Is The New Age Relevant Today?

Walk into any home today and you are almost certain to find something which has been purchased from a New Age outlet. Crystals are of course everywhere. The Buddha himself may appear in the home office, looking well-fed and smiling as he does duty as a paperweight or mantelpiece decoration. Wind chimes may mark the entrance to a room or may be heard jangling merrily in the garden. The design of either the house or garden may well have been inspired by the supposed minimalist principles of Zen Buddhism. You won't have to sniff too hard to catch the heady aroma of incense from the mysterious Orient. And if you look carefully you might even find a crystal ball or two. In one well-known UK charity shop I have even seen crystal balls stacked up next to the cash register in much the same way as supermarkets display shelves of sweets and chewing gum in the area where you line up to pay for your groceries, cleverly taking advantage of those last minute impulse buys ("Oh, I'll just take one of those crystal balls before I leave!).

Never Fear!

Look through the phone directory and you will see hordes of jobbing alternative practitioners. Aromatherapists, Reiki experts, Shiatsu (no, it isn't a little dog!) and any number of other self-certificated experts all clamouring to have a go at curing your bad back or saving your rocky relationship.

Should you lose your appointment book, never fear! Find out what the future has in store by consulting someone who will (for a fee) read your Tarot cards, your palms, tea leaves or probably with a little persuasion (or an extra fee!) the contents of your trash can.

Doctors are yesterday's news. Better to call a hypnotherapist, colour therapist, graphologist or numerologist who can at one and the same time (for a fee) tell you all about your past, your future - and whether you even have a future.

Expensive

When you wish to relax at the end of a hard day you can play special relaxation tapes of whales, waves breaking on the shore or Australian aborigine didgeridoo music. Your home will of course have been designed down to the smallest detail by a knowledgeable, highly-trained and very expensive Feng Shui consultant who probably charges more than your lawyer! Has the world gone mad???

All of the aforementioned distractions and more fit neatly into the loose category of New Age. A lot of people are very serious about New Age interests and contrary to what you may think, I would be the last to want to trivialise their beliefs. Whatever works for them is fine by me. Except for one thing. New Age practices have become so heavily commercialized that the original spiritual components have pretty well lost their integrity by now and, in the West at least, are little more than products and services in a very competitive market.

Ever since Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophists (the forerunners of the modern New Age Movement) signed their exclusive channeling deal with the so-called Ascended Masters back in the nineteenth century, religious and spiritual beliefs have been borrowed haphazardly from any number of world religions. Beliefs have been ripped out of their natural environmental and historical context. Ever since, those beliefs have been blatantly sold to a spiritually vulnerable public that has a big fat disposable income and could not wait to spend it.

And if you still think New Age isn't over-commercialized, consider the case of the trance channeler who trademarked her spirit guide!

Native American

What the New Age movement has managed to do is turn Tarot cards (which have a history going back hundreds of years) into a divinatory version of Happy Families. Feng Shui has been turned into a fashionably expensive way of choosing the wallpaper. And the highly respected Jewish Kabala has become the latest trendy esoteric religion. All the difficult bits have of course been neatly stripped away in order to make it more easily digestible by the New Age fraternity. Meanwhile, generations of Native American wisdom has been repackaged and is now sold as "The Inspirational Thought for the Day". Many Native American tribes are of course no longer to be found.

The dream has gone. All that is left is the dreamcatcher.

There is nothing particularly wrong with getting in touch with your own spiritual roots. Similarly, there is nothing wrong with having a symbiotic connection with the spiritual roots of other people and cultures.

As far as I am aware, there is no artificial New Age movement in the poor villages of Africa. But maybe there is no readily available market for it. Maybe there is no money waiting to welcome it in. Doubtless there is lots of money to be made (probably already being made) not from selling to less affluent countries, but rather in buying artefacts from them (at an advantageous rate of course) and reselling them at a good profit to New Age adherents in the West, thereby perpetuating the myth of the relevance of the New Age movement today.

Mythology

It's time to take a bold step. Leave behind the artificial trappings of the New Age Movement. Find out about the mythology of your own part of the world. Construct your own beliefs or belief system that is relevant to here and now. Do not fool yourself into thinking that you have a valid belief system, when all you have is either a credo that cost you $5.95 or a Feng Shui bill that will turn the neighbours green with envy and make your accountant go white with fear.

If that is all you have, admit it. If it's badges you want why not say so? If it's beliefs you seek, then look elsewhere.

What we really need to do is to stop worshipping at shop windows and to get away from the notion that the ring of a cash register equals divine revelation. And above all we need to learn to trust ourselves again rather than always feeling a need to follow other people's paths. Our belief systems ought to evolve organically and naturally rather than having to be constructed, like Frankenstein's monster, from the leftover bits and pieces of everybody else's.

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