[matthewremski.com]
Why Are Portraits of John of God and Gloria Steinem Beside Each Other at Omega Institute?
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[matthewremski.com]
Remski notes that at Omega Institute there's a strange choice of portraits in one the meeting rooms - John of God, Eckhart Tolle - and Gloria Steinem!
Why Are Portraits of John of God and Gloria Steinem Beside Each Other at Omega Institute?
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So “John of God” used fake healing to gain access to women he would sexually assault.
[www.nytimes.com]
Two somewhat-related things come to mind:
1) A personal memory about how one of the cults I was in overlapped with the John of God cult.
Endeavor AcademyQuote
Remski provides the Wikipedia article on Endeavor
[en.wikipedia.org]
CEI has this information page on Endeavor Academy and its leader, Chuck Anderson
- links to 24 newspaper articles on EA.
[culteducation.com]
2) Questions about how the Boomers mainstreamed sociopaths and charlatans alongside their true heroes.
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1. A Personal Cult Memory
I never went to see John of God, but he had a following at the cult I was in at the time — Endeavor Academy. I distinctly remember one of the lead teachers at Endeavor going to him for a “spiritual surgery”. She brought a cohort of lightworkers who videoed the meeting. They showed the tape to the whole group as proof positive that he’d extracted a tumour from her belly that she didn’t know she’d had.
Of course she didn’t know, because she didn’t. You could see that the dude dropped a chicken liver out of his sleeve and pretended to pinch it out of a fold in her skin.
I sat there in the big room while people watched the chicken liver slither around and a lot of them stood up and started jumping up and down, doing the kundalini jitterbug, barking like happy dogs because a miracle happened.
What’s so strange about such moments, if you happen to be able to retain some sense of internal self/stability, is that the enthusiasm is somatically contagious, even while you know it is making you sick. It’s entirely possible to know on one level that you are in a mentally ill environment and on another level to want to participate in some way that will relieve the pressure of that illness. So the contagion works on two levels: you are infected, and then joining in seems as though it would be an antidote, or at least it would make things more tolerable.
The Endeavor leader, Charles Anderson, was as jealous of John of God as he was resourceful at co-optation. It really got his goat to see the women especially go bananas over having their chicken-livers removed.
For the rest of this article, go here:
[matthewremski.com]
Remski notes that at Omega Institute there's a strange choice of portraits in one the meeting rooms - John of God, Eckhart Tolle - and Gloria Steinem!
Quote
John of God sells snake oil and assaults women, and Tolle mumbles dissociative word salad to cool a burning world.
See article here:
[www.decolonizingyoga.com]
All three have been at Omega. All three have appeared on Oprah.
Under the assumption that they share something in common, these men are elevated on either side of the feminist activist who actually got shit done.
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Who will show how John of God has been valued at places like Omega because, in part, he posed an alternative to the medical realism so essential to things like the reproductive rights movement? Or because he represented an acceptable, “shamanic” version of how to dominate (mostly women’s) bodies with charisma?
Who will study how Tolle has been valued at Omega because he let people off the hook of agitating for structural change, by telling people that conflict is all story in their minds?
When I think about the fractured Left, I keep thinking about this room, this photo gallery, as incoherent as a family’s. John milking charisma with that smile. Eckhart perpetually out-of-focus. Gloria, beaming fullness and generous agency.