Friday, Nov. 27, 1998 | 11 a.m.
There is talk in spiritual circles about the Las Vegas vortex.
It's either here, or it's coming, or it's here and growing. Or maybe there are two.
"A vortex is supposed to be a high energy place -- a place where energies are higher or intense -- where we can magnify whatever energy we have," said Patti Nicholson, who leads Spiritual Encounters, a nonprofit Las Vegas alternative spirituality organization.
"People say (the vortex) is very intense here. People from around the world say they were drawn to Las Vegas for some reason, that there is this energy here."
In "spiritual-but-not-religious" communities, conversations about the vortex often go hand-in-hand with tutorial sessions on aura-reshaping and past-life readings, meditation techniques and inner-peace mantras.
"We don't subscribe to any one main thesis or modality," Nicholson said. "Everything is accepted that would fit into enhancing self-knowledge.
"We're about expanding consciousness and awakening self-knowledge and developing the spirit of unity and cooperation."
The increasingly blurred lines between organized religion, spirituality, psychology, self-help, holistic health and even para-normal activity are evident all over Las Vegas.
Every week, the smaller spiritual groups -- groups that don't yet have a string of churches or temples looped around the city -- meet in office buildings or living rooms to practice and share their faith.
From Spiritual Encounters and the Self-Realization Fellowship to the Las Vegas Humanists and the Urantians, people who have left the mainstream religious halls and fled to the fringe are developing a thriving alternative spirituality community in Las Vegas.
(Subhead: A Buffet of Beliefs)
On the Spiritual Encounters website, one can read tips on how to maintain a positive attitude or peruse accounts of UFO sitings.
Each week, the group holds open meetings at its East Sahara facility on topics ranging from "Introduction to Psychic Development" to "A Search For Healing." Newcomers make up the majority of attendees at meetings, Nicholson said, because there is no cause for regular worship, as in traditional religious worship.
"They come whenever they have a need, or when there's a topic that interests them," she said. "It's a safe place where people can talk about experience that normal society wouldn't accept. Like UFOs or near-death experiences or experiences they've had while in meditation."
And although Spiritual Endeavors would benefit financially from more committed, regularly tithing members, Nicholson said that a major appeal of New Age spirituality is that people are not asked to commit -- financially, nor to any single philosophy, nor to strict moral codes.
"It's not a church, so people don't come all the time and give us money," Nicholson said. "There's a need (for financial support), but there isn't a commitment.
"But one of the things that's different about us than traditional religion is that those religions have become, 'If you don't do it this way, you're going to go to Hell.
"We're not like that."
But many traditional Christians are critical of New Age spirituality, saying that it encourages spiritual confusion rather than disciplined faith.
"It allows people to get off the hook of being responsible for their actions and just melt into the cosmos," said Father Gordon Hines, a priest at St. George's Episcopal Church in Las Vegas.
"It doesn't make them have to be accountable for what they do."
Hines used to live in Sedona, Ariz., an area where New Age activity is renowned worldwide. Sedona's vortex energy, followers say, is higher than most other places in the world.
"I have heard people say that New Age is growing here, and that there is this vortex in Las Vegas -- a place where people feel more spiritual," Hines said. "But I worry about the people who fall into that. I see them as God's children, and I have compassion for them, and I give them credit for searching, but they are on to something dangerous."
(Subhead: Psycho-spirituality)
Perhaps the great irony in the give-and-take between members of organized religion and followers of alternative spiritual interests is that each perceives the other to be psychologically harmful. And perhaps, if taken in extreme, both can be.
But just as great effort is expended in some Christian churches or Jewish synagogues to discredit and/or de-program those affiliated with alternative spiritual philosophies, so is great energy spent in alternative spiritual circles de-programming former members of traditional churches.
"I've met so many people who I kept telling, 'God loves you,' but they had so much guilt, lack of self-esteem, fear, phobias, that they could not comprehend that God is good and God loves them," said Evelyn Schiff, a behavioral therapist and founder of the Las Vegas Gracelyn Stress Management Center.
For 25 years, Schiff has specialized in providing to clients "a spiritually-based alternative to psychotherapy."
"These particular people came from Baptist backgrounds -- and God was a big man in the sky who would punish them," she said. "But it could be from any religion.
