Photo by Craig Carlson

San Diego's new-age crowd has gone from love to loot.

It’s amazing how quickly new-age fads come and go. The fire-walking rage burned itself out in less than a year. Flotation tanks, those sensory-deprivation aids to meditation, can be found lying belly up at garage sales everywhere. Colonic irrigation centers, which offered a kind of holistic enema with mystical overtones, are said to have suffered from the AIDS scare. Nearly all those who worried about their sickly auras have taken them in for adjustment and are now confidently emitting splendid rainbows of light. More recently, those unfortunate souls with unbalanced brain hemispheres have gone through polarization therapy, so that their consciousness is now running smoothly on both cylinders, like a well-tuned Kawasaki. New-age fads come and go all over the nation, but San Diego, which has somehow become the land of Oz for the new-age movement, sees them come and go first.

“San Diego is the cradle of civilization for the Aquarian age,” declares Reverend Judith Larkin. Ph.D., seated in the living room of what she calls her dream home — a two-story house in La Costa, just up the hill from the golf course and resort. Larkin, a petite blonde with a whispery voice and dreamy eyes, is something like San Diego’s good witch of the north and is a key figure in the new-age movement here. “All the major planetary teachers are coming to San Diego to be trained, then going out to the rest of the world,” she says. “It’s like the eastern Mediterranean was 2000 years ago. San Diego is a geographical coordinate point with a high-energy vortex. Anybody who steps into the high-energy field here sees their life immediately accelerate. They go through their marriage in an instant, their job situation changes, their growth pattern speeds up. It’s quite miraculous.”

In an older era, and without the Ph.D. after her name, Larkin, who is the founder of the Gateway Community — a kind of new-age religion headquartered in the basement of a rambling old church building in Cardiff — might be called a mystic, or perhaps clairvoyant. The preferred term today, however, is “mystic counselor,” or perhaps “consciousness facilitator.” Through her powers of Shaktipat meditation, she stares into people’s eyes with a hypnotic gaze that is the opposite of the evil eye and transfers “a light infusion,” which, along with her “psychic facilities” accelerates personal growth. After one or two sessions, Larkin claims her subjects “start doing miraculous things: recalling their past lives, opening their third eye, using clairvoyance,” and so on. The price Larkin charges for a fifty-minute session of this “ancient therapy” is eighty-five dollars.

As it turns out, the Ph.D. Larkin has added to her name was awarded by the University for Humanistic Studies, in Del Mar, a nonaccredited new-age college, which Larkin cofounded. Whatever her professional credentials may be, Larkin has been in the new-age movement long enough to be considered an authority on that subject, and she reads its trends as easily as she reads auras. She doesn’t just know what is coming next, she knows what is coming next.

“About fifteen years ago, I was on welfare and food stamps, living in a tin-can house with chickens and no heat. Poverty. Today I live in a 2200-square-foot house with cathedral ceilings and two fireplaces. Really beautiful. The reason that change has taken place in my life is because I’ve changed my thinking. Prosperity consciousness has changed my whole life. It’s not materialism; it’s divine attunement. It’s knowing your oneness with all the resources so you don’t cut yourself off from your supply. You see, poverty is a ‘dis-ease,’ and prosperity consciousness is a kind of health. If a person is in tune with the universal concepts, they will be healthy — not just physically, but in their bank account, too.

“At Gateway [Larkin’s church] we just finished a course in personal manifestation, prosperity and money, and we’re planning another one in October on the metaphysical aspects of maintaining your portfolio. It’s about looking at money as an approach to health, god consciousness, and wholeness and will cover the skills and techniques to maintain one’s prosperity consciousness in today’s day and age.

“The time is right for prosperity consciousness,” Larkin says. “It’s spreading throughout the whole country, but it begins right here. A lot of people are coming to San Diego to be trained in prosperity consciousness, then going back to Baltimore, Georgia, and North Carolina to teach it there. What we’re talking is revolution here. But it’s the quiet revolution. The revolution that’s bringing in the new age.”

What we’re talking here is new-age real estate agents whispering prosperity blessings before closing the big deal, networking witches passing around Xeroxed resumes, shiatsu hair stylists visualizing buckets of money showering down on their Ocean Beach salons, crystal therapists studying The Tao Jones Averages: A Guide to Right Brain Investing before calling their brokers, and charismatic doctors of economics counseling their students that they are truly loved. Prosperity consciousness is rumbling through San Diego’s new-age movement faster than bean soup and curried rice through an irrigated colon.

