Two things I'll mention.
RE: orbs
I encourage everyone to check out a book called "
Lineage: What If The Universe Gave You A Gift?" by
Nancy Burson who is/was a digital photographer who pioneered morphing technology back in the 80s?. I would try to describe it, but the summery does a pretty good job.
"Seeing is Believing. For the past 2000 years the Universe has asked mankind to believe in God without proof. Now there has been a policy change. Since the beginning of 2006, Nancy Burson has been allowed to show audiences in the US and Europe the highly sentient Light Beings she calls the Extra Celestials (ECs) that she originally met in a crop circle in 2004.
Nancy's quirky yet poignant journey features the miraculous phenomena of glow-in-the-dark statuette dancing Mother Mary. She was a gift from Irish Avatar Derek O?Neill, whose car runs on love not gas and who magically creates rainbows and shape-shifts into other humans with ease. Read Lineage and discover the real reason why the Rays, or ECs are here for contact withmankind at this time."
At any rate the "ECs" reveal themselves as orbs. Also her son is an indigo child spirit medium.
RE: Capitalist cultural backwash.
I have an interest in the "workplace spirituality" movement, which emerged as a distinct entity in the 20's, basicly a spiritual justification for capitalist myths as it jettisoned it's protestant nursemaid. Mostly taking the form of little catch phrases promoting "just world" idealism, positive thinking and the virtues of hard work. Things like "The man who is hauling the oars has no time to rock the boat" "weather you think you can or think you can't, you're right" etc.
The other form early manifestations of it took (based on old corporate diaries I've studied) Is long winded missives on things like salesmanship, the details of warehousing, how people should go about their jobs etc. that are filled with unspoken assumptions culled from the "business wisdom" in the form of these proverbs they've accrued.
It's growth paralleled the growth of the "self-help" genre, (the lasting impact of the popularity and influence of the 1849 book "
Self Help" in Japan would be interesting to investigate).
In the 70's it started mixing with the "human potential" movement, which is basicly the love-child of scientology and the new age movement. You can become highly effective, nay, superhuman... and what better way to use your superhuman powers but to climb to the top of the bussiness world and reap mad profit.
EST is a good early example of this.
As an aside that will probably interest people here the precursor to team building exercises was something called the "
new games" movement, a project to create "games" with no winners or losers that had it's genesis in
the late 60's.
Somewhere in this mix "workplace spirituality" like other subcultures and spiritual movements became commodified (not that it was ever something good or worthy but I'd argue it began as a genuine effort amongst the ownership and management classes to come up with a metaphysical justification for capitalism, through the amassing of anecdotes and just so sayings). The interesting thing about this (as opposed to the commodification of say, punk, or buddhism in the west) is that there is absolutely nothing in workplace spirituality that resists this commodification, since it's entire essence is in dealing with how the universe justifies capitalism.
This is allowed it to grow into a truly aestheticly repugnant monstrosity, hollow to it's core, doing everything possible to present a smiling attractive face that appeals to "everyone" (presents nothing disagreeable to the mainstream, doing whatever it thinks will ingratiate itself to you and offering you the carrot of success within mainstream society if you earnestly adopt it's precepts.) that it's managed to create something that no one actually wants in a way that nothing else parallels in the west (though it's easy to imagine creations similarly lacking in appeal springing up through the process of soviet bureaucracy).
My interest in the topic was sprung when I went into a McDonalds and found the wall covered in motivational quotes, flatscreen TVs playing bland top 20 pop videos, an environment so morally antiseptic, so devoid of the controversial, there could arise no objection, no nagging doubt, about getting your kid that happy meal with the transformers toy.
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