When the New Age Gets Old: Looking for a Greater Spirituality © Vishal Mangalwadi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to my friends in the international L'Abri 'family' who continue to help shape my thinking, as reflected in this book. I would not have had the confidence to undertake this project if Ruth Bradby had not provided the initial practical support in research and Juliet Newport and Dave Adams the initial enthusiasm. Dana and Judy Crider, along with their children, sacrificed their computer for months and also allowed me to invade their weekends when I needed to learn how to use it. Joy Caton and Christian Szurko in England, Chris Ramsay and Annetta Whitley in the USA, and Georg Pfliiger in Germany provided the practical support structure that I needed for collecting research material, travels, etc. The support and sustaining structure in India was provided by my friends in the Himalayan L'Abri Resource Centre, including Joe and Marietta Smith, David Hope, and Jose Matthews, and also by various staff members at the Woodstock School, especially John Mihevc and Hugh Bradby. Hugh helped edit some of the chapters and made it possible for my wife Ruth to work at the school, thereby easing the financial pressures at home. I am grateful for friends who were willing to read various chapters and to help and encourage - Dr Lawrance Osborn, Brian Austin, Dr Peter Deutschmann, Dr Raju Abraham, Stan Rubesh, Joseph Suozzo, Willy Barton and others. Without the financial support of Deo Gloria Outreach, Howard Ahmanson, South Asia Concern, India Groundwork Trust, Stan and Marilyn Reuter, Doug and Beth Heimburger and others, it would have been impossible for me to travel for research, and for our family to survive with a husband and father who does not earn! This is my fourth book in English. But because I have continued to give priority to my work as a social-political activist, I still have not learned to write a page of English without making a few mistakes. Earlier Ruth used to help, now my daughters Nivedit and Anandit have become eager helpers. They hope that I will write more. Ruth wishes that I will become a 'normal' person again - not disturbing her sleep night after night, for months on end. Needless to say, Ruth, Nivedit and Anandit provide much more than an emotional and practical support structure, which helps me to grow and continue to find myself as an author and as a person. They have served as my primary spiritual support structure, to help me grow in my knowledge of God. AUTHOR'S PREFACE The New Age dawned in our generation in the West - in California - and moved east to Europe and Asia. The established order was reversed. The material universe ceased to be the ultimate reality, people began to seek the spiritual, mystical, occultic, extra-terrestrial reality. Faith in 'intuition' or 'revelation', channelled by spiritual entities, replaced the earlier 'modern' faith in human reason. Historians ceased being important, for people could recall, if not actually relive, their past lives with the help of hypnotists or acupuncture needles. Counsellors and futurologists were replaced by astrologers as more reliable interpreters of the present and guides for the future. The New Age of environmentalism taught powerfully that the world was not made for man, but man for the world. It claimed that the technological and nuclear powers of the passing masculine age were destructive, while the psychic and sexual energies of the coming feminine age would be potent remedies for human and environmental crises. This was because the human self was no longer viewed as an animal or a machine, but as the divinity itself. In Search of Self is a sympathetic yet critical study of the New Age world-view. It accepts the New Age's rejection of the old 'secular, materialistic, rationalistic' age as both untrue and harmful. Yet it is not convinced that what is called 'the New Age spirituality' is the answer. Therefore it keeps comparing the New Age answers with the biblical world-view (not necessarily the same as contemporary Christianity), which it claims to be a viable alternative. This book aims not merely to inform, but to stimulate vigorous reflection, to help the reader to separate the grain from the chaff, to make intelligent choices. Vishal Mangalwadi PROLOGUE : SUE'S SEARCH FOR FREEDOM Matteya had evolved so much into the image of his deity Shivs that it seemed as if, had he opened his third eye, he could have burned Sue to ashes. His looks were fierce. His language was filthy and abusive. Sue, in contrast, was calm and confident, though sad. As I stood near the Theosophical bookstand at the Festival of Mind, Body and Spirit and watched the two argue, I felt there was pathos in Sue's firm but gentle assertion that Matteya should not have made Sue's girlfriend pregnant and then walked out on her. Strolling outside the Royal Horticultural Halls in London, where the Festival was taking place, Sue then told me how George, her boyfriend, had walked out on her when their daughter Linda was only two years old. Being both a mother and father to a darling 'terrible two' had visibly damaged Sue's feminine grace. She looked exhausted. Having been a champion of freedom for so long, she hated herself for being a disciplinarian now. But there seemed no other way to parent Linda alone. Sue would never consider infanticide - sacrificing Linda to the Goddess to preserve her own sanity and freedom, in the hope that Linda would be reborn under more favourable circumstances. Yet she felt strongly that abortion was a better option for her girlfriend than being a single-parent family. And singleness was better than being married to a Shiva-worshipper like Matteya. Sue hated to see Matteya doing to her girlfriend exactly what George had done to her. Her only source of comfort was her knowledge that Matteya was not only hurting her friend, but also destroying himself. A similar lifestyle had destroyed George too. Not too long ago, Sue had admired George for his crusade to see a global government set up to ensure a nuclear-free world. Such a government could efficiently sort out the international economic injustices and care for Mother Earth holistically instead of splitting her into artificial political boundaries. Now George had no cause left to fight for, except to champion the rights of AIDS patients. When all his attempts at loving heterosexual relationships failed, he had come to believe that he must 'love' everybody, not just one woman. He became gay and was soon infected with the' HIV virus. Matteya appeared to be going further than George. Along with a few other sannyasins he was a devoted worshipper of Shiva - the male counterpart of the goddess Shakti. They indulged in phallic worship of the Shivalinga to increase their sexual potency and to have mystical experiences, and in occultic rites to gain magical powers to open their third eye like Shiva, who could destroy the world with the eye. Sue blamed Christianity not only for her own wounds, but for the earth's ills as well. If only the 'Father God' of Christianity had not succeeded in destroying the Golden Age when humankind worshipped Mother Earth, perhaps today we would be facing neither ecological disaster nor the myriad ailments that have resulted from our lack of understanding of nature and our disharmony with it. If only we could learn again to flow with nature instead of struggling against it, what health and happiness we could regain - if not paradise itself. Having given up physics at university, and having travelled around the world, Sue was now considering a career in alternative medicine. There was no question of her going to work in a factory, a big office or a corporate business where she would be turned into a non-person in exchange for money, security and promotion. She wanted a profession which preserved her freedom and identity. On her extended travels in India, Sue had encountered the late Osho Rajneesh. She loved him and admired his inner strength to free humankind from the moral shackles imposed by religion. But what Osho's followers such as George and Matteya had done to others and to themselves in the name of freedom was too costly. For a time, therefore, Sue was attracted to the discipline and asceticism of the Hare Krishna movement. But their vicious attacks on other groups who were sincerely trying to usher in the New Age of harmony, reconciliation and peace convinced her that no group claiming a monopoly on the truth could possibly help bring in the Golden Age. Therefore Sue, an attractive young woman of twenty seven, was already getting tired of life. She had largely given up her earlier attempts to create a new world through meditation and psycho-technologies. In fact at present she was not even seeking to become God. Her more immediate goal was to find her soul mate - irrespective of what sex this mate was. The astrologers and channellers she had consulted before going to Egypt had said that she would see her soul mate there. Even if she had met him/her, she felt neither had recognised the other. So she had begun to distrust astrologers for no fault of their own. Now she was more inclined towards trusting her own dreams and inner self than spirit guides and gurus. Nor could she fully understand why people should contact spirits when they were God themselves. A string of unhappy relationships with idealistic men, utopian gurus, spirit guides and exclusive sects had made Sue a little unsure if a New Age had indeed dawned.