One of the troubles with talking about the new age is that nobody in the movement has the slightest idea what the term “new age” means. To the skeptic, the term “new age” might bring to mind a ragtag band of ex-hippies still hopelessly brainwashed by a silly Broadway play called Hair, in which people took off their clothes and sang hymns in praise of astrology. But to the believer, the new age means prophecy in the act of fulfillment. It means the beginning of the Aquarian age, in which 1000 years of peace, love, and enlightenment will reign over the earth. Somewhere between those two viewpoints, the new-age movement might be seen as a coalition of blissfully inept entrepreneurs and smooth-talking con men trying to make a living by sharpening razor blades through the power of pyramids, balancing auras with crystal therapy, and offering lessons in the teachings of a bewildering array of dead Eastern mystics.

One thing about the new age is certain, though: San Diego is rapidly emerging as its capital. There are oft-repeated rumors in the movement that San Diego is the “New Jerusalem.” If that isn’t embarrassing enough, combine the “New Jerusalem” with San Diego’s well-deserved reputation for being the promised land for every get-rich-quick artist in the nation, and you have this strange new fad called “prosperity consciousness.”

There are at least a dozen new-age organizations teaching prosperity courses in San Diego and many more considering teaching such a course. Their styles vary, and to the skeptic they all might seem to be a blend of psychobabble, witchcraft, and sales-manager pep talk. Prosperity consciousness courses are probably best described, though, by one of their graduates.

Rich Bell is a thirty-one-year-old, former part-time advertising salesman for Wholistic Living News, San Diego’s new-age bimonthly. Raised in La Jolla, where he became determined not to become “just another part of the yuppie energy coming out of this place,’’ he has seen more new-age groups come and go than the bulletin board at a local health-food store. “I first got turned on to this prosperity stuff through Terry Cole-Whittaker, six or seven years ago,’’ he says, laughing easily at his own gullibility, which he is at a loss to explain. “Up until then, I had been a TMer [transcendental meditator]. I finally realized that was totally screwing up my life — TM gets you so spacey, you can hardly function. Plus I was a real sucker and went for the flying and levitation studies back in the Seventies when that was being popularized. The cost of TM is so outrageous. I found TIC [Teachings of the Inner Christ] to be a much better deal, and I don’t have to put up with all that vegetarian crap, or celibacy.’’

Teachings of the Inner Christ, another San Diego-based new-age group (which has little to do with traditional Christianity), offers prosperity courses at a converted residence on Grape Street in North Park, where it produces about 200 prosperity graduates per year, each of whom pledges a portion of his income to TIC.

Typical of most prosperity consciousness courses, the TIC program relies heavily on affirmations and visualizations of success and prosperity. One affirmation Bell recited in unison with the rest of his class was, “I accept abundant prosperity now in my life. My in-flow always exceeds my out-flow. I am financially abundant and always maintain a surplus of money. I am blessed with the greatest abundance anyone, anywhere, could ever have.’’ A typical visualization practiced by a prosperity student in the TIC course is to picture twenty-dollar, hundred-dollar, and thousand-dollar bills showering down on his head.

According to Bell, who plans on taking the TIC course a second time because he is more receptive to prosperity consciousness now, these affirmations “change your consciousness so you can receive whatever ideas you need. If somebody is really steeped in poverty, they think in a really defeatist way, and even when opportunities to change their lives appear, they aren’t open to those opportunities.’’

Teachings of the Inner Christ is different from most prosperity courses in that the fee for taking the course is based on a voluntary contribution of ten percent of whatever new income the student earns between the end of the course (usually taught in September) and Christmas. According to a staff member at TIC, the course taught last year brought donations of $4700 to the school.

As a result of the prosperity course, Bell claims considerable success in his Bach-flower business — a nineteenth-century form of therapy using the essences of flowers to treat various physical and spiritual ailments, stimulate ESP, and heal past lives. “I had been thinking of going back to the Midwest, where I studied Transcendental Meditation,’’ he says. “But after taking the prosperity course, I made a shit-load of money as a Bach-flower practitioner and decided to stay here in San Diego.’’

Unique among San Diego s prosperity gurus is Sami Sunsong, a pudgy, fast-talking, thirty-seven-year-old real estate agent who claims to be a prosperity magician. “My life is dedicated to bringing prosperity to the spiritual world and spirituality to the business world,’’ he says. For a voluntary donation, Sunsong will offer a prosperity blessing on behalf of anyone requesting his magic. Part of the blessing, which he calls the chant, is: “Let there be rainbows and waves, let there be rivers and streams, buckets and wheelbarrows full of money and good feedback, fresh inquiries, creativity, peaceful loving harmony, power unto you, unto me, to our friends and family.’’

