From photo editor to esoteric superstar: Bärbel Mohr’s rise was stratospheric. In just ten years, her book ‘The Cosmic Ordering Service’ and the numerous publications that followed spoke to millions of readers who just wanted the same as her: health, happiness, a dream partner and a dream house—simply by requesting it from the “universe”. Yet her end was equally dramatic: in October 2010, after an agonising illness, the best-selling authoress was dead aged just 46. “Where was God?” her followers have been asking ever since. Read here why her premature death was no coincidence.
First and foremost, this article is not intended to pass judgement on Bärbel Mohr—even if some things here may dent her revered image. It is much more about demonstrating that we should not undertake the journey into esotericism lightly. For although the ignorant may brush esotericism aside as an anchor for souls otherwise unable to cope with life, in reality it is no playground to make merry, no short-cut to quick-earned cash and certainly no Disneyland to distract and quieten the squabbling masses—however good it may feel at the time.
It is the field on which the creative forces meet—the white creators versus the black destroyers. But more than anything, it is certainly not a business—and show business even less. Yet today we are so saturated with the omnipresent marketing attitude of ‘turning it all into cash’ that we no longer notice the dangers of such an approach in the field of esotericism: even a little too much entrepreneurial spirit will push us from white to black on the esoteric chessboard. Moreover, thanks to TV and the media we are so used to seeing amateurs doing a job or task that they don’t know how to do, and often don’t even understand, that it is all too easy for a young, naïve soul to get the idea that this is the right way to engage with the unseen world. What these people don’t realise is that it’s a Faustian game to which only too many souls have fallen victim through naivety or non-belief.
If you have read Bärbel Mohr’s books or even attended one of her seminars or lectures, perhaps you are now crying out inside, ‘But she was such a pretty, nice, friendly woman!’ Most certainly. Of course she meant well. But these are not valid criteria in her chosen field. Granted, if someone wanted to establish a career as a figure-skater, slipped on her first double loop jump and broke her neck, that young woman could still be as friendly, as pretty and as nice—and anyone would smack their forehead and ask: was she mad? Why didn’t she first hire an instructor and spend years learning the art of figure-skating in a disciplined and obedient manner? Simply striking out on the ice and leaping around like that can be fatal. Just like it is to play around with esotericism without studying it carefully for years. Only it doesn’t seem so obvious—because there are no ice or skates there.
Bärbel Mohr herself admits to being an ignorant amateur in her books: “I think one of the reasons many people read my magazine—or for that matter, my latest book—is that I, myself, am unholy and unenlightened, and yet, I’m allowed to receive many amusements and conveniences from the Cosmic Ordering Service. The underlying message for you: ‘Well, if this crazy lady can create so much abundance, then I certainly can, too!’ And that’s exactly how it is,” she writes in her book Cosmic Ordering: The Next Adventure, which followed her first success The Cosmic Ordering Service.
Her motives had never been of a spiritual nature. “Here’s a real-life example: in 1995, I planned to do two things. I wanted to publish a partly spiritual, partly secular magazine, reporting positive news. Although I wanted to do this for my personal enjoyment, I also wanted to earn money,” she relates in the same book.
