Perspectives On the New Age

A Talk by Michael J. Dowling
to the Commonwealth Center for Literary and Cultural Change
University of Virginia
February 8, 1993

John White, author of The Meeting of Science and Spirit, Guidelines for a New Age, says, "something unprecedented and transforming is happening in the world. A higher form of consciousness is emerging: a Great Awakening to Ultimate Reality. Some call it the coming of the Age of Aquarius. Others speak of the consciousness revolution or the human potential movement. Others call it the New Age."

I first became interested in New Age thinking in 1970 when I was in a job crisis. An acquaintance suggested I see a certain astrologer. I was relieved to find she didn't have a black cat and pet spiders. It was reassuring to hear that my life fit into an overall plan. I didn't necessarily believe in astrology, but I was drawn to it because I was looking for some reality beyond this limited physical world.

The astrologer said I would be good at Silva Mind Control. Since she was so complimentary, I figured she must be right. Within a few weeks I enrolled in Silva Mind Control and plunged into the New Age Movement. So began a nine-year immersion.

A New New Ager

Silva Mind Control conducts training in parapsychology (ESP), visualization and positive thinking. It opened up a fascinating new world. I studied mind control for three years, taking both introductory and graduate courses. With varying degrees of accuracy, and one time with accuracy that startled me, I was able to mentally know verifiable information about people whom I had never met. Other Mind Control graduates impressed me with their mental abilities. For example, one meditated on top of a mountain, had a number come to mind, and won $1000 in the state lottery playing that number. Techniques such positive thinking and mental imaging enabled me to succeed in certain endeavors beyond anything I had previously experienced.

After three years Silva Mind Control wasn't enough, and I learned that many people who had taken Mind Control were into EST (Erhard Seminars Training). EST was created in 1971 by Werner Erhard and is a blend of Zen, Gestalt, encounter, Carl Rogers, Scientology, ESP, and a few other things. For $300 I took the two-weekend training. It seemed so worthwhile that I became very active over a six-year period, taking advanced seminars and recruiting other people to do the same. (EST has now changed its name to Landmark Forum).

A goal of the EST training is to "get it," which means attaining the realization that there is nothing more in life to get, that we already have everything we need to be happy. In retrospect, the only realization I have is that I was still searching to fill the emptiness inside. Apparently other EST graduates were still searching along with me, because so many of us were investigating a host of other New Age activities, including Actualizations, Life Spring, and other spin-offs and competitors of EST. (The New Age is aptly named because there is always something new to try.)

My search led me to psychics, astrologers, and Tarot card readers. I attended spiritist meetings where people broke down in tears when the medium, supposedly in contact with their departed loved ones, gave them messages that were so specific and personal that no human could have made them up. I lived in a house with friends practicing the Sufi religion, read the writings of Edger Casey, Paramahansa Yogananda, and a host of other New Age gurus, and studied A Course in Miracles, which was supposedly received psychically from Jesus. I was asked to be business manager of the New Age Journal, a nation-wide publication, and to organize a New Age Fair in Europe, both of which opportunities I declined.

At this point in my life the New Age Movement was exciting and life expanding for a number of reasons:

1. New Age thinking affirmed and demonstrated the spiritual dimension of life. As a boy I had regularly attended Christian churches, but much of the time they seemed lifeless and devoid of power. People often appeared to be going through the motions, sort of a cultural ritual. At the time I would probably have agreed with much of the following statement by John White, again from his book The Meeting of Science and Spirit: "At present Christianity tends to demand blind faith, rote words, and mechanical behavior. This leaves people feeling empty and unfulfilled. But the cosmic calling we humans have will not be denied forever, despite the ignorance of religious institutions which, in effect, prohibit people from direct access to God. The Holy Spirit, the life force, will simply move on to create new forms of religious expression, leaving ruins called churches behind."
   
   I wanted and needed more than the institutional church seemed to offer. The New Age not only breathed life and reality into the miracles and teachings of the Bible, it opened up to me the accumulated wisdom of the eastern religious traditions. I began to view my own previous Christian experience as limited and lifeless.


2. The New Age promoted love and tolerance. I needed more of both, the whole world does, and I began to see how my own opinions and biases could cut me off from enjoying others and experiencing life. A popular New Age saying is that all paths lead to the top of the mountain, and that we each have our own unique path. What is truth for you (or what works for you) may not be truth for me, and therefore we are not in a position to judge one another. At that time I remember thinking that the Orthodox Christians I knew seemed happy and nice enough, but rather narrow-minded, intolerant, and lacking curiosity about the exciting things I was experiencing.