“This blessing,’’ Sunsong claims, “is scientifically constructed with metaphysical ideas relating to rhythm, number, color, and form and has all the ingredients necessary to catalyze a change.’’ Recently, he has also added to his chant, after “loving harmony,’’ the phrase, “positive publicity.’’ Sun-song’s success or failure as a magician hinges on public relations, and like other prosperity gurus, he is eager for any scrap of attention resembling good publicity.

Sunsong traces his knowledge of prosperity magic to two mentors: a woman he calls “a native American sun priestess,’’ who performs full-moon dances to assure an abundant corn harvest; and a certified public accountant who charges his clients eight dollars a month for stock market advice based on astrological calculations. Sunsong is also quite impressed with the performance of a marble “prayer-potentizing pyramid’’ at an ESP research facility in Beverly Hills. He once placed a written request for a pay raise of one hundred dollars per week into the pyramid and claims his request was granted one week later by his boss at the real estate firm where he was then employed. “Now, that is what you call empirical, scientific proof,’’ Sunsong insists. “It proves that if you put your consciousness in a place and focus it, you can have miraculous results.’’

Besides his prosperity blessing, Sunsong offers, for a fee of one dollar, membership into what he calls his “prosperity network.” There seem to be no direct benefits or privileges from association with this network, though Sunsong claims members have won free trips to Rio de Janeiro and new automobiles simply by sending in a dollar.

Sunsong also offers what he calls a “prosperity powder,’’ which, for a voluntary donation, he will sprinkle on your telephone, credit cards, checkbook, desk, tool box, grant proposal, job application, or whatever other personal effects you feel are in need of a magical advantage. The formula for the prosperity powder, which smells very much like a common, rather pungent brand of silver polish, is a closely guarded secret.

The prosperity powder can sometimes fail to have the desired effect, Sunsong readily admits. “I once made a batch of prosperity powder that worked in reverse,’’ he says. “I asked these people to help me put their energy into the powder, and there was a lot of negative energy in the group — fear, greed, worry. They put all their bad vibes into the powder, and there were all these losses of money, things stolen, and so on.’’

Sunsong claims to have once dusted the phone of a friend, Tom Richter, who was then advertising director for Wholistic Living News. “Tom called me up and said, ‘We’re $1000 behind our budget for the paper. We gotta get the money or we’re not going to be able to publish.’ I said, ‘Don't worry. I have some fast-acting prosperity powder. I’ll be right over.’ A week later, Tom called me and said, ‘Not only did we get the $1000 we needed, but we’re a $1000 ahead of budget.’ ’’

When asked to verify this claim, Tom Richter, a mild-mannered, business-oriented man in his mid-thirties, seems slightly embarrassed by his recollection of Sunsong’s prosperity magic. He grudgingly admits he allowed Sunsong to dust his office with prosperity powder but then adds, “Sometimes we met the budget, and sometimes we didn’t.” Richter, who once taught an experimental prosperity course of his own, has since stopped working for Wholistic Living News and claims to have abandoned his search for enlightenment.

Another local prosperity facilitator, operating on a less ethereal plane than Sami Sunsong, is Jason Kelly Thompson, who has a doctorate in economics from the University of Massachusetts and once taught economics at Davidson College in North Carolina. Thompson, age thirty-five, is a calm, methodical thinker, with a honey-smooth Southern accent. “What I’ve found is that if people don’t know how to be loved, they also have trouble with money,” Thompson says.. “There’s a kind of receiving mechanism, and if we’re not receiving one thing, it’s hard to receive something else. People have a lot of negative ideas about money: money is evil, money is dirty, only cheats and scoundrels have lots of money, it is spiritual to be poor, you have to work hard for money, and that artists starve because they can’t make enough money. What I do is work to change those negative ideas.”

Thompson’s approach to prosperity consciousness is less mystical than some prosperity teachers and is founded, he says, in the teachings of Science of Mind and a book by Phil Laut, titled Money Is My Friend. His personal touch seems to be his charismatic influence over his students, who invariably speak highly of him and his course. They describe him as being “very good-looking,” “having a special way with people,” and “the kind of guy you’d like to have for your kid brother.” One woman was certain she had known him in a previous life.

One reason Thompson stopped teaching university economics was that he could no longer accept mainstream economic thought. “The first law of economics is the law of scarcity, which says there is a limited amount of resources in our country. What that means is that if I have more, someone else has less. Well, I don’t believe in the law of scarcity anymore. I believe that people can create prosperity in their lives.”

When asked how he could not believe in scarcity when the planet is being plundered for its oil, minerals, water, and timber and competition for the earth’s resources remains the most likely cause for world war, he says, “Mainstream thinking is just in that vein — that if I have more, then you have less. It’s that kind of thinking that heightens the struggle.”

