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Newagers - By Jason Curley, Teacher, Healer and Reiki Master.
 

 

Today I went to the Mind, Body & Spirit "Healing Arts Festival" at the Royal Horticultural Hall in Victoria, London. Convinced by my business partner I needed a day off from writing, I went and never having been to an complementary health/new age exhibition before I had no idea what to expect. What I found was very interesting on a number of levels. It re-established my thinking and feeling on the new age/complementary therapy movement by demonstrating things I had only thought in the past. With a few notable exceptions the attitudes of the energy/spiritual healers who were exhibiting were disastrously putting out negative views in the "my technique is better than theirs" front, surprisingly the worst of this came from the Reiki masters there (with the exception of the Allan Sweeny stand and the college of healing, and those offering Secheem Reiki). Also some born again Christians had found a stand and picked me out a mile off for someone to try and convert. After them trying to argue that my healing was sent by the devil I left one of them dumbfounded on a point that showed me having a deeper knowledge of the bible than he did.

This has brought some interesting points up for me to explore and come to terms with, most notably
    • A) Why are Reiki healers saying "my Reiki is the only Reiki"
    • B) Why do they try and convince people the oldest knowledge is the best.
    • C) Why do spiritual teachers refuse to admit they don't know something and come up with preposterous ideas without looking at the facts?

We must first establish what is going on with the new age market, and we just did, it's a market! It's a group of people trying to sell you products, some of them will believe in what they sell, others will be duplicitous in what they try and achieve. They are out to make MONEY, and that is the key word for a lot of people in the new age market.

I will admit, although I am fairly knowledgeable on certain aspects of spirituality, I don't have in depth knowledge on all techniques and systems, however, I have a deep understanding of spiritual/energy healing I will stick to this topic so apply these points as an analogy to what ever else you can.

Lets just look at one of the exhibitors, Sandra Straw. She was on her stand exhibiting a product called "Reiki Jin Kei Do" I got to have a five minute chat to her, along with another person who had done no Reiki training in the past. I asked "What are the differences between this system and Reiki that is currently taught" She said "This is the most powerful Reiki" then said to the person enquiring about a course "Don't go anywhere else to learn Reiki, learn it with me, mine is the original Reiki that Usui taught. All other systems are wrong". So in effect she wasn't prepared to tell me what the differences were, just the differences in origin, Interesting in itself, but in her brochure she says of the Reiki she has trained in and taught others before "I always thought something was missing". Was that written on brochures in the previous systems of Reiki she taught. Did they say "Come and do your Reiki training with me, but to be honest, I think something is missing"? I think not! How convenient she writes that now, so all her students from the past can get mail outs saying "What I taught you in the past had something missing, come back and do Reiki 1&2 again, it will only cost £195 to upgrade your Reiki" (it costs £295 to learn this new Reiki 1&2 from scratch). Then again she admits she knew the inferior system had something missing when she taught it, wow, call the lawyer there may be a legal case here!

The other telling point with the Reiki people there was when I said I practice Tibetan Usui Reiki via the lineage of William Rand, the looks I got! The problem they see with this is that Rand added 2 Tibetan symbols to the traditional Usui Reiki, and because it's not what they believe to be the original authentic Reiki, it's inferior.

It's obvious from this that for some people it's a market and it's all about money! I have no doubt in another year or so someone else will say "No, Reiki Jin Kei Do is inferior to Brand X Reiki, only we have the true Usui knowledge".

I do have to point out that the one healer I spoke to who seemed entirely genuine and didn't put down any healing system in favour of his own was Nick RedCloud of the Shamanic Research Foundation. A warm friendly guy with an obvious lust for life and inner joy. I'm not promoting his course (I've not done it, I can't be sure what he teaches) but his attitude would convince me he was someone I could learn "something" from.

So where did this concept of the older the knowledge is the better it is. Do people who believe this think the sun revolving around the earth is a much better and more realistic idea than the earth revolving around the sun? This points out where things have gone wrong in new age teaching, this also points out what we need to change in our thinking to become Lightworkers! Too many people pass on garbage they believe without looking into the subjects, they accept ideas BECAUSE they are new age ideas, not because they have researched the subject with a rational approach to observed facts and responses. This makes them no different from any other religion who will believe something just because it's written in their holy book. There are a plethora of ideas I'm talking about here; "We were made by aliens from another planet", "We are plagued by visitors from another planet", "Evolution doesn't exist", "The pyramids were built by aliens from another planet", I could go on, but you get the idea. So this is a religion we are talking about, from now on lets call them "The Newagers", in so many books I read they proudly boast how science is coming in line with some of what they have believed. This is the case, but the important word is "some"!

Science is viewed very negatively by most Newagers I have come across, this is caused by fear and a lack of wanting to learn. All of them will accept the laws of gravity and the individual implications to existence gravity holds. But when it comes to the general theory of relativity or evolutionary theory, they throw it to the wind and are quite happy to accept the idea of faster than light travel and us all being aliens. This is caused by a lack of knowledge combined with a susceptibility to new age propaganda. Many Newagers are afraid science will tell them their spiritual connection to god wont exist, that they can't possibly have the ability to heal with energy. This is very far from the truth. Science creates models (theories) from observed facts. Where something can't be measured or experimented upon, science leaves a blank space, until it can be measured or experimented upon. It is only religious people who create theories from an absence of facts.

So we should accept what science tells us, doing that will only aid us in our search for the truth, combine this with meditation and the deep insight we can personally get from insight into ourselves and our own lives and we are on our way. First we must unlearn the falsehoods we have been taught, then we can start again! Or we can just carry on being spoon-fed by people more interested in making money than allowing us to find our own truth.

I guess this is why I feel I have to write a book for people who want to heal the planet. So much of their time is wasted with false issues, that on closer inspection turn out not to be issues at all. They have found the will to escape from religion (and for some this is very difficult) and walked right into a replacement that at times is a flawed as Christianity is.

So let us not be Newagers, let us be Lightworkers!

 

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