Questions and answers about 1) criticizing the article “Battle For Your Mind”,  2) having two separate publishing companies, and 3) the Columbine High School tragedy. By Dick Sutphen.

Q.
Criticism Of Your
"Battle For Your Mind"

As I'm sure you know, your "Battle For Your Mind" article is all over the Internet. But I've also noticed several people criticizing what you've said, and I can't help wondering about your response? Love your Website.

Patricia Connely / NYC

A.

The "Battle For Your Mind" is a paper I presented years ago at a hypnotist convention. It was released on audio with a disclaimer saying it was not copyrighted and I encouraged people to share the information with others. Many of the Web versions are incomplete or have omitted the credits. The complete paper is available at our Valley of the Sun site under "Articles and Other Information."

The paper exposes brainwashing tactics used by Fundamentalist Christians, cults and organizations that manipulate people into joining or participating in their ongoing classes or seminar offerings.

In response to your question: the criticism on the Web is either from Born Again Christians or people representing the kind of organizations I'm exposing. Seems to me they would have been better off ignoring the paper, because their protests are such obvious attempts to justify their practices.

In response to those questioning the validity of the material, all I have to say is check the facts. The paper is based upon solid research and factual studies from Pavlov, to the techniques used by the Russians and Red Chinese. Conway and Siegelman's exposure of religions and cults is a classic. Eric Hoffer's work on mass movements from Christianity to Communism is often used as a college text. William Sargant's work on the physiology of conversion and brainwashing is one of the best researched studies of our time.

Remember, no one has ever been brainwashed and realized he has been brainwashed. So the critics, converts and advocates all just think they're supporting a good cause or a good organization. The more vehement they are, the more deeply they're probably brainwashed.

Q.
Why Two Publishing Companies?

Why are you bringing out some of your releases on the Valley of the Sun label and others under this new Red Ball on Blue Water label? This question has been asked in e-mails and in person.

A.

The two companies are very different. Valley of the Sun is owned by Tara and me, but is handled out of Ashland, Oregon. The company is set up to work with distributors around the world, who in turn offer our products to book and metaphysical stores. The products are printed, duplicated or replicated in large quantities.

Until recently it made no economic sense to think in terms of releasing a tape or CD unless we believed it would sell a lot of copies. Printing book-size tape boxes is very expensive with high minimums.

Red Ball on Blue Water is a division of Sutphen Seminars. We're located in Malibu and Agoura, Californiaa group of writer/artist/musician/recording talents. Last year we invested in a new digital recording studio and replication equipment that allows us to produce smaller CD runs in-house. The new technology allows us to create superior-quality CDs that don't have to sell in large numbers to be profitable.

The Red Ball on Blue Water titles are for a niche market and will primarily be sold directly to customers on the Web or via direct mail. A few of our first releases are of general interest, but most will be esoteric or for a very limited audience.

Thankfully, the Web allows small companies to compete in mass-market distribution-oriented world. As an example, I'm a fan of specific types of Los Angeles and Austin folk/roots rock/Americana music. Many of these artists are not widely distributed -- even in the huge Tower and Border's stores around LA. But on the Web, I'm always informed of new releases and can sometimes listen to song samples before ordering -- often, directly from the artist at his own Website.

Q.
Columbine High School Tragedy

Many questions have been asked in person and via e-mail about the Columbine High School tragedy. People want to blame the movies, music or violent video games, or maybe even reincarnation. Readers know I am strongly against censorship and usually share an ACLU viewpoint, which many like to challenge. With that in mind I'll reply a week after the event.

A.

First, I responded to news of the tragedy just as you did -- with horror, disbelief and great sadness. Anytime Tara or I are aware of human suffering, we stop what we're doing and send light to the individuals. Even if we observe an ambulance on the roadway, we take a few moments to do this. We sent a lot of light to Colorado. Maybe this is a response to feeling helpless. You want to do something, anything.

As a metaphysician, upon learning of their Hitler ties, I thought the two boys must have been reincarnated Nazi soldiers expressing an anger rooted in WWII. But that's a cliché and I doubt the real story is that simple. Hopefully, with Abenda's help, Tara will soon explore the past-life backstory and share it with all of us.

