Education, Music, and
Art
Spinning Inward, a handbook by Maureen Murdock, tells teachers and parents how to use guided imagery to enhance children's imagination, learning, and creativity. The title is an apt description of the New Age focus in education and the arts. From learning theories and classroom techniques, to the new breed of electronic and acoustic sounds, to visionary paintings and spiraling architectural design, New Age looks inward — and Eastward.
Children's-book buyer Tim Campbell at Book People in Austin, Texas, says he goes out of his way to find New Age books "that tell kids you can take control of your life." Most of these titles are aimed at first to third graders. And along with an ongoing fascination with Eastern spirituality, Campbell sees a resurgence of interest in Native American literature.1
Parenting in the New Age "becomes a spiritual journey taken by parent and child, one teaching the other in reciprocal agreement," says Harriette Davis, a trance therapist teacher in North Hollywood, California, who conducts Rainbow Bridge workshops for parents and children who may have "trouble integrating on this Earth plane." The classes, which include "past life regression" and "psychic awareness," tap into the normal frustrations and guilt often produced by parenting responsibilities.
Children in the Los Angeles School System have been taught to imagine they are one with the sun's rays. In doing
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so, they are told, they are a part of God, "they are one with Him."2
Overt New Age educational philosophy has made sporadic advances into public schools, with an accent in California and parts of Colorado. The wider arena of what is known as "values clarification," which teaches children to discover and clarify their own values rather than having them imposed by outside authority, is compatible with New Age thinking on "confluent education." This New Age theory posits the equality of individual values because everyone has the wisdom of the universe within. Or, as Shirley MacLaine puts it: "We already know everything. The knowingness of our divinity is the highest intelligence."
The chief architect of confluent education, the late Beverly Galyean, described it as a holistic approach using thinking, the five senses, feeling, and intuition.
In an interview with religion researcher Frances Adeney in 1980, Galyean summed up her beliefs: "Once we begin to see that we are all God, that we all have the attributes of God, then I think the whole purpose of human life is to reown the Godlikeness within us; the perfect love, the perfect wisdom, the perfect understanding, the perfect intelligence, and when we do that, we create back to that old, that essential oneness which is consciousness."3
Galyean developed three federally funded education programs for the Los Angeles Public Schools — using guided imagery and meditation. In the early 1980s, the similarly New Age-oriented Project GOAL (Guidance Opportunities for Affective Learning) was developed with federal and state funds to help handicapped children in Irvine, California, as well as nonhandicapped students in fifty-four school districts.4
Marilyn Ferguson approvingly notes such "subtle forces" as work in education:
For example, tens of thousands of classroom teachers, educational consultants and psychologists, counselors, administrators, researchers, and faculty members in colleges of education have been among the millions engaged in personal transformation. They have . . . begun to link regionally and nationally, to share strategies, to conspire for the teaching of all they most value: freedom, high expectations, awareness, patterns,
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connections, creativity . . . . Even a tiny minority of committed teachers, counselors and administrators can set off seismic shocks with programs that work.5
Complaining that American educational institutions have limited and fragmented students and the learning process — "relentlessly turning wholes into parts" — Ferguson identifies a malaise that has exasperated many educators: "Whereas the young need some sort of initiation into an uncertain world, we give them the bones from the culture's graveyard. Where they want to do real things, we give them abstract busywork, blank space to fill in with the 'right' answers. Where they need to find meaning, the schools ask memorization; discipline is divorced from intuition, pattern from parts."6
But the times are a-changing in the teaching of the traditional "three Rs." Pat Boerger, an instruction consultant in the Los Angeles City Schools, says that visualization "is becoming a big part of critical thinking. In relationship to problem solving, it is essential and is just now beginning to impact our schools. Children are taught to visualize alternatives that are the most reasonable for a given problem situation. Reasoning needs to come before the math problem, or the language session . . . [With visualization techniques] children begin to see the broad implications of an answer, not just a narrow, 'fill-in-the-blank' approach."7
And now a New Age curriculum is abroad in the land of higher education — a curriculum that takes altered states of consciousness and human qualities of transcendence seriously. For example, Citrus Community College in Glendora, California, has given credit for self-hypnosis classes and parapsychology courses that teach about ESP, telepathy, clairvoyance, how to see and interpret auras, how to recognize out-of-body experience, and how to harness the secrets of spoon-bending through psychokinesis.8
Sexual counseling derived from Tantric and Taoist practices is offered at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco through a class designed to meet the human sexuality requirement for the California psychology license.
