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Diaryland
The Problem with Sylvia Browne and Novus Spiritus September 11, 2005 @ 2:25 p.m.
I wondered if I would ever get to this point - where I could clearly and logically articulate why Sylvia Browne's Society of Novus Spiritus, a church, business and study group organization I was a part of for four years, has fundamental and dangerous flaws that endanger and hurt all those who are involved with it. I left it in a lot of pain, feeling simulataneously like I had been horribly betrayed and at the same time that I was the most horrible person in the world for throwing away the most intoxicating and meaningful religion I had ever found. Today, as I read over an email from a Novus member, caught up in a witch hunt for a "psychic vampire" who was "slandering" the church and the administrators of its fan websites, I found myself just writing. And for the most part, its all here now. What the problem was. Where I was unreasonable and where I wasn't. Why I'm not alone in this. Why I left.
I didn't end up sending this. It probably wouldn't be well received - just followed up by a series of super-defensive posts about Saint Sylvia Browne and all the hardworking people in her church, study groups and web groups. That's been my experience in the past. So I guess I'll just put it here, where its obviously personal. If they bother me here on my own diary, there'll be no way they can accuse me of slander. And it'll be obvious that any apologetic crusade they might be on to save people's names and faces is nothing more than the outlash of their own fears.
This is how I feel. This is my resolution to what I experienced as spiritual rape, and which has taken years to deal with.
***
I have found through my personal experience and the experiences others have shared with me that Sylvia Browne's books and Novus Spiritus' philosophy, at least in their written form, advocate a very strong, embracing and tightly knit kind of spiritual family - in their own words, a "people's church". People are given a sense through what they read that when they come together with others who believe in these works, they are 'coming home' to a family in which they will be unconditionally embraced and loved. They are taught that this family goes back through multiple lifetimes and is conected by common experiences of suffering and fighting for God and good. Although there are warnings against ostentation in the later books of the Journey of the Soul series (the ones that aren't abridged and publically sold in bookstores) such warnings in my opinion are submerged by the sea of messages that encourages spiritual elitism and martyr complexes.
I believe that this is why there are so many people involved with Novus, both laypeople and ministers, that develop negative, jaded personalities. Among other problems, they can become arrogant and elitist, believing themselves 'chosen' as Gnostics. They can also develop a "suffering saint" mentality where life exists as a mere battlefield in which he who gets beat up the most and takes on the heaviest burdens gets the most holy points - the lay people presenting grand melodramas as testimonials, and the ministers using it to guilt trip people into giving more money and time. Some even manage to do both at the same time. I saw this in many people over four years of involvement with Novus - in two different churches and several different study groups and web groups.
You can legitimately argue that such behavior is against Sylvia's teachings and wishes, but to an extent such a defense is irrelevant, because obviously since the woman has not stepped in to correct the problems with the business/church she insists on being run her way or the highway, it is not as important as she claims. Novus is full of contradictions - it is marketed as a people's church, but the only person who knows what's right for it is Sylvia Browne, with even minimal input from her own ministers. Her own autobiography confirms just how peeved she got when her own office staff tried to give her mere suggestions for the organization she claims to be running for the sake of God and humankind but which plainly are not open to input from either. Even the spirit guides that Sylvia listens to on occasion have their words taken uncritically, when it is convenient to listen to them at all.
Sylvia Browne's teachings advise people to be spiritually independant in theory, but in practice they do not teach average people how to do so. What exercises are provided to stimulate personal and independant spiritual experiences are written with a defacto bias towards natural psychics. When average people fail at such techniques, having been poorly taught by those who never had to work to develop such faculties, psychics don't understand and only insist that its easy and natural and if it isn't working, you must be trying too hard, not enough, or making it too complex. Confused and defeated, average people then content themselves with creative visualization believing there is nothing more to spiritual experience than that. They never learn the more demanding yet more rewarding techniques of devotional or magical practice which can give them directly what and Who they seek, and to compensate they may begin to believe that the echoes of their own ego and its desires and frustrations are the voice of spirit guides, angels, or even God, with all the consequences that such false gods bring. Divorcing themselves from reality, they cast themselves into the role of hero in a fantastic world where all the spiritual forces of the universe are for them or against them.
What is really sad is that when such people meet real Gnostics - mystics and/or mages who have had the actual experience of Gnosis, something Novus people pretend to without having a clue what it is - they can't make sense of it, and so they have to either reshape such things to fit Sylvia's paradigms, or dismiss them all together as lies or insanity. Even Sylvia Browne herself has had the gall to call others who have had spiritual experiences (both average people and psychics) insane or lying. Whether they are other popular spiritual authors like Elizabeth Clare Prophet or David Icke, whose teachings are strange but not much stranger than Sylvia's, or people within the churches, study groups and web groups who have claimed to have had experiences with or channeled Azna, Om, any other of the entities from Novus teachings, or entities from outside of the teachings that may not fit into the paradigm or may even contradict it, they all are summarily dismissed to give enough of a facade of skepticism that people put their critical thinking to rest. Novus members become the very fundamentalists they decry: because they have no objective, critical way to evaluate Sylvia's experiences and teachings, they feel that to be rational they have to take all or none. Sylvia herself hasn't been very critical with herself and the entities that communicate with her - she seems to believe that if a spirit is right about one thing, its right about everything. Even if she has said "Take what you like and leave the rest", it has only been contradicted by the passive-aggressive precept that 'not everyone will be spiritually advanced enough for this philosophy'. So if something doesn't make sense or seems wrong, its not that Sylvia or her spirits guides are wrong in any degree: its that you are just too 'worldly' to see the truth in it. Even if such things contradict historical or scientific evidence - apparently every scientist and historian is just as closed minded as James Randi. And he only aggravates Novus because he is as irrationally incredulous as they are foolishly gullible.