Tara and I also talked about the karma of all involved. Remember, karma either is or it isn't. There is no half-way karma. Either everything is karmic or nothing is karmic. This is either a random universe and there is no meaning to life, OR there is some kind of plan. My life work tells me that there is a plan. And if there is a plan, wouldn't an intelligence (God?) have established the plan? And would it not follow that justice would be part of the plan? That being the case, karma is the only possible plan/explanation that I'm aware of. Accepting this, wasn't everyone affected by the massacre playing out their karma in one way or another.

From experience, I've learned the hard way that explaining such things to the media only generates anger. The interviewer doesn't accept the philosophy and is unwilling to the take the time to even basically understand how karma and reincarnation work.

Tara recently dissected the astrology chart of a suicide. She found so many death/suicide factors in play on the day he died, the chart indicated that his destiny had been written since birth. But this knowledge doesn't explain, why he came in to live a full life and then die of a self-inflicted gunshot, leaving loving survivors to mourn his passing.

The weekend prior to the events in Littleton, I had read a research report that said if an expectant mother is upset and angry during pregnancy, the child will absorb the anger and will grow up feeling uncomfortable without the presence of internal anger. But if everything is karmic . . .

Overreaction & Blame

Sadly, people need to blame. They need a simple explanation to rationalize what happened. As expected, the tragedy has provided those with a cause to climb on a soapbox and point fingers. The day after Littleton, we received a lengthy e-mail blaming President Clinton for everything that is currently wrong with society.

Others are blaming guns and the easy access to the materials to make bombs. But once man learned that gunpowder can be made from three simple elements: potassium nitrate (fertilizer), charcoal and sulfur, there was no turning back. In an hour, I could easily make a zipgun out wood, a rubber band and a piece of pipe. A deadly pipe bomb can be made with the heads of kitchen matches.

Guns are outlawed in the UK, and most policemen don't even carry weapons. But that didn't stop the psychotic in Dunblane, Scotland from obtaining a weapon and murdering school children.

People are blaming violent movies, music and video games. I grew up in the aftermath of World War II. Soldiers were heroes and from kindergarten to fourth grade, the favorite game my friends and I shared was "playing guns" -- stalking each other through our middle-class neighborhood, pretending to kill each other. At the annual country and state fairs, we shot guns on the midway -- the targets being yellow ducks and miniature people. We didn't have video games, but it seems to me we were acting out in the same way kids do today with a video screen.

I'll never forget the initial public reaction to Elvis Presley. Parents couldn't relate to the music, so they rejected it. My parents certainly did. And from their pulpits, Christian preachers condemned Elvis and his "devil music." But ole Elvis didn't turn out to be so bad, and most of my generation grew up to be law-abiding citizens. Today, many of these peers are advocating a ban on everything they dislike.

Didn't You Look Back?

In the days following the Columbine High School tragedy, I'm sure you, like me, looked back upon your high school years, and tapped into the anger you once experienced at being rejected, challenged or beat up. My group was art/journalism students, and we viewed the jocks as negatively as they viewed us. But my primary problems were not with jocks, but with a journalism teacher, and the policies of school administrators.

My anger was very real and I released it by self-publishing and selling a newspaper challenging the positions of those I disagreed with. As a result, the vice principal threw me into the wall screaming, "You had Communist backing for this publication, didn't you? Didn't you?"

"No."

"You are expelled!"

This was evidently the first time in the history of my high school that anyone had openly challenged authority. I was informed that I would never be allowed back into the school system. Forget graduating. But when my Celtic mother took on the school, they quickly reversed their position. The teachers and administrators wanted me to say I was sorry. I refused to apologize. After being kicked out of journalism, I went underground and continued my propaganda war in more subtle ways.

Thinking back, I question the level of anger I experienced at the time. I certainly was not angry enough to want to shoot anyone, but I had art and journalism as a frustration outlet.

The way to avoid future school tragedies, is not to ban things we personally dislike. We live in a free society and it will cease to be free when we start tinkering with the Bill of Rights and Constitutional amendments.