3. The New Age was self-empowering. Florence Graves, editor of New Age magazine says that the heart of New Age thinking is a "belief that we all have the power to effect deep changes — not only in our personal lives but also in the world." A prime teaching of EST, and of much New Age thinking, is that each of us creates our own reality. We are gods. I liked the sense of healthy responsibility and power over my own destiny this perspective gave me. I began to see how often I blamed circumstances or other people for my own failings. Like the characters in Somerset Maughn`s novel The Razor's Edge, I saw that in life I usually got what I really wanted, even though it wasn't always what I thought I wanted. So this new attitude of taking full responsibility for my life created a sense of honesty, maturity and empowerment.


4. New Age philosophy gave me a goal in life. I had worked in the business world and knew materialism wouldn't satisfy my deep longing for meaning in life. The goal the New Age supplied was self-realization, reaching my full human potential. This translated for me into being a better person, unencumbered by fears, prejudices and other human failings. I was told in EST: "You are perfect. There are only barriers to your perfection."
   
   New Age thinking sees sin is an illusion. Good and evil are two sides of the same coin, the yin and yang of life. Our work is to ascend to a higher level of consciousness so that we can truly be who we are. Although this sounded like a formidable challenge, most New Age philosophy teaches that we don't have to do it all at once. We can count on being reincarnated through many lifetimes. So, for perhaps the first time I had a goal for my life, thanks to the New Age.


5. Finally, New Age thinking provided an appealing holistic view of all of life. I would have agreed with this quote by Florence Graves: "We believe the best New Age thinking reflects the age-old yet eminently relevant belief that the health of the individual and that of society are fundamentally interrelated. This holistic world view is in alignment with such down-to-earth subjects as environmentalism, holistic health, women's rights, social responsibility, and personal spirituality." From my psychic experiences I could accept the view that we are all linked together by a mysterious life force, and that perhaps we are linked with our environment as well.

Exciting Attractions

Writers and philosopher/scientists such as Capra, Talbot, and Davies have popularized the notion that new advances in physics support New Age thinking about the design of life. Matter and anti-matter in the physical realm seem to mirror the yin and yang of eastern mysticism and to support the oneness of all things, the unity or complementarity of opposites. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and Einstein's Theory of Relativity seem to demonstrate, among other things, the interdependence of observed and observer, the relativity of time and space, and the ever-evolving nature of reality. The fact that each part of a hologram, no matter how small, can reproduce the whole image when illuminated by laser light seems to parallel the New Age spiritual concept that each of us has all the potential of the universe within us. "The new physics," says Paul Davies, scientist, philosopher and winner of the Templeton Prize for Religion, "offers a surer path to God than religion." Exciting stuff!

Thus, New Age thinking promoted many things that had great appeal to me: enlivened spirituality, an attitude of love and tolerance, personal empowerment and responsibility, a meaningful life goal, and a holistic life-view. I also recognized some of the positive contributions to society the New Age Movement was making in areas such as wellness, nutrition, and ecology.

By now you are probably wondering why I am listed on the flyer for tonight's panel as a "former" New Ager. That's because, in spite of all the appeal and excitement outlined above, I still had a deep longing for personal meaning. I was searching so hard in fact that in one seven week period I participated in two gestalt therapy weekends, followed by a two-week encounter group, followed by a ten day Buddhist meditation retreat.

One night while I was walking alone during the two-week encounter group mention above, I had the first of three experiences that took place over a year and a half. This isn't the place to give the details of those experiences, but I might say they were of the same genre as the conversion experiences of the Apostles Peter and Paul as recorded in the Bible, or the experiences of Augustine and Wesley. Please do not think that I am comparing myself to these great men, or that my experiences were the same. What I am saying is merely that I did not choose these experiences. They were initiated outside of myself.

Fundamental Flaws

Humanly speaking, I did not want to leave the New Age Movement. The attraction was too strong. But after that point I not only did not, I couldnot see the world the same way. So, I sought to blend my New Age thinking with the Christian faith. At first that seemed possible, just as two railroad tracks appear to converge in the distance. But the more I walked those tracks, the farther apart they seemed to get. The two thought systems, which seemed to almost blend in some areas, flatly contradicted each other at a fundamental level.

For example, Matthew 10:34 records Jesus as saying, "Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword." On the other hand, The Course in Miracles has Jesus saying in the first person singular that his disciples misquoted him; that he did not come to bring a sword, but peace and brotherhood. This direct contradiction of the Bible is a remarkable example of the heart of the conflict between New Age thinking and Orthodox Christianity. Did Jesus come to bring peace among all men regardless of their beliefs (at-one-ment), or did he come to bring reconciliation with God for those who put their faith in him alone (atonement)?

To cite just one more of many possible examples, in the Bible I would read passages such as the following from Colossians 1:15-20: "He (Christ) is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood shed on the cross."