Here we already have possibly two wrong reasons for venturing into esotericism. For true spiritual knowledge must never be abused simply to make money or fulfil personal desires—this is selfishness, and leads to more selfishness. And selfishness makes you as fit for the spiritual path as someone who would rather break both legs to climb the ‘mountain of achievement’ on his knees—by which one immediately takes oneself out of the ‘race’ or rigs it by ordering a palanquin. Perhaps you will scale the mountain by the latter route, but you won’t be able to breathe…
But Bärbel Mohr never wanted to follow the “spiritual path”. She admits as much upfront: “… In fact, until rather recently, I was a strictly incredulous atheist. My philosophy was a materialistic and mechanistic one.” She couldn’t get on with the Avenger-God of religious teaching—neither can we, incidentally. “I considered reports about miracles to be sheer nonsense until I actually saw repeated examples of them. Then, I began to have experiences myself, that proved unequivocally that I had been mistaken. (…) I have determined that I can talk to invisible forces and receive answers. Even more amazing, I can give up ‘orders’ to these invisible forces and enjoy the manifestation of these wishes in my life. ‘Ah, so it does exist!’ I said to myself, continuing my search for further evidence of this mysterious, invisible power. The Bible did not resonate with me, but many other books of a spiritual bent opened my eyes. From divergent opinions, I only became more inspired, yet I could never look upon someone else’s viewpoint as dogma. Even if a thousand other people accepted a teaching as truth merely because a guru pronounced it so, I needed to filter it through my own experience. Belief is a force that inspires further questing after belief.
“The result of my personal quest—that you can freely discard or put on the shelf to explore at a later time—is as follows: there seems to be a force that creates everything, including humans. (Possibly, however, everyone creates themselves and manages to forget.) In any event, this force seems to have equipped each human being with creative power and a free will—as well as gigantic memory lapses, evidenced by the fact that almost no one recalls his/her origins as a soul.
“I name this invisible authority the Cosmic Ordering Service because it is obviously a force that lies outside our physical reality, and it appears to be at least as large as the entire universe to me. I have discovered a kind of spiritual telephone, through which I can communicate my wishes to this force in the same way that one would order a pair of jeans from a mail-order company. My orders are then ‘delivered’ promptly. And so this is the model that has been created for me. If one sticks to the ‘business conditions’ in childlike innocence, immediately forgetting the order after placing it, yet remaining prepared to answer an ‘unknown phone call’, then this service works extremely well.”
Perhaps you, dear reader, are feeling quite thrilled by Bärbel Mohr’s advice now. And that’s the dangerous thing about it: it appears logical, effortless and, with her lively tone of writing, a paragon of healthy common sense. However—hold on to your hats here—it is a camouflaged form of black magic and you need finely honed powers of discrimination to recognise the pitfalls.
In the first place, you might like to ask how someone can come to call the unseen force that can obviously create humankind not “God” or “the Source” or “the great Unknown” but a “cosmic ordering service” or even ‘universe’, which was obviously the same to Bärbel Mohr. In fact, she acts like an innocent child with thousands of great big wishes. The nature of a child is that it wants to have. And at some point, a person should move from Having to Being—well, those who venture into esotericism in any case. Not so Bärbel Mohr. In an interview with the magazine Allegria in spring 2010, six months before her death, when she had already otherwise withdrawn from public life, she said: “Even little things can be ordered. The question often comes up of whether it’s okay to burden the Universe with little odds and ends, or whether you should just order the big things. In my opinion the connection with ‘up there’ is like a muscle: if you never train it, it relaxes and has to be built up again before you can finally use it. You can train to listen to the inner voice by using small orders. Plus, your little successes give you courage and make you happy—and that’s precisely the right attitude to help make the big things happen.” The magazine promoted Mohr’s books with the sentence “Bärbel Mohr’s wish rules: refreshingly unsaintly, yet highly spiritual”. Highly spiritualist would have expressed it better. Because, fundamentally, the ‘highly spiritual’ guide to ordering from the universe is a well-concealed form of black magic, as mentioned previously. This is also the view of Sergey Nikolayevich Lazarev, whose findings we cite comprehensively in the article How Emotions Form Our Fate. In fact he says in one of his books: “What is witchcraft? It is the exploitation of divine opportunity for selfish goals”. He adds: “Very strong protective processes are activated if the subtle field structures, in which everything is uniform, are penetrated by consumer-oriented and earthly goals. Dpending on the extent of the intrusion, a mechanism is set in motion within the individual, his family or tribe, a group of people and even, in the case of severe injury, humankind in its entirety.” Bärbel Mohr had sold around two million books in 21 languages and appeared repeatedly on German and British television.