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The school is accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges and grants a Ph.D. in psychology and a master's in anthropology, philosophy, and religion. The institute's weekend workshops have included "Ethnobotany and Shamanism: Psychedelics Before and After History" and "Towards a Psychological Archaeology and the Forgotten Nose."9
Other alternative-style universities in the San Francisco Bay area alone include the Rosebridge Graduate School of Integrative Psychology (the Ph.D. combines "western psychology with the wisdom of the body, mind and spirit of the East"); Antioch University (M.A. in Somatic Psychology and Education, which covers "bioenergetics, primal therapy, gestalt, various forms of Reichian therapy and a host of lesser known modalities"); and John F. Kennedy University (master's programs in psychology, holistic health, and arts and consciousness, promoted as "The graduate school for the study of human consciousness . . . . Come home to the whole of yourself").
Although in 1977 a federal court declared Transcendental Meditation — introduced into New Jersey public schools in 1975 with government funds — to be a violation of church-state separation because of its Hindu undertones, meditating on the Inner Self, often in conjunction with yoga, is taught at some state universities.
According to New Age leaders, however, what is taught at the university level now needs to filter down to the elementary classroom and kindergarten — and even to "mother's knee."
"We have to realize once and for all that there is no separation between the sacred and the secular, so it will be natural for our children to assume this," says educator Gay Luce, who has been a consultant to the National Institute of Mental Health and the President's Scientific Advisory Committee. She adds that she fully expects meditation techniques involving "the body's energy chakras" to be taught in kindergarten soon.10
In his award-winning essay, "A Religion for a New Age," John Dunphy declared: "I am convinced that the battle for humankind's future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their
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role as the proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity that recognizes and respects the spark of what theologians call divinity in every human being."11
Sights and Sounds
New Age education is getting help from films, television, and popular music.
In the movie The Dark Crystal, produced by the Muppets' creator Jim Henson, good and evil are transcended and cosmic unity returns after a lost shard once split off from the magic crystal is restored. The lovable Mystics do not win over the evil Skecsees, but the two fuse into one group; ultimate reality is beyond good and evil, writer Douglas Groothuis says of the plot.12
New Age music also transmits values and transports souls into a kind of cosmic connectedness, proponents say, while at the same time uniquely touching spontaneous chords in individuals. Largely instrumental, this music is unstructured and circular in form, with a blurring of tones; often there is no ending or resolution to the melody.
Critics call it "yuppie Muzak," "aural wallpaper," and "audio valium." Those who like it say it echoes the ambience of natural environments, helps them relax and meditate, or elicits a joy that energizes and brightens them.
Whatever else it is, New Age music is diverse, part of a complex cultural trend, and appeals to a growing cross-section of Americans that extends far beyond the core of identifiable New Agers. It includes the sounds of plant vibrations, animal and nature noises, Celtic harps, gourd-shaped sitars, tunable tabla drums, drone-generating tambouras, and digital synthesizers. It can even be produced by a sheet of steel balanced on a balloon submerged in water.13
New Age music is also a hot industry. Windham Hill, whose serene, introspective recordings first sold in health food stores in the 1970s, had parlayed an initial $300 investment into more than $35 million in sales during 1987.14 The Palo Alto, California-based company also cut the first New Age record ever to go platinum (George Winston's
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classic December) and created a special division to license New Age music for use by advertisers.
