Preview of the New
Age
Daunting!
That was the word for the giant jigsaw puzzle chosen one holiday from the jam-packed game cupboard in our Forest Falls mountain cabin. Not only did there seem to be a jillion pieces, but they all looked alike, except the few that formed the border. And they were so tiny. We despaired of ever piecing the monstrosity together.
So there it sat. A rough outline of two edges, a couple of clusters of interlocking pieces in the center, and a jumble of unmatching squiggly shapes heaped to the side.
Months passed. The puzzle was carefully transferred onto a large board, moved from the living room to the upstairs back bedroom, and perched atop a fiberboard packing barrel. Now and then, when they were bored, one or another of the kids would wander in and fit in a piece or two. We began to wonder if half the parts had been lost or if someone had mixed in pieces from some other game, for the puzzle seemed to be fighting to preserve its anonymity.
But gradually — piece by piece over many months — the jigsaw finally made "sense." A coherent whole began to take shape.
When, in the summer of 1987, I first contemplated writing a book that would make sense of the amorphous New Age movement, it also seemed a daunting task. So many bits and
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pieces. Uncertain borders. Shifting spheres of activity. And a revolving cast of characters.
Of all the writing projects I have undertaken during my twenty-five-plus years as a journalist covering religion, this subject has been one of the most formidable — and the most fascinating. Many of the organizations and individuals I have followed through the years seemed to reemerge. Some of the history of philosophy and patterns of thought I had studied long before in theological schools in Edinburgh and Princeton took on new perspective. Yet much of my research particularly on the human mind and quantum mechanics, covered territory I had seldom charted before.
Eventually, a profile of the New Age began to emerge, like the recalcitrant jigsaw puzzle. "There is a picture here, even with some detail and color," I kept saying to myself.
Indeed, I soon discovered that much had already been written on the subject, and I have referred to these sources liberally. Also, I met experts whose knowledge of the New Age far exceeded my own. Dozens of them were willing to share information and insights as we talked in person and by telephone.
One conversation particularly stands out: November 24, 1987, in Berkeley, California, with Brooks Alexander. This gray-bearded, owlish-eyed, cap-wearing, researcher-author is an articulate spokesman for the Spiritual Counterfeits Project, an organization that thoroughly examines and critiques America's new religious and spiritual groups and their leaders. He is also a consummate authority on the New Age.
"You can do one of two things," Brooks cautioned me when he learned the scope of my project. "You can either keep up with the New Age movement, or you can write about it — but not both."
I soon learned how right he was. New Age in the late 1980s was on the move. In newsbiz we call it "hot."
The media and publishers, responding to interest as well as creating it, have swarmed to print, film, and televise profuse accounts of trance channeling (the new version of spirit mediumship); healing with crystals; reincarnation; out-of-body experiences; altered states of consciousness; meditation techniques; UFO abductions; and the intuitive powers of the brain's right hemisphere.
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Meanwhile, Shirley MacLaine, the bubbly dancer-actress-author turned New Age gourmet, became the number one news magnet for mysticism's latest incarnation. Her bestselling books and television miniseries (Out on a Limb) turned the movement into a fad.
For all its faddishness, however, the New Age is hard to define; its boundaries are fuzzy. It's a shifting kaleidoscope of "beliefs, fads and rituals," as TIME magazine duly noted in its December 7, 1987, cover story, "New Age Harmonies."
New Age is a hybrid mix of spiritual, social, and political forces, and it encompasses sociology, theology, and the physical sciences, medicine, anthropology, history, the human potentials movement, sports, and science fiction.
New Age is not a sect or cult, per se. There is no organization one must join, no creed one must confess. Identifying individuals as "full-blown" New Agers is baffling. Some subscribe to certain portions of New Age, some to others; some dissociate themselves from the movement altogether, though they embrace core aspects of its thinking.
The New Age influence touches virtually every area of life, and thousands of New Age activists seek to transform society through New Age precepts. Millions more have adopted the movement's view of reality, though they may simply think of it as a pragmatic, humanistic philosophy of life.
Although "new" in style and vocabulary, the movement is in many ways as old as the Eastern religions of Hinduism and Buddhism, Western occultism, and the mystical oracles of ancient Greece and Egypt. New Age has simply recast the theory of reincarnation into the language of Western humanistic psychology, science, and technology.
The multiple tracks of the New Age movement also trace to free-based versions of Abraham Maslow's "self-actualization" and the fundamental optimism of the 1960s, while the imprints of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Transcendental Meditation and Werner Erhard's "est" are also apparent.
I have taken a journalistic approach to putting the New Age puzzle together and have tried to be fair and balanced throughout. In my opinion, the New Age — insofar as one can corral this moving, many-sided, cultural transformation — is neither the hellish conspiracy that fundamentalist critics charge, nor the utopian bliss its fondest supporters imagine.
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Rather, the insidious danger of the New Age is its view of the nature of reality, which admits to no absolutes. History provides evidence that relative standards of morality breed chaos and — ultimately — the downfall of society. However, these are conclusions reached only after a careful look at New Age strengths and weaknesses, stabilities and follies.
Understanding the New Age is my attempt to slice the New Age movement at a point in time, even as events have continued to move ahead.
Remember, "New Age" is an umbrella term. A precise definition is a chimera. But broad lines of commonality form a pattern, and for me, at least, the big New Age picture-puzzle has come together. I hope it will for you.
By the way, we never did complete that jigsaw puzzle at our mountain home. But then, there really was no mystery about what the finished product would look like. The picture was printed on the outside of the box.
Besides, there was little incentive to complete the game. The puzzle depicted the front page of the New York Times. For a Los Angeles Times writer to give such expression to a chief rival would have seemed an act of treason.
