THE STRAWBERRY FIELDS FACTOR

by

Alan Morrison

Today, one often hears young people say: "It's all relative, man", if one presses them to accept black-and-white morality or ethics. However, it should be realised that the acceptance of this concept immediately destroys the uniqueness of God's Word as the objective source of revelation, and the fact of Jesus Christ as the substantial fount of all Truth. Instead, it deifies individuals by holding up their personal subjective world-views as being THE truth, even when they are in contradiction with one another. This concept is a major factor in the New Consciousness being pressed on humanity and has found its expression in the ubiquitous vogue-phrase "Paradigm Shift". A Paradigm Shift, in the jargon of the New Gnostic, refers to the process whereby one can, through a small but highly significant shift in perception or world-view, slip into another level of reality. It is rather like looking at a picture for the first time and seeing certain features, but on looking a second time one might see something completely different because a change took place in the way one viewed it. Yet both perceptions are said to be "correct", thus negating any objective reality in the picture. What this concept implies is that there are as many "realities" to a situation as there are people to perceive them: Truth is purely arbitrary and solely in the eye of the beholder. Now this can certainly be true in regard to our perceptions of many things in life, as in the example above. For there are a great many situations in which there is plainly more than one way of looking at an object. But it is a logical fallacy to deduce that this approach can be applied to every conceivable situation in the world, and even to the experience of personal existence. The reason that the drawing above can be perceived in so many ways without violating its integrity is because there is no externally imposed control which dictates how it should be viewed. Its identity is "up for grabs". But if the voice of God thunders: "This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased", could anyone deny that Jesus has the unmistakable identity of the Son of God? Surely reality takes on an unequivocal quality when God has imposed His objective authority upon it. To attempt to apply the principle of "no objective reality" to Deity, His material creation or inspired revelation (the Bible), is surely an outworking of the satanic lie in Eden ("Has God really said...?"). Perhaps such an emphasis is inevitable in a world of increasing iniquity and disobedience to God's Law. In order to bring about a complete mistrust of the concept of the Transcendent Creator God of the Scriptures, whose Word is THE Way, THE Truth and THE Life, the satanic realm has built up an assumed need for a massive paradigm shift in favour of the Eastern world-view which states that life as we know it is an illusion, that each one of us creates his own reality, that the essence of God indwells all people unconditionally, and that we can utilise this immanent "divinity" for our own ends, both spiritual and material. The concept of the Paradigm Shift was first formulated by science historian and philosopher Thomas Kuhn in his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions".[1] The general use of this term has since been seized upon avidly by those preaching the Neo-Gnostic "gospel", and who have a vested interest in bringing about the Hundredth Monkey consciousness of the "Aquarian Age" via "quantum leaps" and "evolutionary shifts" in psychic awareness. But the concept of "no objective reality" has been a fundamental principle from ancient times in any situation where the Satanic Initiation is in the ascendency. In classical Hinduism, the term Maya, "illusion", is used to refer to the material world, which is judged to be devoid of objective reality. As one source puts it: "Maya is originally the magical power of creating illusion or deceit, but in the Advaita Vedanta it refers to the illusory existence of a world of multiplicity superimposed upon the single non-dual reality (Brahman) by the power of ignorance (Avidya)...Maya is the power of God (Ishvara), which creates the illusion of a differentiated universe and conceals the divine unity behind appearances, while ignorance creates the seemingly separate self at the individual level".[2] The idea that each person is only "seemingly separate" from the cosmos has grave implications for the biblical concept of personal responsibility for sin and its eternal consequences, as we shall shortly show. The uniqueness of each individual is also undermined, a fact which is illustrated in the Zen Buddhist proverb which says: "Last night I dreamed I was a butterfly. Am I a man who dreamed he was a butterfly? Or am I really a butterfly who is now dreaming he is a man?" If you meditate on that one for too long, you could slip your moorings and begin to doubt your own existence: a sure recipe for self-induced psychosis. Even common sense can discern that such a statement is unmitigated nonsense. Every time we wake up, we awaken to the same world, the same circumstances, the same self (give or take a cell or two); whereas, in our dreams, we enter a different world and circumstances - and very often experience ourselves as being someone else. If we accept the "no objective reality" worldview of the East, we are entering, at best, a nursery-rhyme fantasyland; at worst, it is the ultimate nightmare scenario, with each one of us in the starring role. Here in the West, this concept has been welcomed in the field of Transpersonal Psychology. For example, the occultist and Neo-Gnostic Carl Jung says: "Our unconscious existence is the real one and our conscious world is a kind of illusion, an apparent reality constructed for a specific purpose, like a dream which seems a reality as long as we are in it".