New Age sounds can be heard on several nationally syndicated radio programs. "Music from the Hearts of Space," which signed up forty stations during the summer of 1986, was reaching more than two hundred public stations by early 1988.15
But is New Age music really new? Some commentators, like former Journal editors Peggy Taylor and Rick Ingrasci, trace its emergence to the late 1960s and early 1970s with recordings such as Paul Horn's solo flute album "Inside the Taj Mahal" and Brian Eno's minimalist electronic "Music for Airports."
"As the genre emerged it was generally restricted to meditative, ambient music . . . . [T]he idea caught on, and a growing number of listeners began using the better-quality recordings to create a peaceful, introspective atmosphere for reading, massage, relaxation or meditation."16
By the time it had become a bona fide marketing category, New Age music had broadened to include everything from the blending of polyrhythmic ragas from the East with contemporary rock rhythms from the West, to pastoral, impressionistic New Age chamber concerts. And then there are eerie tribal sounds and "Earth music," produced on ancient instruments. New Age music artist Elisabeth Waldo of Northridge, California, for example, has a collection that includes llama bone flutes, ceramic whistles, fruit shell rattles, and two rasps fashioned from human bones.17
Beethoven once noted that "music is the mediator between the life of the senses and the life of the spirit." This seems particularly apt in regard to New Age music. For while there is nothing overtly theological about it, many New Age music superstars (such as Japanese synthesist-composer Mansanori Takahashi) consider their music to be part of their spiritual path and a means to express New Age values and to shape culture.
Not everyone is moved by New Age music, of course; some find it tedious and boring and the victim of cheap imitations. Iconoclastic rock musician Frank Zappa objects to New Age music being promoted as therapy. "As far as I'm concerned," he says, "music has better things to do than find one drone
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chord to help you achieve your mantra. If it's therapy, let's not call it music"18
Indeed, meditational / space musicians like Steve Halpern have collaborated with physicians and music therapists to create stress-reduction music designed to help people cope with sickness or face terminal disease. Hospitals throughout the country use Halpern's series of "Anti-Frantic Alternative" tapes.
"Who knows," quipped Pamela Bloom, a contributing editor to High Fidelity magazine. "Before too long, your yearly check-up might turn out to be a tune-up."19
Iasos Inter-Dimensional Music, creator of "angelic music," claims that its Angels of Comfort record was selected at a conference of persons involved in "near-death experiences" to be the music most similar to the "heavenly music" they heard while "on the other side." Many said that's what they would like to be hearing when they make the "transition known as death."20
Some ethereal music, like that of Emmy Award-winning Emerald Web artists Bob Stohl and Kat Epple, is packaged in video albums, combining the sounds and sights of New Age. The latter include moving mandalas (visual symbols used as meditation aids), swirling lasers, and electro-kinetic abstract images.
Visions and Visionaries
New Age has also influenced the visual arts. For example, computer-generated art, including "Fractal Fairy Tales," simulating the branching, twisting organic shapes found in nature, is a popular New Age art genre.
"These mathematically inspired pieces of art, with their fine detail and dazzling colors, reveal the richness and complexity that are hidden in even the most elementary equations," says Bruce Schechter, suggesting that the border between art and science is not only less clearly marked than previously thought, but also that their commingling holds immense potential for exploring the mysteries of creativity.21
The nondualistic dimension of existence, seen as underlying all of life, reverberates powerfully in New Age art and architecture. It also represents a reaction to the depressing
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"aloneness," profound isolation, and numbing violence inherent in the themes of much contemporary abstract art.
"New Age art is an attempt to create a safe, fantasized environment, with its friendly animals like unicorns, trees, landscapes and castles," says Karen Hoyt, a psychologist and artist who has studied and written about the New Age movement. "New Age art focuses on 'the universe next door' . . . but it is escapist and narcissistic. It depicts contact with spirits — other beings who are like you — but you are not in relationship with them."22
Gilbert Williams, considered to be a quintessential Visionary painter, exemplifies these themes in canvasses filled with the subjective imagery of transcendence: moons and temples, goddesses and gateways, groves and guardians, lakes and light "beings" shining with bright color and intricacy.
