Universal Insults – Serge Benhayon’s degradation of the ailing

Universal Medicine markets itself as a complementary medicine organization that promotes healthy living, however, the Esoteric healing services sold by cult leader Serge Benhayon glorify death and reincarnation at the expense of physical and mental health. A critical element of Benhayon’s Livingness death drive is magical thinking, where Esoterically correct thoughts and behaviour are rewarded with improved reincarnations, while the contrary are punished with disease and adversity. His writings show how Benhayon has borrowed from New Age mogul, Louise Hay’s book of moralistic magical thinking spells, and reveal his toxic attitudes to the sick, disabled and marginalized.

Moral judgement and Louise Hay’s business plan

Louise Hay, the author of ‘You Can Heal Your Life’ and its many offshoot products has created a multi-million dollar industry from damaging notions that disease arises from incorrect thinking, and can be cured by reciting affirmations and avoiding displeasing thoughts.

Being aware that cancer comes from a pattern of deep resentment that is held for a long time, until it literally eats away at the body, I knew I had a lot of work to do. (Hay, 1988, p.1)

She claims to have cured herself of cervical cancer without medical treatment, and none of her 35 million customers seem to care that she can’t provide evidence. The model of New Age success, Hay presides over a publishing empire built on promoting healing through self affirmation, where healing success is measured in book sales.

Hay insists that customers are able to control their lives with their thoughts.

The way to control your life is to control your choice of words and thoughts. (Hay, 1988, p.4)

It would be more reasonable to suggest that one’s choice of words and thoughts helps them control their responses to life, but typical of the New Age, the thoughts of individuals have the magical power of controlling the workings of the universe. Thoughts can both cause and heal serious disease, as well as influence unrelated events. We saw an example of this grandiosity when stalwart UM cult member, Jane Keep, told us her car copped a knock in a car park because she dropped her self loving self absorption for longer than her Esoteric selfishness could bear and delayed leaving work. If she’d been more ‘in truth’ she would have pissed off earlier and avoided a bent fender (but for all she knows, she might have been hit by a Mack truck on the freeway instead).

As powerful as thoughts are deemed by New Agers, intellect is deemed inferior to intuition. Unsurprisingly, Louise Hay has no higher education attainments or formal therapy qualifications and devised her bestselling magical thinking and affirmation plan not through research or clinical experience, but via channeling; a formula eagerly imitated by any number of underqualified New Age shysters since. The omnipotence of self they’re selling exonerates them from responsibility for lousy results, which are conveniently blamed on the ‘words and thoughts’ of the client. And if that doesn’t add up, there’s always the customers’ sinful past lives.

The following is a sample page of Hay’s simplistic list of the ‘probable causes’ of disease and her affirmation remedies.

Louise Hay, Heal Your Body, 1988, p.10

She also writes that the ‘probable cause’ of cancer is Deep hurt. Longstanding resentment. Deep secret or grief eating away at the self. Carrying hatreds. (Hay, 1988, p.22)

Yet, logic deprived New Age platitudes don’t hold up to the reality test. It does not add up that every cancer patient is carrying hatred. Plenty of deeply hurt, hate carrying and grief stricken individuals don’t get cancer. Plenty live a long time in comparatively good health. Plenty of people hate themselves and don’t get acne. Some people long for love but have no aches. Need I go on? For those of us dealing with patients every day, such judgements are profoundly insulting to the ailing. They also dangerously minimize the complex causes of disease, and stigmatize the non feel good emotions, such as anger and grief, which are appropriate responses to many circumstances. Without anger, there is no justice, and people have no defence from exploitation. Without grief we can’t comprehend loss, and the value of precious things lost, such as life, or love, or health. And since when does any emotion occur in isolation – separate from a range of other emotions and responses?

Benhayon on the magical thinking bandwagon

Benhayon didn’t only adopt Alice Bailey’s theosophical package wholesale, but he took on Louise Hay’s list of sins as causes for disease, in some cases practically word for word. Hay lists the causes for breast disorders as a refusal to nourish the self. Putting everyone else first. Overmothering. Overprotection. Overbearing attitudes. (Hay, 1988, p.21)

Benhayon repeats:

We know breast cancer is out of control and energetically from an esoteric point of view this is caused by the lack of nurturing a woman has toward herself. Women, at best, are today great nurturers of others, but not of themselves! (Benhayon, 2006, p.249)

However, Benhayon takes New Age fundamentalism a step further. As explored in the post on disease development as a moral choice, rewards of health and good fortune for Esoteric good behaviour get little more than lip service. Universal Medicine is marketing death. It only offers ultimate redemption to paid up subscribers who deride their physical body and annihilate their human responses over enough lifetimes to discard their physical form and ascend into the Divine light of God. In the interim, the emphasis is on making everyone feel like shit. The focus is on moral judgement, condemning any emotional expression and any engagement in life as disease causing, and keeping followers dependent on healing sessions and workshops to clear their bottomless supply of loveless ‘prana in expression’.

Insulting the sick and marginalized

The following quotes reveal Benhayon’s repugnant judgements of disease and misfortune, and his condemnatory attitudes to those who don’t surrender to his perilous ‘Livingness’ cult and allegiance to its unisex Brotherhood of abuse deniers.