[3] In the 1960s, a number of psychiatrists also began to take this concept onboard in a big way as their experimental work appeared to give it confirmation. In his book "The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise" (Penguin, 1967), Ronald D. Laing recounted how one of his patients had suddenly undergone mental disintegration after looking at himself in a mirror and subsequently went on a ten day "voyage" into an inner world of extraordinary hallucination. On recovering from this mind-journey, the patient felt he had undergone a profound religious experience. This persuaded Laing that reality was only relative, and he began to revere the schizophrenic and psychotic as being somehow on a higher plane with greater insight into reality than the average human being - so much so that he likened psychiatrists to "the blind leading the half-blind" when they counsel such people. This view was also supported by the internationally-renowned psychiatrist Stanislaf Grof, whose experiments on patients with LSD therapy in the 1950s had convinced him of the "relativity of reality". One is reminded here of the lyrics of the classic 1960s Beatles" song, "Strawberry Fields", which says: "Let me take you down, "cos I"m going to Strawberry Fields; Nothing is real... Always - no sometimes - think its me; But you know I know when its a dream... It's getting hard to be someone but it all works out; It doesn"t matter much to me". At the time, "Strawberry Fields" was the nickname given to the hallucinogenic drug Lysergic Acid Dithylamide (LSD), when it was disguised in small dark pink tablets. Lyrics rooted in a similar world of drug-induced unreality were recorded in another well-known Beatles classic, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds": "Picture yourself in a boat on a river, With tangerine trees and marmalade skies. Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly, The girl with kaleidoscope eyes". It was well-known at the time that these words were inspired through the influence of LSD, and that the initials of the song-title were a none-too-subtle advertisement for the drug. Furthermore, the character "Lucy" is none other than "Luci" -- short for Lucifer, into whose kaleidoscope of "reality from any angle" many were falling. Such "acid-rock", as it is known, was extremely fashionable during the phase when such drug-use was being encouraged by the powers of darkness in order to cut a huge swath into the minds of the young and vulnerable children of the intelligentsia who would eventually grow into those who now hold positions of cultural responsibility and parenthood. Another development which has gone some way towards influencing this loosening of the idea of an objective reality is the huge growth of interest n Shamanism across the world in the past couple of decades. Serge King is a Polynesian shaman who is director of the Order of Huna International in Hawaii, one of the many new schools for the training of shamans in the world today. On this subject of "reality", he writes: "The first and fundamental principle of Huna...says that "the world is what you think it is". Another, more popular way of stating the same thing is: "We create our own reality."... [Shamans] take that idea to mean that we not only attract experience by our thinking, but we actually create realities. By our assumptions, attitudes, and expectations we make things possible or impossible, real or unreal. To put it another way, by shifting mind-sets we can do ordinary and non-ordinary things in the same physical dimension that we share with everyone else... Shamans are taught as early as possible that the objective world is only one way of seeing...In shamanic thinking, the objective world is simply one more place in which to operate, and to operate effectively in any world is the shamanic goal... Shifting mind-sets or moving between worlds in full consciousness is a subtle and delicate process... With practice this becomes virtually automatic. What helps tremendously is loving yourself without reserve and trusting the God within you. But of course that is good advice whether you are a shaman or not".[4] Do you see the implications of what is being said here? That the same shift in perception which leads to an inability to distinguish between a rabbit and a duck can be applied to the very fact of our own existence, so that we can never really be sure whether we are people or butterflies or anything. Once you have accepted this way of thinking, you then become the inventor of your own reality. Such a world-view has immense implications for the lives of those accepting it. For the whole question of where one will spend eternity becomes meaningless to a person who believes he can inhabit any reality of his own making. Thus, the purpose of this mindset in satanic strategy becomes only too obvious. (Take note of the name of the publisher of the book containing the above quotation, and things will become even clearer). And when we come to the "official" teachings of the New Gnosticism, we find that this concept of "no objective reality" lies at the very heart of its world-view. Findhorn guru, Peter Lemesurier, puts it like this: "The only universe that you can ever perceive is the universe that you perceive. What you are actually perceiving...is nothing more or less than your own perceptions. The universe itself, it would seem, is random enough (scientific speculators currently prefer to explain this idea in terms of a theoretically infinite number of possible "parallel universes") to permit your consciousness to model it in any way it wishes. "Which has to mean, in effect, that whatever seems to you to be happening "out there" is - strange as it may seem on first consideration -ultimately a direct result of your own state of consciousness. Eerie though this realisation may at first seem, the world's problems are actually your own problems. Its divisions merely reflect your own inner conflicts; its inhumanity your own inhumanity to yourself; its famines the extent to which you are starving large parts of your own psyche; its pollution problems your proneness to smother your own inner reality with imposed beliefs and illusions; its drug addiction your refusal to face reality; its unemployment your failure to put whole areas of your awareness to work; its anti-black racialism your rejection of your own darker side; its lawlessness your disregard of the basic laws of your own being; its AIDS - along with the breakdown of the earth's protective ozone layer - your unconscious realisation that ultimately you cannot protect yourself or cut yourself off from the rest of the universe; its global warming your participation in the fever of transformation that humanity is currently undergoing; its mass-movements and mass-disasters your increasing involvement, perhaps, in the growth of some kind of new, transhuman super-entity. "In a phrase, we do not see things as they are: we see them as we are. And other people...are merely particular aspects of ourselves... And so it is not so much a matter of your head being in the universe, as of the universe being in your head".