On the 60 Minutes television show, a video game representative asked reporter Ed Bradley about the young man who found hidden meaning in J.D. Salinger's Catcher In The Rye, and then murdered John Lennon. Do we ban this classic literature? Maybe Moby Dick could set off someone else.

Instead of banning ourselves into a reformer-style Utopian society, let's think up new ways for teenagers to channel their emotions. Let's make schools safer using all the technological resources we have at our disposal, and let's set up programs like the those in Houston, Texas that identify troubled children and provide counseling.

Los Angeles Time columnist Mike Downey ended his April 28 column on overreaction to Littleton by saying, "Not to try to control young minds, just so we can do a better job of reading them."

Amen.

Feb. ‘99

Questions and answers about 1) the downing of TWA flight 800, 2) the Millennium Project as spreading fear, 3) the idea of Unconditional Love being unrealistic, and 4) repressing sex. By Dick Sutphen.

Q.
The Downing of TWA Flight 800?

I understand that in the October Sedona Psychic Seminar you talked about psychics checking out the downing of TWA flight 800. My friend who attended couldn’t remember enough of the details to satisfy my curiosity. Can you please share this story?

Joyce Spaulding
St. Louis, MO

A.

During a Q&A period, we were talking about remote viewing into the past, present and future -- something we plan to explore in the Sedona Advanced Experimental Seminar in September 1999. In 1976, author Richard Bach experienced remote viewing at Stanford Research Institute. Shortly after that, while spending a day together at my home in Arizona, he explained how the sessions were conducted and what he experienced.

A couple months later, I tried the technique as a group experiment with 100 participants attending a reincarnation seminar. I hypnotized the group and to my amazement, almost everyone successfully projected their mind to an outbound target -- a person who drove to a unique environment miles away.

Over the years we refined the techniques to the point that if Tara was the target, she didn’t dare stop to take a bathroom break or the seminar participants would pick up on it. Remote viewing as it was being explored in those days can easily be verified and runs at least 80-percent successful with any group I’ve ever worked with. But when the U.S. Army Intelligence and the CIA got involved, they took the techniques into whole new realms of exploration to psychically spy upon the Russians and other enemies of the state.

Remote viewing back into past events sounds far fetched, but according to hundreds of accounts, many from the intelligence community, this too has often been verified.

In the Sedona Psychic Seminar, in response to a question, I shared a capsulated version of a report by Uri Dowbenko in Nexus magazine -- an interview with David Morehouse, former military intelligence remote viewer.

CBS News approached Morehouse to see if he would use remote viewing to investigate the real cause of the TWA flight 800 disaster. He assembled a team of six of the top remote viewers in this country. Five of them saw the same thing -- a powerful secret weapon -- a microwave energy beam that was intended to destroy a drone missile fired from the USS Normandee 35 miles away.

Flight 800 was late taking off and wasn’t supposed to be in the flight corridor at the time. As a result, the plane flew right into a weapons test -- between the microwave beam and the missile beyond the plane. Morehouse provided CBS News with a 32-page report that never aired, although it included dozens of verifiable details and substantiating satellite imagery from French satellites.

The microwave overheated the plane’s fuel tanks. This report verifies all the reports from people who observed a missile go up, followed by an explosion. But the dummy missile was far beyond the plane.

Evidently a doctor examining the bodies of recovered victims was amazed to find metal fused into a flight attendant’s back. This could not have resulted from an explosion, but could have resulted from metal being so overheated, it literally melted into flesh.

Reference: Nexus, volume 4, number 5. This may be the Australian edition. For those interested in a remote viewing workshop and hypnosis session, my Video Hypnosis® Astral Projection & Remote Viewing tape is available at the Valley of the Sun Publishing site: www.sutphenpublishing.com

Q.
How Dare You Spread Fear of the End Times?

A dozen people have written, condemning me for conducting the psychic Millennium Project (reported on the Website and in Soaring Spirit #70), and for sharing preparedness information. Their argument can be summarized by quoting a Tucson woman’s vehement letter: “You’re spreading fear. By thinking about preparedness, you’re mentally programming a crisis to manifest. How dare you?”