I know what happens to people when they are critical of anything related to Novus - they are accused of "negativity" and emotionally, though not physically, shut out from what they were led to believe was their spiritual family. I've seen in in the churches and the study groups and the message boards. It has happened to friends of mine, and it has happened to me. And they are all forced to deal with the shame completely alone. Because this is what Novus tells them: it is all THEIR fault. THEY are troublemakers who have nothing better to do than 'be psychic vampires and spread negativity' - cause gee, its not as if they have actual legitimate experiences of frustration with the contradictory teachings, hypocrisy from the people who claim to practice it, indifference, cruelty and betrayal from those were taught to trust as family, and ostracization when they reach out to try to find others in a similar situation. THEY were stupid and immature enough to believe that their church could be open to their input, supportive of their difficulties, or just acknowledge their participation. It was THEIR fault for having the "unrealistic expectations" of thinking that Novus actually practiced what they preached, that anyone was actually serious about all that sacharine "love and light" people would give you to your faces while calling you a dark entity behind your back. Its all THEIR fault for being confused, hurt and frustrated by the mixed signals and the double-standards and acting out under the duress of such emotions. And even after all the talking down about how foolish they were to give their hearts, mind and souls to a belief system which warned them not to do so occasionally but then fostered and encouraged the opposite the rest of the time, they have to live with the shame and scars as they condemn themselves more than anyone else.
And they'd be right, because such people, myself included, were foolish and gullible enough to get sucked into a religion that taught that everything about God and the Universe is as simple, easy, good, black and white, and whipped-cream fluffy with baby cherubs on top as we wished it was. It felt so good to believe and belong that we abandoned our critical thinking because we didn't want to go back to the pain and confusion of an existence where nothing is certain. For our part in the blame and the fault, we get to be punished a hundred times over for being negative troublemakers, and dehumanized as psychic vampires and dark entities. For their part in the fault, Novus can find themselves spotless because we were "always free to walk out the door". In this way, people in Novus Spiritus can perpetuate a smaller degree of the same kind of abuse as cults, yet convieniently claim they are not a cult because they never forced anyone to do anything or kicked anyone out. In a way, I think this is more subtle, insidious and cruel than some cults. Cult or no cult, the effect is the same: the dissenters get painfully beat down for making bad decisions from mixed signals. And because they were only inspired and guilted into giving away time, money, mind and SOUL to Novus Spiritus passive-aggresively, Novus can excuse themselves as blameless because "they should have known better" than to put more stock in the actions and behaviors that were overwhelmingly fostered than the official and contradictory disclaimers, which so effectively removed any legal or moral sin on the part of the churches, the business, or the study groups.
I have found through years of scholarly and critical research in religion, philosophy, psychology, parapsychology, mysticisim and magic, that is entirely possible for a person to have an authentic spiritual experience with a real energy or entity and still be wrong to some degree in an objective sense. Every spiritual entity that has ever communicated with a human has had their communication mediated by that person. And this is not merely a matter of whether the person faithfully and truthfully recounts their experinces - the MIND ITSELF gives a spirit form, identity and voice. Christ, for example, may have an objective existence independant of people, but every time it communicates with a person, it will not only be Christ's message for John Doe and those who will hear him, but John Doe's experience and version of Christ and the message formed from their union. Unless we were to fully return to completely undifferentiated Unity, as long as we are human we will only perceive the Divine through aspects - through a mirror, darkly. The mind itself is not only powerful enough to change the physical and spiritual reality of an individual, but it can actually create, give birth to and grant independant existence to spiritual forces and entities. And these forces can all think and act for themselves, develop personalities and histories, and grow and diminish through contact with other minds. Spirits are independant, self-conscious memes that change and replicate throughout the consciouness of humankind and the universe. And they are not always honest. All but the Unmanifest God are biased to some degree by their perspectives and paradigms and can only give truths that are relative in some way. Most can reach into a fairly universal source of knowledge such as what is called the Akashic Records and produce enough verifiable evidence to hook people into believing they always speak from such objective sources and never from their own opinions. There are many documented cases from the history of spiritualism where spirits used such verifiable evidence, or even more personal things only a deceased person would have known, to masquerade as departed loved ones and even famous figures from history such as Jesus. Some spirits may have good intentions and believe they are telling the undisputed truth when they are not - they may be under misunderstandings themselves. Some will only tell you as much truth as they think you are worthy of or can handle. Some speak in allegories and subjective truths. Some just plain lie. The point is, just because information comes from a spiritual entity does not necessarily make it true.
I do not know the nature and truth of the matter regarding Sylvia Browne, Iena Francine, Raheim, Azna, Om, Aumra, or any of the entities and teachings that are a part of Novus Spiritus. Much of their teachings are merely borrowed from other sources anyway, often without a knowledge of how to synthesize them. I intend to discover the full truth about them using the best means I can, if for nothing more than closure, but that is a long time off. In the meantime, the best I can regard them as are interesting speculations about theology, cosmology and theodicy coupled with a mixture of basic sympathetic magick and pretty visualizations which could invite in spiritual experiences for the more trained or psychic. And that's when I'm feeling generous. It might be interesting to interview Sylvia herself, but as I don't have hundreds of dollars and would need more than an hour consultation not available for the next few years, that doesn't seem like it will be an option.
Funny - Sylvia Browne made herself out to be everybody's friend in God, yet she's the hardest of all to reach.
"Details in the Fabric" - May 31, 2009
Not So Quick Questions - April 6, 2009
The Morning Stars - Lords of the 15 - April 9, 2009
Sincerity and Faith in Magic - April 10, 2009
Not So Quick Questions (2) - April 14, 2009
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