To continue with the New Age: is it a curse or a blessing? Or is it - as I believe it is, a harbinger of something to come?
While elements of New Age thought have always been with us - from the gnostics of the early Christian era to the communitarians of the medieval ages to the schisms of the Reformation to the colonization of America, it really picked up steam during the social upheaval of the 1960's, and it is easy to see why. While social change has always been with us, it was at this point where all authority - ALL - was put to question, and for many, laid to rest. For its persistence and dissemination, we may site advances in communication and travel, the two combining to make the present era a world-wide phenomena where all authority is questioned. This has led many - such as fundamentalist Islamists - to become further entrenched, although by doing so, they alter the fundamental principles of their religion, unwittingly advancing the very sort of fundamental change they wish to deny. Such tottering of old beliefs has opened the door for all manner of idiosyncrasies, which, in sum, has come to be labeled the New Age.
Good or bad? In a New Age way, I would have to say "both" in the short term. Many of the new ideas, for instance, are little more than paranoid tracts of world cabals and sinister plots and alien abductions that do more to highlight our dis-ease with the current era than the un-moving truth. But we also find good, for new doors have been opened for a re-framing of traditional ideas that have very obviously gone stale.
Overriding all, however, is the current lack of center for a vast number of us, something unheard of just a few centuries ago. Recalling the Founding Fathers of America, not one of them questioned the existence of God. Although they did question his/her nature, the idea that life and natural structure could come from nothing was more than ludicrous - it was madness.
Not now, and that is our problem and our opportunity: our problem because many now have no certain idea about the meaning of life and death - that is, of existence itself; our opportunity, because, as stated, something more relevant for our very different human world of the current era may arise.
But think of the negative side: humans, as Kurt Vonnegut cynically put it, have to tell themselves that they understand the reason for our (their) being. Once we did; absorbed in our cultural traditions, we did have the fundamental layout of our inner cosmology. Dante's Divine Comedy illustrates what it was for the West - that life was a test made inevitable through Adams and Eve's fall, that Christ showed us the way back to grace, and that, at death, we would have to undergo the eternal punishment of hell, or the purifying flames of purgatory, before we returned to he Divine Father. Many of us from the Western tradition do not find this adequate any longer, just as many from other cultures - from American Indians to Han Chinese - no longer find the template of their lives in the old traditions. But think what that leaves us with? We have science, that offers us tools, but no one on whom to depend who can tell us what we most need to know: why are we born? What is there for us after death? How did being and thought arise, and for what purpose?
Without answers to these, we run adrift - into "multiculturalism" and extreme relativism. And under such a basic (lack of) belief system, even the most ardent of socially concerned groups will eventually, given several generations, run astray from standard morals and beliefs. How did the monstrosities of many of the old theocracies arise? How did the monstrosities of the atheistic totalitarian states arise? Where there is a vacuum of meaning, meaning will come in - although it might be evil, from any broader standpoint (that is, against life and free will). We must have our answers to the ultimate questions. We are built to have them. With their lack, almost anything will do, for a while.
We are not, however, on the verge of re-installing Baal or a Hitler-like leader, at least not in the countries open to international media. We are,rather, adjusting to cross-cultural awareness and to new technology. Reading the New Age literature, as well as the new voices of the traditional religions, we do not seem to be going astray from fundamental principles - and, against all assurances of the Victorian empiricists, we are not simply packing away spiritual beliefs in the belief that they were silly anachronisms from an ignorant past. Something else is going on: we are finding another path to the same place. In this, we have to keep in mind that social movements, just as much of our personal movements, are not run by conscious reasoning. Rather, a deeper, more intelligent aspect of our collective being is at work. This may be distorted and perverted temporarily by charismatic leaders, but such movements cannot last. We are, as the anthropologist Gregory Bateson put it, whole beings, fully in sync with the natural world, although seldom seen by ourselves as such. What is happening now is a natural movement towards a more effective mode of understanding, of what Religion has always explained - the core of our meaning withing the cosmos. We cannot help but find it, eventually. What that core is has been said many, many times before in many different ways, but what we know it as is encapsulated in the the word "love." Not Hollywood love, but Love, the gleaming essence of the universe. With it, we might burn to ashes or not, but always, in the end, rise again towards it. I do not believe we are in the process of becoming the Sphinx at the moment, but perhaps we are. Regardless, I do believe a new age is coming, and in a relatively short time, on the tail coats of the New Age. FK
While elements of New Age thought have always been with us - from the gnostics of the early Christian era to the communitarians of the medieval ages to the schisms of the Reformation to the colonization of America, it really picked up steam during the social upheaval of the 1960's, and it is easy to see why. While social change has always been with us, it was at this point where all authority - ALL - was put to question, and for many, laid to rest. For its persistence and dissemination, we may site advances in communication and travel, the two combining to make the present era a world-wide phenomena where all authority is questioned. This has led many - such as fundamentalist Islamists - to become further entrenched, although by doing so, they alter the fundamental principles of their religion, unwittingly advancing the very sort of fundamental change they wish to deny. Such tottering of old beliefs has opened the door for all manner of idiosyncrasies, which, in sum, has come to be labeled the New Age.
