THE NEW AGE MOVEMENT – WHAT IS IT? New Age Series – Part One
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STATEMENT DN050 THE NEW AGE MOVEMENT – WHAT IS IT? New Age series – Part One by Elliot Miller This article first appeared in the Summer 1985 issue of the Forward, currently the Christian Research Journal. For further information or to subscribe to t he Christian Research Journal go to: http://www.equip.org What is the New Age movement? Evidence of a new phase in evolu tion? Harbinger of the Antichrist? A passing fad? A conspiracy myth created by paranoid Christians? Or is it so amorphous and enigmati c that it is impossible to adequately characterize? The question posed by this article’s title has been a live one for Evanglicals over the past few years. Answers have varied widely, including, but not limited to, those given above. Discussions of the top ic have frequently generated a great deal more heat than light. This article hopes to shed some good light on the subject, and in the process provide a Christian evaluation of some New Age teachings and claims. The New Age movement is not impossible to describe, just difficult. It is a complex sociological phenomenon not unlike the proverbial elephant discovered independently by three blind men: one came upon his leg and described him as a tree; another got hold of his trunk and likened him to a hose; the third stumbled onto his tail and insisted he was like a rope. Things that may be true about parts of the New Age movement are not necessarily true of the whole. DEFINING THE NEW AGE MOVEMENT The New Age movement is best understood as a network — or, to be more exact, a metanetwork (network of networks). What is a network? According to New Agers Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps (who have provided a useful analysis in their book Networking), a network is an informal, loosely knit type of organization ver y different from other types of organizations: “Networks are composed of self-reliant and autonomous participants — people and organizations who simultaneously function as independent ‘wholes’ and as interdependent ‘parts’.” 1 Networks are “spontaneously created by people to address problems and offer possibilities primarily outside of established institutions”2 There are many different levels of networking, so that one network can exist within a larger network, which in turn can exist within a still larger one (i.e., a metanetwork). The borderlines of networks are characteristically fuzzy, “frustrating outside observers determined to figure out where a network begins and ends.” 3 Networks tend to be decentralized, often having no single leader or headquarters, and with power and responsibility widely distributed. Bearing in mind my suggestion that the New Age movement is a network, one more characteristic of networks needs to be noted: Like the fly whose “one” eye comprises thousands of individual eyes, net works “see” through many perspectives, although the unknowing observer may think they have only one point of view. At times, a network seems to “see” with one eye and “speak” with one voice, testifying to consensus around an idea or a strategy. Such moments of unanimity are important, because they often reveal the essential common values and bonds that explain the unity among the diversity of network viewpoints. At other times, a network may appear to be a babble of disconnected concerns and interests, or an arena of internecine warfare. (Anthropologist Virginia) Hine calls this trait “the ‘fission-fusion’ characteristic that confuses observers and leads the CRI, P.O. Box 8500, Charlotte, NC 28271 Phone (704) 887-8200 and Fax (704) 887-8299 1 bureaucratically-minded to see networks as ‘lacking’ in organization.” Networks not only tend to pu t up with disagreement, in many ways they depend upon it. The forthright independence of the members keeps the network as a whole from being dominated by any single node. Hine writes that while it is a shared vision that keeps a network together; “it is th e conflicting concepts of goals-means that prevent any one segment from taking permanent control over all the others”... …The many perspectives of a network derive from the autonomy of its members. All have their own turf and agendas, yet they cooperate in the network because they also have some common values and visions. 