[5] [emphasis in original] Here, Peter Lemesurier reduces every phenomenon in the world to mere projections of our own consciousness. "We do not see things as they are: we see them as we are". Therefore, there are as many worlds as there are people to create them. In the ideology of the Neo-Gnostic, it is not a personal God who has created the world - we each create our own worlds in every living moment out of our own consciousness. In other words, in their view, each one of us is God (cf. Gen.3:5)! It is most important that we understand the dire consequences of holding a world-view which claims that there is no objective reality. In fact, they are superbly realised in George Orwell's not-so-futuristic novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four", in which the denial of objective reality is an integral part of the social and political philosophy of the Antichrist-like "Big Brother" and his despotic "Party". At one stage in the book, the central character, Winston, stumbles on the realisation that "In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what then?"[6] This way of thinking is not merely confined to the world of fiction. It is a natural consequence of the Neo-Gnostic mindset, showing clearly that the real battlefield in this world is not on any tract of national territory but in the realm of human thought-processes - a fact which becomes understandable when one realises that it is the mind which provides the interface between humanity and the demonic realm. There is a particularly chilling moment of realisation in Orwell's novel when the "Thought Police" agent, O"Brien, during his torture and brainwashing of Winston, states: "We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation - anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to... You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature."[7] "Reality is inside the skull". This Hindu-Gnostic statement from Orwell's Thought Police is almost identical to Peter Lemesurier's claim that "the universe [is] in your head" and his other statement: "We do not see things as they are: we see them as we are". Orwell's entire conception was a remarkable piece of insight concerning the future Neo-Gnostic development of human society. All Christians should read this classic work (and preferably the original unabridged manuscript edition) in order to grasp some concept of what lies in store for them under the rule of the Antichrist. Orwell saw clearly that the most powerful way to manipulate people is to claim that reality can only ever be subjective. In just the same way that Orwell's Big Brother seeks to control human minds by removing all possibility of an objective reality, so Satan seeks to regain control of the world by the same means. (Which -- as we have written elsewhere -- is why psychotropic, consciousness-altering drugs like LSD and Cannabis have been unleashed to such a large extent on this planet). For without objective reality, there can be no personal God, no Divine revelation and, by dint of logic, no certain salvation. In just the same way that when there was no king in Israel everyone did that which was right in his own eyes (Jdg.17:6), so when the King of the Universe has been dethroned in the minds of men and women, reality becomes reduced to "the imagination of man's evil heart" - which ultimately means the deification of self (cf. Gen.6:5; Dt.29:18-19; Jer.11:7-8; 23:17). If, as the "Thought Police" agent O"Brien puts it, "nothing exists except through human consciousness",[8] heaven help us all; for human consciousness, when left to its own devices and the ravages of Satan, is the psychic dustbin of the universe. And if, as Peter Lemesurier claims, other people are "merely particular aspects of ourselves" rather than having a bona fide objective existence of their own, then we have dehumanised every human being which God has brought into existence, and denied the existence of their Creator. If you want a vision of the warped future being generated by this concept, imagine a Neo-Gnostic sitting cross-legged on a human face - forever.[9] The world-view which holds that "nothing exists except through human consciousness" is actually a classic example of the well-catalogued philosophical standpoint known as "Solipsism", which can be defined as, "The extreme form of subjective idealism that denies that the human mind has any valid ground for believing in the existence of anything but itself".[10] Very few thinkers have dared to hang their hat on the solipsistic peg, although the English philosopher, Bertrand Russell, declared his ideal to be "the establishment of physics upon a solipsistic basis",[11] an ideal which has now come to pass. For the so-called "New Physics" is yet another area which has encouraged the idea that life is more or less an illusion. We have developed this more fully in a separate article on the world of science; but we are recording it here to show the full extent of such Neo-Gnostic conceptual fantasies. Because of recent scientific assertions that matter is just another form of energy, this has served to bolster the pantheistic claims of the Neo-Gnostics and their concept that material things are only what they appear to be within a framework of relativity. However, Dr. Ernest Lucas of the Institute for Contemporary Christianity, writing in the journal Science and Christian Belief, confounds such an idea when he writes: "To say that matter is unreal because it can be converted into energy is like saying that ice is unreal because it can be converted into water".