Her influence on the “esoterically naïve, whom I want to address in this book in the first place,” as they are called in the Cosmic Ordering Service, is not to be underestimated—just like other authors with the same message: don’t be stupid and toil away for nothing—no, just order whatever your heart desires, because according to Bärbel Mohr, “To be sure, the Universe could not imagine anything better than for YOU to become happy”. Many immediately took this to heart and immediately placed their wish list on the Internet. Such a list might read, for example: “My order for this week: please let our puppy be house-trained by next week. Please let my husband have fun at work and come home in a good mood. Please show me a way to find good part-time work, despite my communication problems. Please let me continue losing weight on the diet and get fit. Please let me find a good house for our family where we all feel at home. Please let me use the car for once on Saturday, as I urgently need tablets for the dog. Thanks very much, dear universe. Love, Olga.”
Of course the universe has nothing better to do than take care of non toilet-trained puppies—ultimately its greatest desire is to make sure we are all wonderfully happy! Marina even went a step further, as recommended in a follow-up book by Bärbel Mohr. Not only does she simply place an order; she also offers thanks before the wish has even come true. This in fact boosts the realisation of the wish: “Dear Universe! Thank you for the wishes that came true. For this week, I would like: my children to make good progress at school and show me this with excellent grades. Tobias to be a better football player. Thank you for the weather I wished for. Thank you for our good team-work at work. Thank you for the profit I will be able to make in October. Thank you for the new car, which will be just perfect for me. Thank you for the beautiful things I am able to experience. I am entitled to be happy, content and rich in all respects. I am entitled to the fulfilment of all these wishes. In love and gratitude, Marina. I love life and life loves me.”
These kinds of letters are available to read in Bärbel Mohr blogs. Her large following gladly shared their wishes and experiences with like-minded devotees, although Bärbel Mohr had admitted in Cosmic Ordering: The Next Adventure that “…I neglected to sufficiently stress one small, but important detail” in the first volume. “It concerns the doubts, which erase all orders, and the closely connected fact that you should in no case ‘count your chickens before they’ve hatched.’”
This is indeed one of the basic prerequisites for a successful precipitation: never express it loudly or tell others what you wish for because otherwise your heart’s dreams will be poisoned by the resentment and doubt of others, or—if it’s a selfless wish—nullified by dark forces. The fact that the wishes of Mohr’s followers were still fulfilled indicates that they were not answered by the divine world, but by ungodly beings in the astral sphere (in earlier times they were called ‘demons’). These beings celebrate when they are able to lead awakening souls down the wrong path—the path to selfishness and selfhood that always leads to greater inner dissatisfaction and thus further away from the divine world. Those well-versed in esoteric matters know that the divine world never, ever releases its valuable energy for selfish, self-centred wishes. It only supports selfless intentions that in some way help life to grow (or survive) on this precious planet. And it is the altruistic service of such people that ensures a backflow of energy that will in turn provide for their true needs without needing to draw up a wish-list! God doesn’t give mankind what it wants, but rather what it needs. And sometimes the worlds that lie between those two are our salvation!
The people caught by the Pied Piper’s seducing tunes followed Bärbel Mohr happily on the path over the edge. Normal wish orders were soon no longer enough. In November 2008 the “turbo wish rocket” landed in the Bärbel Mohr forum. Everything written there was “immediately sent to the Universe by express rocket”. Imagine, if you please, a small rocket with your own wish stuck on it racing at the speed of light into the Universe with an extra instruction (express order)… delivered by express courier! Wow! People joined in, cryptically ordering, for example, “Dear Universe, for tonight in [X] I am ordering lots of good… partners. Thanks!”
Or short and sweet: “Dear Universe, here is an express order. Please quickly send me: LOVE! And 300,000 Euros! You know my address! Please think about it; it’s urgent! I’m very grateful! Thank you, thank you that I can order like this!”