Thompson sees prosperity consciousness becoming one of the hottest new topics in the new-age movement because the high inflation and high unemployment of the Seventies and Eighties have forced people in the new age to become aware of grim economic realities. Rather than trying to save the world, they are more concerned now with saving themselves. “In the Sixties, when our values were love, peace, and brotherhood,” Thompson says, “I thought the reason there was so much pain and poverty in the world was because the world needed to be changed. What I came to realize was that I wasn’t comfortable with my own life. My source of discomfort was myself. Now I believe we will heal the planet by healing ourselves.”

Thompson’s prosperity course runs three weeks, one evening per week. His fee is computed on a sliding scale, between eighty-five dollars and $125. In addition, he offers private prosperity counseling. “The people who are coming to me are going through major transitions in their lives. Some of them are really sick of their jobs, making plenty of money but hating every minute of it. Some of them have something else they want to do with their lives but are afraid to do it. One woman who came to me was making $50,000 a year but was losing all the really big deals. I talked with her to find out what her blocks were. She had just broken up a relationship in her life and believed if she were really successful, she wouldn’t be able to find a man. There are lots of women like that — afraid they won’t get married or find a lover if they are successful. I told her the kind of man she was looking for wouldn’t be threatened by her success.”

Thompson sometimes barters his counseling services for his clients' services, trading his time for gardening, photography, and cooking. “If they’re having trouble with money, they might not be able to pay in cash, and trading helps them learn the value of money. I had one guy in my class who wanted to trade for his carpentry work. I asked him how much he charged, and he said, ‘Eight dollars an hour.’ I told him I charged eighty dollars an hour. So when he came to my class next time, he was furious. He said, ‘I have to work ten hours to see you for one!’ I told him, ‘I asked you what you charged, and that’s what you said.’ ” Thompson and the carpenter finally settled on sixteen dollars per hour for the carpentry work and forty dollars per hour for the prosperity counseling. “We were both happy, and we both learned a lot about what our time was worth.”

Like other prosperity counselors, Thompson traces the origin of prosperity consciousness in San Diego to Terry Cole-Whittaker, the ex-high priestess of the new-age movement here and author of How to Have More in a Have Not World. Cole-Whittaker’s Sunday TV sermons, which were famous for being more entertaining than a Las Vegas floor show, were often based on the message that abundance is your divine right and only your level of consciousness prevents you from having it. By using her maternal charisma, she gave her followers permission to want what they wanted, without guilt. They would squeal with delight when she would kick off her high heels, knock the flowers off the podium and say, as one student recalled, “It’s okay to cruise through the ghetto in your Cadillac and say to yourself, ‘These people are poor because they aren’t using their consciousness correctly.’

At times Cole-Whittaker’s strutting evangelism may have resembled the born-again Christian TV tycoons, but as Tom Richter, from Wholistic Living News says, “She was definitely new age. She was thumping the Bible pretty hard there for a while when she wanted a larger TV audience, but even then she would interpret the Bible in metaphysical ways.”

In 1985 Whittaker returned from a trip to India to discover that her church was $400,000 in debt. Stung by criticism of her in the press, Cole-Whittaker withdrew from most public appearances and now offers only tapes and videos of her lectures. (One video, entitled “Manifesting Your Desire,” sells for $39.95.) Some of Cole-Whittaker’s followers, though, like Jason Kelly Thompson, believe her lessons in prosperity were valid ones and her recent troubles will prove to be positive in the end. “I like the way Terry has changed since she gave up her church,” he admits. “She doesn’t wear pantyhose and all that make-up anymore. She’s given up her glitter image and isn’t so concerned with saving other people and proselytizing. I think she opened up a lot of people to the idea of prosperity consciousness, and it got a little carried way, like things do sometimes.”

The lucrative market for prosperity teachers in San Diego is so tempting right now that some mainstream financial counselors seem to be scrambling to identify themselves with the new age and with prosperity consciousness. Roger Lane is a La Jolla-based prosperity educator who came to San Diego in 1983 after marketing computers and Redken hair care and cosmetic products in Hawaii. A nervous, high-energy person whose persuasive salesman rap sometimes makes him sound like the guy who sells kitchen knives at the Del Mar fair. Lane teaches two prosperity courses per month at Seminars by the Bay, in Marina Village — one for the public and one exclusively for the beauty industry. They usually have about fifty people in attendance and are somewhat more practical than many prosperity courses in that they offer advice about how to deal with banks, credit cards, investment strategies, and so on. And at $295 for two days, the course is something of a bargain, as most prosperity seminars go.