[12] But scientists today are not given to such rational reasoning. Instead, they have opted for the Neo-Gnostic view of reality. As one leading international physicist states in a highly regarded work: "Physical reality does not exist independently of the observer and his experimental apparatus".[13] And he goes on to surmise that "Perhaps all properties - and hence the entire Universe is brought into existence by observations made at some point in time by conscious beings".[14] This is entirely in accord with the Hindu-Gnostic world-view. Yet this is mainstream physics today. The presenter of a BBC science programme on the so-called "Anthropic Principle" summed up such thinking when he made the statement: "The centre of the Universe is in your living room".[15] As if this claim was not condemning enough of the solipsistic mythology of the New Physics, another physicist writes in similar vein when he claims that "Physical systems cannot be said to have definite properties independent of our observations; perhaps an unheard tree falling in the forest makes no sound after all".[16] One can see that these statements bring into question the entire foundation of the objective material reality which has been created by the Triune God. What they are saying, in effect, is "nothing really happens unless I experience it". Each individual, therefore, becomes the centre of his or her own universe. Man become God. Such a solipsistic nightmare has now seized the "brilliant" minds that are at the leading edge of science today. This is in spite of the fact that the general verdict on Solipsism in current philosophical circles is that, "presented as a solution to the problem of explaining man's knowledge of the external world, it is generally regarded as a reductio ad absurdum".[17] Yet this is precisely the position of all these Neo-Gnostics today, who are building a world which is about as real as that depicted in "Strawberry Fields". One's blood runs cold at the thought that when the day comes that these people take full, open control of world authority (which may not be very far away), it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that they will attempt to enforce their philosophy on Christian dissidents in much the same way as the "Thought Police" in the book "1984" - only this time not with crude electric shock treatment, but perhaps through the use of LSD therapy and other psychodynamic "treatments" in "rehabilitation" centres designed to alter human consciousness in the desired manner. The notion that there is no objective reality has even permeated professing Christian organisations. The Society for the Promotion (sic) of Christian Knowledge has recently published a book entitled "Living Illusions". The pre-publication press release states that the book "examines different expressions of faith...and suggests that they are all illusions".[18] Claiming that "there are no hard and fast rules upon which we can pin the truth about external reality and inner life", the author, a lecturer at the University of Leicester, "...illustrates his argument with examples from studies of psychoanalysis as well as art, science, theology and mysticism, to show that our beliefs and assumptions rest only on our personal perceptions".[19] The solipsistic doctrine of "maya" is now standard fare in many mainstream "Christian" circles. However, as far as the genuine Christian experience is concerned, the concept of "no objective reality" can really be viewed as one of the "deep things of Satan". In the first place, there is a real ethical problem here. What happens to public (or private) morality if one can say, "It depends how you look at it..." every time someone commits a violation of the law. The Bible says that if someone kills in cold blood, objectively this is murder and he should lose his own life. But if there is no objective reality, then the excusatory standpoint of the murderer (e.g., "I just lost my temper...", or "She should never have left me...") becomes just as valid a reality as the Law of God. In other words, the moral integrity of the universe rests on the objectivity of reality. Furthermore, the Bible shows that, far from being an illusion, our life-experience in this world is very real; and Jesus Himself revealed that the decisions we make during our sole earthly pilgrimage will affect us for all eternity (Jn.5:24). It is interesting to note that Lazarus and the Rich Man in Jesus" parable (Lk.16:19-31) did not look back on their lives as dreams, but that they retained their identity and reaped the reward for what they had done as conscious human beings. Mere dreamers cannot be held responsible for what they do in their dreams. It is true that human beings do not have a holistic view of everything; our consciousness is tied to the present space/time dimension, and it stands to reason that our understanding and perception is limited when compared with that of God. But it is ONLY God who has the total view, and it is ONLY God who is permitted to have the total view. The desire to let go of normal consciousness and tap into "divine consciousness" only becomes an issue for the person who wants to be like God in his understanding. But the Christian has the revealed truth that for a man to attempt to penetrate forbidden wisdom and know things as God knows them was the very first deception in the cosmos ("You will be like God, knowing...", Gen.3:5). In the novel "1984", the important axiom to which Winston clung was: "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows". And that is also true for us in this age of Gnostic irrationality. But we must also say that true Freedom is the freedom to know that a living, personal God has created this universe, and that we are all partakers in the objective world-reality which HE has created, whether we believe it or not.

