000 teacher train­ings was more lucra­tive than charg­ing stu­dents $25 per class, Walk­er said. Those class­es cre­at­ed a glut of new­ly licensed teach­ers, some of whom turned to Insta­gram to build a fol­low­ing and secure spon­sor­ship deals.

In behind-the-scenes mar­ket­ing train­ings, aspir­ing well­ness influ­encers were told that “being con­tro­ver­sial, tak­ing defin­i­tive posi­tions that make peo­ple love you or hate you, is a great way to build your brand,” Walk­er said.

That proved true for many spir­i­tu­al influ­encers and plat­forms: A Venice kun­dali­ni yoga teacher who has worked with pop star Ali­cia Keys inter­viewed a con­spir­a­cy the­o­rist for an hour on YouTube. A Sacra­men­to yoga teacher who post­ed, then delet­ed, an abbre­vi­a­tion for the pop­u­lar QAnon slo­gan, “Where we go one, we go all.” And on Gaia, a kind of Net­flix for spir­i­tu­al­ism, sub­scribers can watch a 13-episode series by British con­spir­a­cy the­o­rist David Icke, who pop­u­lar­ized the claim that the world is run by shape-shift­ing, blood-drink­ing lizard peo­ple.

Hold­ing influ­encers account­able for spread­ing those beliefs has proved dif­fi­cult, as the vast major­i­ty of the indus­try is unli­censed and unreg­u­lat­ed.

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“Insta­gram is the plat­form where yoga and QAnon inter­sect­ed,” said Cécile Guerin, a yoga teacher and extrem­ism researcher at the Insti­tute for Strate­gic Dia­logue in Lon­don. She said the ide­ol­o­gy was a clear fit for a com­mu­ni­ty that has long been taught to search for and decode hid­den mean­ings and pat­terns.

Fed­er­al offi­cials have clas­si­fied the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry as a domes­tic ter­ror­ism threat. An intel­li­gence report released last week sug­gest­ed that while some adher­ents will pull back as false prophe­cies do not come true, oth­ers will shift from “serv­ing as ‘dig­i­tal sol­diers’ towards engag­ing in real world vio­lence.”

The theory’s promised “Great Awak­en­ing” echoes the yog­ic views of ascen­sion and con­scious­ness. The anti-mask and anti-dis­tanc­ing rhetoric focused on bod­i­ly auton­o­my and sov­er­eign­ty, themes embed­ded in New Age prac­tices, too: that you are your own guru, that you know your body bet­ter than any­one else.
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And note the echoes of MTG’s masks=Holocaust com­par­i­son: those same memes are part of this ‘pas­tel QAnon’ con­tent:

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Jen Pearl­man, a cer­ti­fied life coach who has dab­bled in holis­tic heal­ing for years, also watched the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries grow­ing last year.

First, the­o­ries that COVID-19 was caused by 5G wire­less tech­nol­o­gy. Then an explo­sion of posts shar­ing the viral anti-vac­cine movie “Plan­dem­ic,” cou­pled with crit­i­cisms of mask rules. In the sum­mer, the embrace of the “Save the Chil­dren” cam­paign, an anti-sex-traf­fick­ing cam­paign co-opt­ed by QAnon. By Novem­ber, Pearl­man said, peo­ple were talk­ing about their 2nd Amend­ment rights and Trump’s reelec­tion cam­paign.

Most alarm­ing, she said, was that many of the posts seemed anti­se­mit­ic, with allu­sions to a New World Order and com­par­ing the Unit­ed States’ pub­lic health shut­downs and vac­ci­na­tion poli­cies to the con­cen­tra­tion camps of Nazi Ger­many.

It felt “ter­ri­fy­ing,” Pearl­man said — a reminder that “even though as a com­mu­ni­ty we’re real­ly pep­py, we love every­body, and it’s all very ‘kum­baya,’ there is a dark under­ly­ing world­view.”
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So was we can see, when MTG dis­tin­guish­es her­self from the rest of her GOP col­leagues by mak­ing these kinds of ‘masks are like the Holo­caust’ remarks, she’s engag­ing in the same kind of per­son­al brand­ing that vet­er­an well­ness gurus are train­ing oth­er well­ness gurus to deploy in order to build a per­son­al fol­low­ing. Be con­tro­ver­sial and take defin­i­tive posi­tions that make peo­ple love you or hate you. That’s how you cyn­i­cal­ly build your brand. Whether you’re an aspir­ing well­ness guru or run­ning for office.

It’s the kind of sto­ry that acts as a reminder that much of the con­tem­po­rary right-wing polit­i­cal rhetoric real­ly does have remark­able par­al­lels to the worst kind of New Age pseu­do-spritu­al garbage con­tent. Sell­ing fake solu­tions to hyped up prob­lems is kind of the core of the GOP’s cur­rent pitch to vot­ers. And as Don­ald Trump demon­strat­ed, being the most con­tro­ver­sial polit­i­cal fig­ure has become the path a GOP pri­ma­ry vic­to­ry. And today, flirt­ing with QAnon is how you stand out in today’s GOP. The same psy­cho­log­i­cal cap­ture of the GOP’s col­lec­tive head­space by the QAnon move­ment is hap­pen­ing in the New Age move­ment, using many of the same tac­tics. And the same social media plat­forms. It’s the kind of sit­u­a­tion that, when thor­ough­ly stud­ied, will be high­ly edu­ca­tion­al to grift gurus of all vari­eties. It’s part of what makes this sto­ry of QAnon’s suc­cess­ful col­o­niza­tion of the well­ness com­mu­ni­ty some­thing to keep an eye on. The grift gurus of the future are learn­ing valu­able lessons about keep­ing their grifts robust and healthy.