Spritituality 2
ESTABLISHING A GLOBAL SPIRITUALITY
IΙ. Common paths to spiritual power
"We must feel part of all space and time, of the greatness and wonders of the universe. We must re-establish the unity of our planet and of our beings with the universe and divinity."
-Robert Muller, New Genesis: Shaping a Global Spirituality
Re-establishing our unity with earth and spirit is encouraged in classrooms across the country. Multicultural, global, environmental, and arts education teach children the occult formulas that once linked the world's shamans, voodoo priests and medicine men to their respective spirit guides. While words will differ from culture to culture, the pagan practices within earth-centered traditions are similar around the world.
Today, over half of these religious practices are sweeping into our nation's classrooms. Accepted as means to multicultural understanding, they are actually being used to establish earth-centered spirituality. The following practices from Chart (above?) represent only a tiny drop in a rising flood of occult stimuli.
1. Altered States Of Consciousness
Teaching students to alter their consciousness through centering exercises, guided imagery, and visualizations has become standard practice in self-esteem, multicultural, and arts programs. Sometimes they prompt contacts with spirit guides. An Iowa school is using the nationwide language-arts curriculum READ known to captivate students with shocking stories and occult themes. One of Read's audio-cassette tapes included a writing assignment (see footnote below) which uses the following visualization to stimulate the students' imagination. Notice the hypnotic suggestions:
"Rest your head on your desk. Close your eyes and breathe deeply to relax. Watch the screen inside your mind. You are about to journey to an uncharted land. Picture in your mind a place where there is an opening in the earth. Go and find this place, then wait at the edge. Are you ready? Let yourself fall in. Enter the earth. Let yourself spiral down through the world beneath your feet. Down through the passage way.
What kind of place is this. Look around. Move around. As you become acquainted with our surroundings, ask to meet a guide. A animal, person or being will accompany you an give your whatever power you might need.
Someone or something is coming toward you in a peaceful way. Who is this? Watch what this new companion does or shows you. Listen to what it says. Go wherever this guide wants to lead you. You are safe. You will not be harmed.
Now it is almost time to leave. The guide who has been with you has a gift for you. Reach out your hands and take what it offers. This gift has special meaning, just for you. What is it?”
2. Dreams and Visions
After studying a pagan myth, students are often asked to imagine or visualize a dream or vision, then describe it in a journal or lesson assignment. For example, Montana fourth graders read a myth describing how "the Spirits guided" an Indian girl named "Gentle Fawn" by taking the shape (shape-shifting) of a White Deer. The lesson continued:
"You have an incredible dream. And just as Gentle Fawn learned from her dream, you also have a vision. 1. Describe your dream. 2. Describe your lesson of truth".
3. Astrology
Countless teachers across the country require students to document their daily horoscopes. Others help students discover their powers and personalities through Aztec calendars and Chinese horoscopes. A Connecticut teacher wrote an award-winning curriculum based on Indian shaman Sun Bear's "medicine wheel astrology". Her students and others who use this program locate their personal birth moons, colors, animal spirits and spirit keepers on the Indian medicine wheel.
4. Other forms of Divination
Through palmistry, I Ching, tarot cards and horoscopes students learn to experience other culture and tap into secret sources of wisdom. [19] Students in Texas were desensitized to occult dangers when told to imitate the wizard pictured behind a crystal ball in their assignment. The instructions told each child to create a vision in their own minds and "describe in your best soothsayer tones, the details of your vision".
5. Spiritism
While pagan myths and crafts show students how to contact ancestral, nature, and other spirits, classroom rituals actually invoke their presence. California third-graders had to alter their consciousness through guided imagery, invoke or "see" their personal animal spirits, write about their experience for a public bulletin board display, and finally create their own magical medicine shields to represent their spirit helper.
Minnesota students were given this morbid assignment: "Your mother died three years ago. However, she will return briefly. You will have only ten minutes to speak with her and then she is gone for good. What will you talk with her about?" While this exercise asked students to pretend rather than actually invoke the presence of a dead relative, it placed the occult practice of spiritism into a context that made it seem acceptable.
6. Occult Charms and Symbols
Dream-catchers, Zuni fetishes, crystals and power signs like the quartered circle and Hindu mandala are only a few of the empowering charms and symbols fascinating students today.
7. Solstice Rites
After seating themselves "according to their astrological signs", Oregon students who traded Christmas for a Winter Solstice celebration watched the "sun god" and "moon goddess" enter the auditorium to the beating of drums and chanting. "Animal spirits" and "barcode children" followed. Celebrating Winter Solstice with "dance around the Solstice tree" is one of the Anti-Bias Curriculum's suggested alternatives to Christmas.
8. Sacred Sex
Sun Bear, whose books are used to teach classroom Medicine Wheel astrology, writes, "Many native cultures refer to making love as sharing energy or merging energy. In the natural cycle of life, the most powerful thing we can do is to share our energies with each other."
Starhawk wrote a similar message, "Sexuality is a sacrament. Religion is a matter of relinking..." Considering today's degrading sex education programs, one might wonder if Planned Parenthood and SIECUS (Sex Information and Education Council of the United States) authors share this pagan appreciation for the unifying power of promiscuity. Dr. Lester Kirkendall a SIECUS board member, wrote:
"The purpose of sex education is not to control and suppress sex expression, as in the past. The individual must be given sufficient understanding to incorporate sex most fruitfully and most responsibly into his present and future life".