Elizabeth Clare Prophet On Spirituality and New Age Religions
The following is excerpted from the 1983 interview, From The Heart, with Elizabeth Clare Prophet where she expressed her candid and incisive views on spirituality and New Age religions.
How do you explain the rapid growth in alternative religions during the last two decades?
People all over the world have left mainline religions because they have not answered the questions that people are asking. Orthodoxy is not providing them with the teachings for the new age that is upon us.
And the truth of the matter is that the wolves in sheep's clothing that are in the pulpits of many of the world's churches do not offer a real path of salvation, and they have kept their people under control through ignorance. These are the spoilers that Jesus rebuked, saying: "For ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered."
Now that the people are finding some soul-satisfying answers and new considerations of age old truths, these false pastors fear that they will lose control of the people. They know that once the people have the truth, they will be free and will no longer need to submit to this mass campaign of ignorance. This means freedom from the mind manipulators including the cult watchers and the deprogrammers.
You believe it is not right for one individual to be the judge of what religion another should have.
I think the individual should be free to contact God directly through the spark of divinity which God has placed within his heart. And this is a delicate process, and I don't believe it should be interfered with by anyone.
The most important thing a religion can do is give the individual tools with which he can pursue his own spirituality.
Contrary to what many people think, heaven is not won by dogma and doctrine. It is won by love, by the great principle of love. The most important teaching that you can give anyone is the true meaning of love.
No one should decide that he is going to change his religion or leave his organization for another under the duress of a deprogramming session. He should do so under the freedom of his own conscience—away from all voices demanding, "Go here, go there."
There is only one place for the individual to deliberate the issues of life and his relationship to God—on the mountaintop in communion with the Holy Spirit, the promised Comforter who will teach us all things and bring to our soul's memory the true teachings of Jesus Christ which are not being taught in many of the churches today.
How does one differentiate between what is or what isn't a political activity—and why is there a limitation placed upon religion as it interrelates with government?
Human government is merely an interim rule—an interregnum, if you will—which we bear as a yoke until the government, once again, be upon the shoulders of the Lord Our Righteousness prophesied by Jeremiah—the individual Christ Self.
Why shouldn't we demand that our leaders reflect the higher order of things? If we the people do not challenge the false prophets in church and state, then we will be counted as accomplices in their neglect or betrayal and find ourselves bearing the yoke of their karma. The Bible says he who does not raise his voice against evil and the evildoer must suffer his fate.1
You know, there really should not be any line drawn between church and state. Of course, we must not allow the state to dictate religion, and a national church is repugnant to the American character. But in the course of daily life, the individual himself is an integrated political, social, and religious entity.
There never was a line drawn between religion and politics in the speeches of the prophets of Israel or of Gautama Buddha, of Confucius, of Jesus Christ or Moses or our own founding fathers, for that matter. In their day all of them were outspoken about the power elite in their citadels of world control and they addressed all the issues.
Therefore I speak out and I also address all the issues. In a democracy, in a republic, it is everyone's right, privilege, and duty to do so. It's not important that we agree; it's important that we understand why each of us makes the choices that we make. And if we think our brother or sister is in error, we say, "Come now, let us reason together..."
By education, by science, by careful research of truth and error, by probing and by spiritual communion, we are free to evolve our ideas and belief systems and to interest others in our logic and our conclusions.
We should rejoice in the free dialectic that we so enjoy in America and not fear another when his beliefs differ from ours. It is our trust in God as the All in all that allows us to have confidence in the outcome of peace, brotherhood, and enlightenment. Let us live and let live.
Many churches in the new age movement have come under the scrutiny of cult watchers and deprogrammers.
[Editor's Note: This interview was conducted at a time when deprogrammers were at their peak activity, before arrests on kidnapping charges and civil rights lawsuits put them out of business.]
I think that deprogrammers are cowards. They are afraid to move alone, so they move in packs like coyotes. They are the real brainwashers, washing the brains of their helpless captives of any inclination to pursue a path of soul discovery and explore the inner universe of Self.
They know they couldn't win in an honest and fair debate, so they have to kidnap a person. They lock him up, deprive him of food and sleep, mock him and discredit his ability to make decisions, harass him until that person's level of stress is so great that all he can do is think of how to get them to stop. They hammer and hammer away at him, using foul language, shouting in the face of their victim, uttering endless obscenities and blasphemies. They have no scruples.
They work by inciting fear to a fever pitch, casting that person's religion and its leader in the guise of the dreaded Antichrist. And they create their lies out of the whole cloth while pronouncing scriptural truths and saying they are servants of the will of God. But in practice, they function entirely contrary to the principle of free will that has come down to us as sacred through the Judeo Christian tradition.
Their philosophy is: Let us do evil, that good may come—"whose damnation is just," Paul said. The process of deprogramming washes the brain of self confidence and even the will to be independent under God.
The ability to choose, even if one makes wrong choices, must be safeguarded. Every man's religion is a synthesis of his highest understanding of himself in relationship to Life and his fellow human beings. And he can only gain this understanding by living and evolving. Spiritual evolution, not brute force (deprogramming is the rape of the mind and soul), is the ordained way of the soul's reunion with God.
God invented free will. God invented the law of reincarnation and karma so that souls could return to him by the self educated exercise of free choice in the matter spheres. However long it may take, God wants his sons and daughters to return to him by love and not by force.
Wise parents should hold the same vision and the same hope for their children, and trust in Him that He will not allow the false Christs to pluck their children from the heart of the living Savior.
See Elizabeth Clare Prophet on the sacredness of life.
1. Ezek. 3:17-19