Then, in my New Age studies I read totally contradictory passages, such as this one in John White's book, The Meeting of Science and Spirit: "The institutional Christian churches tell us that Jesus was the only Son of God, that he incarnated as a human in order to die on the Cross in a substitutionary act as a penalty for our sins, and thereby save the world. But that is a sad caricature, a pale reflection of the true story. It turns Jesus into a magical fairy-tale hero and Christianity into a cult of personality. As Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out a century ago, Christendom has become a religion about Jesus rather than the religion of Jesus. The religion about Jesus puts him on a pedestal, regards him as Big Daddy in the Sky, and petitions him to be responsible for us. The religion of Jesus calls on every human being to take personal responsibility for growing to that same state of cosmic unity and wholeness which Jesus himself demonstrated. There is no substitute for personal responsibility. Jesus did not save people; he freed them — from the bondage of ego. The significance of incarnation and resurrection is not that Jesus was a human like us, but rather that we are gods like him."

The Limits of Tolerance

The New Age had taught me to be tolerant, but I learned that my tolerance had a limit. I could not both be god and need a savior. The New Age creed that "there are many paths to the top of the mountain" would not tolerate a religion that said in Acts 4:12, "there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved." There came a rather dramatic point in time, a specific hour of a specific day, when I was forced to reject one allegiance for the other. I submitted to Christ, not based on my reason alone or even my choice alone, but on what I would have to call an experience of having my eyes opened.

As I turned away from New Age spirituality, I began to see over time, much to my consternation, that my attraction to the New Age had not been motivated by a pure search for truth and enlightenment on my part as I had thought, but primarily by my own pride and rebellion. I wanted to be powerful, to be perfect, to become god rather than to submit to the authority of God, especially God in human form. This realization was not exactly the kind of self-realization I had been looking for. Instead of finding, I was found out.

I still think the New Age Movement has some truth in it (that's truth with a small "t"), but since I don't believe it is based on ultimate Truth, I see it as dangerously leading people astray. Speaking for myself, I regret the thousands of dollars and the wasted years I spent in New Age endeavors. Even more, I regret my rebellion against God and the lost opportunities to serve Him and other people.

Not So New

It is probably worth noting that there is some question as to whether New Age spirituality is really new at all. Shirley MacLaine in her 1989 best seller Going Within says that there is nothing new about the New Age. "(Ancient) Christian Gnostics operated with New Age knowledge." Elain Pagels won the National Book Critics award in 1979 for her New Age book The Gnostic Gospels. Gnosticism was a form of religion the early Christian church refuted as heresy. It maintained that ignorance, not sin, is what involves people in suffering. Interestingly, Paul was addressing this issue in the early church when he wrote the passage in Colossians that I quoted earlier. A strong case can be made that New Age spirituality is a repackaging of this ancient Gnosticism.

Since the 60`s and 70`s the New Age has emerged from the counter-culture to the mainstream. I am no longer actively engaged in the New Age, but I, like all of us, am profoundly influenced by it every day. It's in the movies we see (Star Wars and many others), on TV (Joseph Campbell's "The Power of Myth" is just one example), and in the music we hear (John Lennon`s Imagine is particularly noteworthy since it speaks of one world with no countries, no religion, no heaven, no hell). The New York Times best-seller lists have included such New Age books as Marianne Williamson's A Return to Love, Principles from the Course in Miracles and Gloria Steinem's Revolution from Within, A Book of Self-Esteem.

New Age thinking profoundly influences the issues that make headlines today: environmentalism, feminism, multiculturalism, political correctness, homosexual rights, abortion rights, and world government. Much of the controversy that we see in our country today over these issues is due to the fundamental differences between the New Age world-view and the Orthodox Christian world-view. When we are all gods and all paths are equally valid, the highest principles become tolerance, appreciation of diversity, self-fulfillment, holistic health, and individual rights.

In Hindsight

Finally, some of you may be wondering how I now view all those experiences that I thought at one time so confirmed my New Age thinking. There's an aphorism attributed to the eastern mystics that says, "when a pickpocket meets a man, all he sees are his pockets." Because as a New Ager I saw the world through New Age eyes, I tended to fit life into that framework. I still believe many of the experiences I had were real, but I have different explanations and value judgements about them now. It's as if the curtain has been pulled back and the Wizard of Oz has been exposed. What I once regarded as wonderful and exciting, I now consider deception.

So, that's my story. If I were still a New Ager, I would say that it's true for me, but it may not be true for others, and that's fine. But as a Christian, I believe it's true to such an extent that I've staked my life on it. As a matter of fact, I believe the essentials of what I have said are true for all of us, whether we realize it or not, and that we all have staked our lives on it, whether we like it or not.