Apart from the derogatory nastiness, look out for the usual hallmarks of Benhayon bonkers: inaccurate medical language, simplistic notions of disease development, merciless and meritless Esoteric Karma, the Esoteric gender war, women with gyne disorders are lesser women and far flung supernatural balderdash.

Illness and disease are only markers. They are but mere reflections of our many choices. (Benhayon, 2011, p.586)

Esoterically a food intolerance is a reaction to a food based on where you are at in your energetic development — and an allergy is an intolerance that has been long ignored. Both are forms of healing and not a penance. (Benhayon, 2011, p.592)

An allergy to something is an ignored intolerance. And, an “ignored intolerance” is an insistence to not self-love. (Benhayon, 2011, p.618)

Poverty is a consciousness. It is a form of inactivity that is founded by a victim mentality to hide the lack of committing to life in full. (Benhayon, 2011, p.286)

Anorexia is a problem of self-worth – the feeling of not being worthy enough to even figure on earth. Bulimia = non-acceptance. It is an act that symbolises that they cannot stomach how things are. (Benhayon, 2011, p.614)

What you do not want to remember most in your dementia is the fact you gave up on yourself. (Benhayon, 2011, p.588)

Brain tumours are the residues of our un-expressed truths. They are the made manifest of uncommunicated energy. (Benhayon, 2011, p.592)

Sleeplessness is the reflection of the abuse of daily life. (Benhayon, 2011, p.622)

Stillness is the energy that is honouring you as a woman. Become racy and or driven and you have asked male energy to dominate your body. Looking like a woman but being run by a male energy is not the whole and true you. This is the widespread problem with women since the eighties. Will women stop and listen to this teaching or will breast and ovarian cancer along with so many other complications need to get so bad that they are forced to pay attention to it. (Benhayon, 2011, p.544)

Postnatal depression is the disconnection of the femaleness that was there only because of the pregnancy and not from her choice to be in femaleness. (Benhayon, 2011, p.525)

Lack of self-nurturing is now a significant global problem and in particular for women, as it is the actual energetic cause of breast cancer and its ill rise in our societies everywhere. (Benhayon, 2011, p.518)

Women have achieved equality, in some measure, by ‘out-male-ing’ the man. Therefore, they too, are in the excessiveness of male energy. This why there are so many cases of ovarian cancer, fibroids, cysts, endometriosis, breast cancer, etc. (Benhayon, 2011, p.519)

A stroke is the end result of an investment in things being a certain way –  it is the need to put out how you personally want others or things to be. When it does not occur in accordance to how you needed it to be, the body reacts suddenly to the needed investment not feeding it back the need it needed. This is how we get strokes. (Benhayon, 2011, p.572)

Anxiousness, along with exhaustion, is another one of our undiagnosed worldwide plagues. Anxiousness comes form knowing that you are not equipped to deal with what is ahead of you. And you cannot deal with what is ahead of you if you are not with you. (Benhayon, 2011, p.581)

Incontinence is caused by you not dealing with your long-term anxiousness. (Benhayon, 2011, p.609)

Withdraw from life in any way and you will have invited ill mental health. (Benhayon, 2011, p.581)

The root of all depression comes from an exhausted body. (Benhayon, 2011, p.606)

All forms of psychosis begin with a very conscious and deliberate choice to withdraw from committing to life’s responsibilities. (Benhayon, 2011, p.615)

It is through these lower three chakras that the consciousness of the astral discarnates enters and influences thought…Schizophrenia is the result of such over-stimulation from the solar centre. The over-stimulation is caused by an excess in entity activity, allowing the discarnates access and control over their host. Recognition of this will go a long way to helping those that are not too far gone. The multi-personality syndrome is true, but it occurs because there is a multiple range of discarnates accessing and expressing through the incarnate’s vehicle using his or her lower-mind via the lower three centres. Knowledge of this will one day be the accepted norm. (Benhayon, 2006, p.371)

All autistic conditions in their many varying degrees and others such as Down syndrome, where there is a lesser form of a natural expression, come from abuse of one’s position in a former life. Those who hold positions of authority and thus the force to inflict suppression, destruction, corruption and other forms of retardation to the natural manner in which each spirit uses life to evolve back to Soul, will incur such Karma. No one can escape this aspect of the Law of Cause and Effect. (Benhayon, 2011, p.151)

A mental and or physical disability is the karma of controlling other people for self-gain. (Benhayon, 2011, p.302)

Heart disease happens because you don’t love, because you don’t express lovingly and because you hold back and do not let others truly love you. (Benhayon, 2011, p.587)

Heart disease is forever the marker of our choice to not be love in all that we do and say. (Benhayon, 2011, p.601)

Cancer is created by the excessive build up of a particular emotion we do not move on from, hence why we have so many differing cancers. (Benhayon, 2011, p.622)

Simple isn’t it? Developing disease is a ‘choice’.

Benhayon, S. The Way It Is, UniMed Publishing, Goonellabah, 2006

Benhayon, S. Esoteric Teachings & Revelations, UniMed Publishing, Goonellabah, 2011

Hay, L. Heal Your Body, (First published in USA as What Hurts, 1976), Specialist Publications, Concord, 1988 

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