NOTES & REFERENCES

[1] Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago, 1970).

[2] John R. Hinnells (Ed.), The Penguin Dictionary of Religions (Penguin,

1984), p.208.

[3] C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections (Routledge & Kegan Paul,

1968), p.324.

[4] From the chapter "Seeing is Believing: The Four Worlds of a Shaman" by

Serge King, in Gary Doore (Ed.), "Shaman's Path: Healing, Personal Growth

and Empowerment" (Shambala Publications, 1988), pp.44-52.

[5] Lemesurier, This New Age Business: The Story of the Ancient and

Continuing Quest to Bring Down Heaven on Earth (Findhorn, 1990), pp.230-232.

[6] George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Penguin, 1984), pp.72-73.

[7] Ibid., p.228.

[8] Ibid., p.228.

[9] This is a play upon the spine-chilling words from Orwell's novel: "If

you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face

forever".

[10] Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition, Vol.X, p.946.

[11] Chambers's Encyclopaedia, 1963, Vol.XII, p.695.

[12] Quoted in an article entitled, "New Agers Spell End for Science" in the

Times Higher Education Supplement, May 8th 1992, p.6.

[13] John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tippler, The Anthropic Cosmological

Principle (OUP, 1988), p.464.

[14] Ibid. p.470.

[15] BBC World Service science programme Journey to the Centre of the

Universe, 0515 hrs, September 28th, 1992.

[16] J.F. Clouser and A. Shimony, quoted in John D. Barrow and Frank J.

Tippler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, p.463.

[17] Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition, Vol.X, p.946.

[18] August 1993 press release for Michael Jacobs, Living Illusions (SPCK,

1993).

[19] Ibid.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Your servant, in Christ Jesus,

ALAN MORRISON

Diakrisis International

AM@diakrisis.org

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