Category: The Bazaar

  • Cardiff Weirdos

    Good for giggles. I found this link to a Travel section article in the Guardian online. “Perhaps I just don’t have a soul. But then, I’m from Cardiff where we don’t have New Agers. Or, if we do, we call them by their other name: weirdos. And although I am almost too perfectly the target…

  • Self-Help Books

    Self-Help books on psychology, personal growth, and spirituality must be profitable for publishers and booksellers, because there are thousands of them. They vary in quality, and they don’t come with any consumer warnings or ratings.

  • Sleeping with Aliens – More

    I spent a long time reading, summarizing and reviewing Sleeping with Aliens. I posted a review on the Blogcritics site, and a long commentary on this site. It isn’t kind to the New Age.

  • Sleeping with Aliens

    Wendy Kaminer’s book, Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials, The Rise of Irrationalism and the Perils of Piety is interesting. She says that her objective is to write against irrationalism but I see her book more as an examination of how the New Age is becoming, in effect, a minority religion in America. (On July 19, 2004 I…

  • Snapping

    The first edition of Snapping was published in 1978, which was the year of mass suicide of cultists at Jonestown, Guyana. While authors Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman did not predict such an event, their book was on the shelves at the right time. Snapping, America’s Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change was not about cults…

  • Enlightenment Bazaar

    Soon after I started my blog, I wrote “Fakirs” and set up an Archive category called Fakirs for essays about New Age spirituality, New Age science and cults. I have been writing about strange beliefs, and trying to understand why people embrace them. A few weeks ago I read Wendy Kaminer’s book Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials,…

  • Five Stages

    During a recent conversation, the question of the stages of grief came up. I wasn’t sure if there were supposed to seven stages or five. The five stages of grief are Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance, in the system suggested by the Swiss psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, in her 1969 book On Death and Dying.…

  • Fearbusting

    Rhonda Britten has found, apparently, commercial success. Her Web Page is an advertisement for her books, personal appearances and other services and merchandise. The testimonials on her Web page indicate that she has been hired by companies and organizations as a motivational speaker. She is a writer, and a “coach”. She counsels people to buy…

  • Pining for the Fjords

    He’s not dead, he’s pining for the Fjords. Rupert Sheldrake was a reputable plant scientist. He enjoyed a good reputation in his field, and published in peer-reviewed scientific journals until 1978, and published articles in Nature in 1973 and 1974. He has links to his published papers on his web site. According to his own…

  • Fakirs

    When I was six, my parents gave me three books by Rudyard Kipling. There was The Jungle Book, and a book called Stalky and Company which was a fictionalized account of Kipling’s teen years in an English “public school” which was actually a private boarding school. My mother had been the Akela in a Cub…