I won’t even attempt to defend the psychic research project. Those offended by such things probably shouldn’t be reading my communications in the first place. The project is the con-sensus of the 114 people who participated.

As I have explained -- I envision a financial crisis, and the possibility of a small war expanding into a bigger war, and I’m concerned about ecological problems. But neither Tara or I foresee “end times.” No comets, no pole shifts, et cetera.

In response to those who don’t want me to share preparedness advice, let me ask a question. Every time I get into a car, I put on a seat belt. According to your logic, this action is programming an accident.

Another question: During cold/flu season, I take a couple daily doses of apple cider vinegar, to keep my system acid and less susceptible to such infections. Each time I raise that glass of vinegar and water to my lips am I programming a cold?

I don’t think so. We all need advice on occasion, because  we can’t be experts on everything. We can close our eyes and ears to every warning because we think it’s going to program the effect. To do so is to become so fearful of our own thinking and ability to make decisions, we end up living in our own personal “Dark Ages.”

Enough said.

Q.
Unconditional Love Is Unrealistic

I don’t believe it is realistic to strive for unconditional love. Acceptance of other people, no matter what they do, is a naive concept. There are times for intervention and resistance.

Kara Vickery
Atlanta, GA

A.

To me, unconditional acceptance (love) is a matter of being compassionate while also accepting another person without judgment, expectations, blame or attempted control -- as long as the other person isn’t endangering themselves or others. I don’t usually add that qualifier because it seems so obvious.

The drug addict needs intervention. A drunk must not be allowed to drive. If physical abuse is part of a relationship, the only way to be responsible to yourself is to leave. Unconditional acceptance doesn’t mean you put other people’s needs before your own needs. It doesn’t mean you stop deciding what works for you and what doesn’t.

Mythologist Joseph Campbell talks about three kinds of love: “agape,” “eros,” and “amore.”

Agape, to me, is the unconditional love I described above. A non-sexual love.

Eros is love in a sexual sense. You might love someone you’re having sex with, but you’re not in-love with them.

Amore is deep love -- the kind shared by mates/lovers who dearly love each other.

Q.
Repressing Sex?

I received two messages at our Personal Website from people questioning the idea of sexual repression resulting in anger. My answer (at www. dicksutphen.com Q&A) was in regard to President Clinton’s war with the Republican Sex Police. Both of those leaving messages mentioned celibacy as a proper channel for spiritual advancement. Neither person who e-mailed wanted their names used.

A.

I’ve answered this question before in print, so I’ll repeat the response as it appeared in my book Lighting the Light Within:

History will support the idea that the more you repress sex, the more angry and violent you tend to become. Sexual energy can thus be used very effectively by those who direct armies. If the soldiers have no opportunity to experience sex, their energy and anger can be channeled into the battle.

Celibacy is demanded by most cults, and encouraged by many religions, so you think it is spiritual. These organizations know that sex is such a powerful force, it can’t be successfully repressed. Thus, when the followers fail to successfully repress their sexuality, they feel guilty. It is much easier to control guilty people. And when they continue to fail, they lose self-esteem. It is even easier to control people who have low self-esteem. The followers accept that they are sinners and the guru or church becomes their only hope of redemption. It’s a very successful ploy.

You’re here on earth to raise your level of awareness by interacting harmoniously with physical reality. When you reject an aspect of physical reality and pretend it doesn’t exist, you are not living a life of total involvement. Until you can go through an entire lifetime with total involvement and without fear-based emotional attachments, you will continue to reincarnate.

From a metaphysical karmic overview, there is also the idea that you become what you resist -- if not in this life, in the next. So, if you resist sexuality in this life, you’ll just have to come back and deal with it in the next.

My spiritual view is a combination of Zen and Paganism. The Pagan view is, “And it harm none, do as you will.” Many Pagans advise that you resist nothing you desire to experience if your desire is not harmful to yourself or others. They feel repressed sexual energy will pervert, and you’ll end up expressing the energy in unhealthy ways -- if not in this life, in the next.

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