"My concept is that every problem or issue comes from a lack of love. The basic need is acceptance, and people do find that in church sometimes.
"But people grow out of churches. Some start with the fundamentalist churches, and then move on to broader concepts. The people in the metaphysical community come from a number of different faiths, and they keep growing."
In her practice, Schiff uses hypnosis to regress people to the place in their lives where their spirits were damaged, she said. She then encourages them to heal themselves.
Sometimes, a client will have to work through negative feelings that he or she got from a church, she said.
As a therapist, Schiff said, her task is to change the way people think about the universe and to accept their role in it -- not unlike the job of many leaders in organized religions.
"Changing perceptions is the goal," she said. "As humans, we go to classes, we read books, we do self-awareness activities, we go to therapy, we go to church -- we just need to change our perceptions from time to time.
"I don't suppose God cares too much which way you go, as long as you're working at being a better person."
(Subhead: Secular spirituality)
If psychologists share with pastors the duties of caring for human spirituality, so then do philosophers, according to members of the Humanists of Las Vegas and Southern Nevada, a group of self-described "critical thinkers."
Secularism does not exclude spirituality, according to Bernard Mesco, an atheist. Spirituality, he said, is a general feeling of intellectual and emotional well-being, and can be inspired by human acts.
"Spirituality is not the property of the religious only," Mesco said. "A personal emotional experience can be described as a spiritual experience and has nothing to do with finding God or whatever."
Mesco said that watching world-class athletes perform or listening to an outstanding musical performance can be a spiritual experience. Morality is a separate issue entirely -- developed through logic rather than passed down from religious authority.
"I was raised in the Jewish faith, but was never really religious," Mesco said. "We were never given morality codes relating to religion. I came about my feelings as a free thinker. I'm an engineer, and I tend to be be a little on the scientific side, looking for answers that make sense."
The Bible, he said, does not appeal to him in that manner.
"They say that the best way to create an atheist is to have them read the Bible -- they'll say, 'Gosh, that couldn't be an all-loving and beneficent God,' " he said.
The appeal of belonging to the Humanists group lies in celebrating the abilities of human reason, rather than worshiping deities and judging one another according to divinely revealed codes, Mesco said.
Humanists have periodic meetings, but no worship practices.
"Most people who aren't religious don't want to belong to an organization," Mesco said. "But some of us get together and talk about things -- philosophy and politics, things like that. And it is spiritual. The world of ideas can be spiritual."
(Subhead: Cosmological spirituality)
Still, other alternative spiritual philosophies draw from the traditions of Christianity and then add new thought -- such as a different supernaturally inspired theory about the organization of the planetary system.
For $54, a Las Vegan can buy the 2,000-page Book of Urantia at local bookstores. Allegedly channeled from celestial beings to a Chicago psychiatrist less than a century ago, the Book of Urantia now has readers worldwide. In Las Vegas, at least two study groups meet a couple of times a month to talk about universal themes such as loving one's neighbor, and about a theory of the universe that casts the Earth and humans as a small part of a universe teeming with other life.
"It is essential to unify science, philosophy and religion in order to be a complete revelation," said Stephen Thorburn, a former fundamentalist Christian who has been studying the book for 12 years. "Many of the world's great religions are largely authoritarian and don't address our intellectual concerns -- only our emotional concerns; they appeal to fear more than reason and most of them utterly fail to address science at all ... Cosmology directly indicates our physical, spiritual and intellectual relationship to God."
The Book of Urantia ("Urantia" is the name the celestial beings gave to Earth) also devotes a third of its pages to the life and teachings of Jesus.
Thorburn's wife, Judy, a baby boomer who has been a Jew, a Christian and a Buddhist, now subscribes to the tenets of the Book of Urantia.
"It's the message of the book that matters to me," she said. "The message is, 'As long as you're on the path to God, you are saved. As long as you are thirsty for truth, knowledge, and righteousness, you're going to be saved. You are going to be meeting with God one of these days.' "
"It changed my life completely," Stephen said. "I have peace, joy and happiness. I don't have burning questions about my relationship to God anymore. The teaching is that God has given a fragment of his spirit to live in each and every one of us. It is accessible to us -- all we have to do is open it up. That's a very important teaching.
"Truth just has an appeal that is just irresistible."
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