In similar fashion, New Age architecture is "art for the people": "It has to do with earth-sheltering homes, solar-powered homes, and hand-built homes. The new wave concerns itself with log homes and Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes. The latest in technology, in energy-aware physics, is being combined with the pervasive belief that homes are to live in, that they should be comfortable, that even if a wood-burning stove spoils 'the line of a wall,' it can be tolerated."23
Thus New Age architect Eugene Tsui of Berkeley, California, says his work is "expressive of the supreme intelligence and spiritual powers manifest in Nature."24 He designs houses like the one he did for N. Starr in Baja, Mexico, which floats in the ocean and is partially anchored to a coastline rock outcropping. A bridgeway connects the music studio / patio with the main portion of the house, and a screened aviary tops the seven-story structure.
And Camden, Maine, tentmaker Bill Moss, who looks upon his work as "functional sculpture," designs "perfect pitch" tents that are all hoops and peaks; their graceful, sweeping curves "resemble crustaceans or caterpillars more than home sweet home."25
New Age artist Sharon Skolnick, who is fond of painting surreal images within images of San Francisco scenes, sums it up well: "Making art for me is a day trip into my primal self and the collective selves where we all join in a kind of divine molecular dance-prayer."26
Chapter 18 || Table of Contents
1. Suzanna Little, "Children in the New Age Bookstore," Publishers Weekly, 25 September 1987, 72.
2. Charles Olsen, "Please Turn Up the Lights" (sermon), 15 November 1987, Arcadia Presbyterian Church, Arcadia, Calif.
3. Cited in Frances Adeney, "Educators Look East," Spiritual Counterfeits Project Journal 4, no. 1 (Winter 1981–82): 29.
4. Lynn Smith, "Adult Type Education for School Children," Los Angeles Times [Orange co. ed.], 24 June 1982, pt. 5, 1.
5. Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy, Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s (Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, 1980), 281, 314.
6. Ibid., 284.
7. Pat Boerger, telephone interview with author, 19 January 1988.
8. 1988 Citrus Community College catalog, 69.
9. Fall 1987 calendar, California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco.
10. Celebration of Innovation Workshop, San Francisco, 7 November 1987.
11. John Dunphy, "A Religion for a New Age," Humanist Magazine (January–February 1983): 26.
12. Douglas R. Groothuis, Unmasking the New Age (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1986): 26.
13. Otto Freidrich et al., "New Age Harmonies" (cover story), TIME, 7 December 1987, 69.
14. Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg and Edward Giltenan, "Mainstream Metaphysics," Forbes Magazine, 1 June 1987, 158; Carol McGraw, "Seekers of Self Now Herald the New Age," Los Angeles Times, 17 February 1987, pt. 1, 3.
15. "New Age Music and Video," Guide to New Age Living (Brighton, Mass.: Rising Star Associates, 1988), 85.
16. Peggy Taylor and Rick Ingrasci, "Synthesizing East and West," New Age Journal (September–October 1987): 70.
17. Mike Wyma, "Ancient Music for a New Age," Los Angeles Times [Valley ed.], 8 October 1987, pt. 5, 34.
18. Quoted in Marion Long, "In Search of a Definition," OMNI (October 1987): 162.
19. Pamela Bloom, "Soul Music," New Age Journal (March–April 1987): 58.
20. 1987 Iasos Inter-Dimensional Music catalog.
21. Bruce Schechter, "Fractal Fairy Tales," OMNI (October 1987): 91.
22. Karen Hoyt, interview with author, Berkeley, Calif., 24 November 1987.
23. Alice Lawhead and Stephen Lawhead, Pilgrim's Guide to the New Age (Batavia, Ill.: Lion Publishing Corp., 1986), 77.
24. Advent Design and Research Literature.
25. Doug Stewart, "Perfect Pitch," New Age Journal (February 1986): 40.
26. "The Artist: Sharon Skolnick," Common Ground: Resources for Personal Transformation 53 (Fall 1987): 2.