Lane says San Diego is ideally suited for his courses. “People come to the sun belt looking for opportunity. People here are outgoing and achievement oriented. They want a higher quality of life.” Lane bases his course on the teachings of Buckminster Fuller, the eclectic inventor of the geodesic dome, whom Lane says he knew before Fuller’s death in 1983. “I once heard Bucky prove to a conference of 150 businessmen in Lake Tahoe that every man, woman, and child today can become billionaires. He said we have this economic theory of scarcity but that it [scarcity] doesn’t really exist. He documented the resources of every country and said we have enough resources on the planet to be wealthy beyond our imagination.”

But Lane claims his course doesn’t encourage people to become irresponsible consumers. “I don’t motivate people to become millionaires,” he says. “I ask them what they want, then help them to understand they can have it — a house, a car, a savings account, whatever they want. Everybody wants a different quality of life. I say, whatever you want you can have, because it’s there. Everything you need is available. Half of what I do is help people know what they want. Most people have gone through such a history of not knowing what they want that even to look at it is a major task.”

In some ways, Lane sounds very much like the old school of financial counselors whose ads have appeared in the back pages of big-city newspapers for years, tempting America’s would-be entrepreneurs and frustrated salespersons with come-ons such as, “I can show you how to use other people’s money to become wealthy beyond your wildest dreams!” But Lane is quick to deny any similarity between his course and the older school of financial counselors. “We’re definitely new age,” he says. “Absolutely.” At the same time, he doesn’t care to be identified with the money-showering-down-from-heaven school of prosperity consciousness, either. “Some people sit in their houses doing their affirmations, thinking money’s gonna fall out of the sky,” Lane says. “It does help if people have a positive outlook, but you still gotta have daily action. You gotta go out and serve people. How much money you make is directly related to how many people you serve. It’s like right- and left-brain thinking. The new age is the right hemisphere, the old age is the left hemisphere. There’s the people who teach prosperity by saying, ‘If I think good thoughts, it’ll all just happen for me.’ And then there’s the conventional financial planners. I’m in the middle. My course is about balancing those two worlds, I want to get both hemispheres of the brain working together.”

Even more mainstream than Roger Lane is Margaret Wright, a certified public accountant and part owner of the Wright and Geiss Production Company, which has been offering a money course in San Diego since 1977. The current course is taught every month at a meeting room in Seaport Village, downtown. Titled “Money and You,” the course is advertised in Wholistic Living News, featuring pictures of money raining down and copy that reads, “If you are sick and tired of just watching as others blast their incomes into the stratosphere ... call Margaret Wright.” The price for the three-and-a-half-day course is $595 — certainly high enough to be a lesson in money-and-you without attending a single lecture.

When asked if the course is directed specifically toward the new-age market, Wright replies, “It depends on how you sell the course. It’s definitely consciousness stuff; it’s not an accounting course. It’s very new age. I think San Diego is the consciousness center of the world right now and has been for a long time.” The kind of people who take the course, Wright says, are usually entrepreneurs, or people thinking about starting their own businesses. People who might be described as new age make up about half the 1500 people she claims have taken the course.

“A lot of people have unconscious blocks to making money,” she explains. “Some people, especially men, can't be more successful than their fathers. That’s an unconscious thing, so we get them to look at that and how they are using that to block money in their life.” The course is based partly on the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, and partly, once again, on the teachings of Buckminster Fuller. “Fuller didn't believe you should work for a living,” Wright says, “and he always refused to work himself. He said you were here to make a contribution, and if you did that, the universe would take care of you. If you are doing what you are here to do, you will be happy, successful, and more wealthy.”

It probably wouldn't be fair to say that the prosperity consciousness craze is based on greed. With the possible exception of the prosperity teachers themselves, nobody is getting rich from visualizing buckets of money showering down from heaven. The new-age movement is neither more, nor less greedy than the larger culture it's a part of. As one prosperity teacher says, “Money is a hot topic in San Diego. Everybody here wants to know more about money, and we're just trying to address that need.”

The most disturbing quality of prosperity consciousness, and the new-age movement, may be the almost crippling gullibility of its students. Alienated by the inhuman objectivity of science and disillusioned by the rigid dogma of institutional religion, they seem to be groping for any mythology they can believe in and willing to accept as fact almost anything they are told by anyone with enough nerve to stand before them and tell them it is true. The result is a dazed, almost brainwashed confusion. As Judith Larkin, Ph.D., puts it, “People in the new-age movement tend to space out, to hide behind their spirituality, and that doesn't do them, or God, or anybody else any good.”