4 The New Age movement, then, is an extremely large, loosely structured network of organizations and individuals bound together by common values (based in mysticism and monism—the world view that “all is one”) and a common vision (a coming “new age” of peace and mass enlightenment, the “Age of Aquarius”). New Agers may differ over such questions as when the New Age begins, whether it will be preceded by a worldwide cataclysm, how it will be politically structured, whether there will be a Christ-figure governing it, or who the true avatars (god-men) or messengers from the spirit world are (if there are any). Nonetheless, they agree that they can hasten the new order that they all await by cooperating to influence developments in our culture’s political, economic, social, and spiritual life. Within the New Age metanetwork and movement are hundreds of smaller (but still sometimes very large) networks and movements encompassing a wide variety of interests and causes (all compatible with the ends of the larger network). The consciousness movement, the holistic health movement, the human potential movement, all have contributed generously to the New Age movement, as have the followers of many Eastern gurus and Western occult teachers. However, participation in one of these movements does not always indicate conscious or actual participation in the New Age movement (remember that networks have fuzzy borderlines). Nor do all Eastern/gnostic movemen ts believe in a coming new age, or participate in the networking process (such groups, like the Hare Krishnas and Christian Science, should really not be considered a part of the New Age movement, in spite of the many beliefs they hold in common with it). Additionally, such movements/networks as ecology, “appropriate technology” the “peace movement’ and future studies overlap the New Age network to varying degrees, though they are by no means entirely encompassed within it. The New Age movement is not a cult by any accepted sociological definition of the term. Although there are several cults which could be classified within it (for example, the Rajneeshees, Transcendental Meditation, and the Divine Light Mission), most are on the movement’s periphery. Some, like the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness (MISA) and the Sufi Order in the West, are more in its mainstream, but only because they are less exclusive, and their leadership less authoritarian than most cults. Cult membership is by far the exception, and not the rule, for New Agers. New Agers tend to be eclectic: they draw what they think is the best from many sources. Long -term, exclusive devotion to a single teaching, teacher, or technique is not the norm. They move from one approach to “wholeness ” to another in their spiritual journeys (firewalking as a means to “personal transformation” is the latest sensation!). New Age Journal observes: ...the many issues of the new consciousness are like peanuts: you can’t eat just one. The stockbroker, for e xample, who began dabbling in alternative body therapies ten years ago has quite probably gone on to the likes of meditation or the ecology movement of Zen studies by now, and no doubt he notices the aperture in his personal cosmic egg getting wider all th e time.5 Basic Beliefs This eclectic tendency underscores the fact that New Agers consider spirituality much more a matter of experience than belief. Any teaching or technique that facilitates experience is welcome, but there is most often no loyalty to a rigid, elaborate system of belief. Are there any beliefs that are universal, or almost universal, among New Agers? Some of them would answer “no” (in fact, beliefs are often portrayed as direct impediments to enlightenment). 6 However, certain assumptions cannot be separated from New Age thinking, or it would no longer be New Age thinking. As noted earlier, all New Agers believe that “all is one”— everything that exists composes one essential reality. A second assumption is that this Ultimate Reality is neither dead matter nor unconscious energy. It is Being, Awareness, and Bliss (which is to say, a Hindu conception of God as an impersonal, infinite consciousness and power). The first two assumptions imply two more: all that is, is God (which is pantheis m); and man, a part of “all that is” is likewise divine. But how do New Agers answer the inescapable fact that most people don’t at all feel one with God? CRI, P.O. Box 8500, Charlotte, NC 28271 Phone (704) 887-8200 and Fax (704) 887-8299 2 In agreement with all pantheists, New Agers explain that man is separated from God only in his own consciousness. He is the victim of a false sense of separate identity which blinds him to his essential unity with God, and this is the cause of all his problems. How then can man be saved (or made whole, as New Agers would prefer to put it)? It becomes a m atter of spiritual technology. New Agers believe that any or all of a variety of techniques for altering the consciousness (including meditation, chanting, ecstatic dancing, and sensory deprivation) can enable the seeker to consciously (mystically) experience his supposed oneness with God. Thus, salvation for the New Ager is equated with gnosis (experiential knowledge). It is Self-realization or the realization that one’s true Self is God. Such mystical experiences are viewed as doorways to “personal trans formation,” a lifelong growth process marked by increasing wholeness and personal power.