Good or bad? In a New Age way, I would have to say "both" in the short term. Many of the new ideas, for instance, are little more than paranoid tracts of world cabals and sinister plots and alien abductions that do more to highlight our dis-ease with the current era than the un-moving truth. But we also find good, for new doors have been opened for a re-framing of traditional ideas that have very obviously gone stale.
Overriding all, however, is the current lack of center for a vast number of us, something unheard of just a few centuries ago. Recalling the Founding Fathers of America, not one of them questioned the existence of God. Although they did question his/her nature, the idea that life and natural structure could come from nothing was more than ludicrous - it was madness.
Not now, and that is our problem and our opportunity: our problem because many now have no certain idea about the meaning of life and death - that is, of existence itself; our opportunity, because, as stated, something more relevant for our very different human world of the current era may arise.
But think of the negative side: humans, as Kurt Vonnegut cynically put it, have to tell themselves that they understand the reason for our (their) being. Once we did; absorbed in our cultural traditions, we did have the fundamental layout of our inner cosmology. Dante's Divine Comedy illustrates what it was for the West - that life was a test made inevitable through Adams and Eve's fall, that Christ showed us the way back to grace, and that, at death, we would have to undergo the eternal punishment of hell, or the purifying flames of purgatory, before we returned to he Divine Father. Many of us from the Western tradition do not find this adequate any longer, just as many from other cultures - from American Indians to Han Chinese - no longer find the template of their lives in the old traditions. But think what that leaves us with? We have science, that offers us tools, but no one on whom to depend who can tell us what we most need to know: why are we born? What is there for us after death? How did being and thought arise, and for what purpose?
Without answers to these, we run adrift - into "multiculturalism" and extreme relativism. And under such a basic (lack of) belief system, even the most ardent of socially concerned groups will eventually, given several generations, run astray from standard morals and beliefs. How did the monstrosities of many of the old theocracies arise? How did the monstrosities of the atheistic totalitarian states arise? Where there is a vacuum of meaning, meaning will come in - although it might be evil, from any broader standpoint (that is, against life and free will). We must have our answers to the ultimate questions. We are built to have them. With their lack, almost anything will do, for a while.
We are not, however, on the verge of re-installing Baal or a Hitler-like leader, at least not in the countries open to international media. We are,rather, adjusting to cross-cultural awareness and to new technology. Reading the New Age literature, as well as the new voices of the traditional religions, we do not seem to be going astray from fundamental principles - and, against all assurances of the Victorian empiricists, we are not simply packing away spiritual beliefs in the belief that they were silly anachronisms from an ignorant past. Something else is going on: we are finding another path to the same place. In this, we have to keep in mind that social movements, just as much of our personal movements, are not run by conscious reasoning. Rather, a deeper, more intelligent aspect of our collective being is at work. This may be distorted and perverted temporarily by charismatic leaders, but such movements cannot last. We are, as the anthropologist Gregory Bateson put it, whole beings, fully in sync with the natural world, although seldom seen by ourselves as such. What is happening now is a natural movement towards a more effective mode of understanding, of what Religion has always explained - the core of our meaning withing the cosmos. We cannot help but find it, eventually. What that core is has been said many, many times before in many different ways, but what we know it as is encapsulated in the the word "love." Not Hollywood love, but Love, the gleaming essence of the universe. With it, we might burn to ashes or not, but always, in the end, rise again towards it. I do not believe we are in the process of becoming the Sphinx at the moment, but perhaps we are. Regardless, I do believe a new age is coming, and in a relatively short time, on the tail coats of the New Age. FK
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