From the good people at Debunking Debunkersrule.
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http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Debunking_debunkersrule/message/168Another Death in a Plastic Vision Quest!
Message #168 of 168
Bozhoo everyone! I was bouncing, but I'm back now.
Please remember the Reverend Karen Blomberg in your prayers this
week. She appears to be the latest victim of the plastic medicine
people selling the right to be called an "elder" through a expensive
quickie-vision quest. The coroner's report says she died of a
pulmonary embolism. The group, Wilderness Rites, took elderly women
on nuage "visions quests" to high elevations to avoid
the summer heat. What a 54 year old woman was doing on this
questionable "elder-quest" is hard to say. These deaths always both
anger and sadden me, especially since this lady seemed to be highly
educated and should have had the common sense to avoid this group of
obvious charlatans.
This is inevitably what happens when we lose sovereignty over our
spiritual practices and outsiders re-create them in incoherent ways.
When our sacred rites are subjected to Capitalism the greed that
accompanies this sick institution always yields a bad outcome. All
over the Southwest, these plastic vision quest factories have been
associated with drug abuse, corruption, child abuse, physical and
spiritual injury and even death, but they're never shut down.
Holding a vision quest in the desert in August is insane. Going t
higher elevation brings different problems with it. I can't believe
the guides were so irresponsible. Let's all pray that Non-Indians get
some wisdom and come to realize that nothing good can ever come from
the misrepresentation and abuse of indigenous spiritual traditions.
Ironically, Reverend Blomberg taught courses called the "Authenticity
Series" to help give people new insights into themselves. She was
completing a book on the subject. Her quest for authentic experience
lead her to the most inauthentic of experiences and probably
shortened her life unnecesarily. If she had only done a google
search she might have discovered that this group was already under
suspicion from real NDNS and even identified as fraudulent by a group
of elders.
http://www.geocities.com/anaskayi/nolist.htmlHer quest for authenticity need not have shortened her life.
Their warning reads:
"NOTICE - The websites on this list have been reviewed by the Elders
of the Anaskayi. It is the opinion of the Elders that these websites
do not properly reflect true Native American culture and spiritual
teachings. In some cases, the fault may be ignorance of those truths.
In other cases, fraud appears to be possible."
Here is Rev. Blomberg's Obit:
www.washingtonpost.comJuly 30, 2008 Wednesday
Regional Edition
OBITUARY
Karen Blomberg Associate Pastor, Counselor
The Rev. Karen Blomberg, 54, an associate pastor at Westminster
Presbyterian Church in Alexandria who also was a teacher, writer and
counselor, died July 21 of asphyxiation due to a pulmonary embolism
while on a spiritual retreat near the Sierra Nevada mountains in
California.
Rev. Blomberg was in the Inyo Mountains on a vision quest camping
trip sponsored by Wilderness Rites, an Oregon group that promotes
earth-based healing practices. "The vision quest is an ancient rite
of passage that provides an opportunity to step away from your busy
life and slow down enough to hear the voice of the natural world,"
the group's Web site stated.
Rev. Blomberg was camped at Badger Flats at the 9,000-foot level in
the mountains above Independence, Calif., about 170 miles north of
Los Angeles, when she began having chest pains, according to Leon
Brune of the Inyo County coroner's office.
She had begun the 10-day program to become an elder in the vision
quest community and was part of a 16-woman excursion at the time of
her death.
"She was surrounded by a circle of friends who prayed and sang as
they carried her down from the base camp," said Dava Money, who wrote
and taught with Rev. Blomberg a series of courses on authenticity
that involved in greater self-awareness.
Rev. Blomberg, who lived in Alexandria, served as one of the pastors
of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Alexandria since 1990 and was a
private-practice pastoral counselor in the D.C. area for 15 years.
She possessed a desire to discover and make possible the highest
potential in everyone, money said.
In one of her last journal entries, Rev. Blomberg wrote, "The power
of God through Jesus moves people over thresholds; from brokenness to
wholeness, from sightlessness to vision, from death to life, from
sleep to awakening."
Rev. Blomberg, a native of Richmond, Ind., grew up in Indianapolis
and graduated from Taylor University. She received a master's degree
in divinity in 1981 and a master's degree in theology in 1986, both
from Princeton Theological Seminary.
She served congregations in Toms River, N.J., before moving to the
Washington area in 1990.
She was active in numerous spiritual, coaching and counseling
communities and groups that connected her own Christian tradition
with other spiritual traditions.
"She was able to bring new, fresh ways of looking at the Gospel,"
money said.
Rev. Blomberg co-developed and taught 11 courses called the
Authenticity Series to help give people new insights into themselves.
She was completing a book on the subject.
An amateur musician, she played the banjo, the guitar and the djembe
hand drum.
Survivors include her father, Kenneth Blomberg of Indianapolis; and
two brothers.
-- Yvonne Shinhoster Lamb
The source was the Associated Press State & Local Wire
The url for the Wilderness Rites website is here:
http://www.wildernessrites.comTheir 10 day "Vision Quest" for women costs $1200.00 per person. 16
women went so these frauds made $19,200 just on this one fake vision
quest.
The group's leader, Anne Stein, callers herself an "ecopsychologist",
whatever that is?
Here's her contact info:
Anne Stine
541-488-4899
480 Herbert St, Ashland, OR 97520
astine@...
It doesn't look like they're be any serious investigation into the
organization.
later,
Laura
