Premises of the New
Age
When the American Atheists held their national convention in Denver in 1987, Madalyn Murray O'Hair said there is no God. Soon after, Shirley MacLaine toured Denver and told her listeners that she and everyone else is God. Then Billy Graham came to town and declared at a crusade that Jesus is the only God.1
It all depends on your worldview, which is the cherished premises or assumptions you hold about ultimate reality, human beings, and the relationship between the two.
Worldviews — and the implications drawn from them — differ from group to group within the diverse and eclectic New Age ranks. In fact, New Age doesn't refer to a particular group or collection of groups, nor to a specific period in history. New Age movements is a more apt description. The New Age has no overarching superstructure. Its beliefs and practices vary as widely as those within the Christian and Jewish traditions.
"No one speaks for the entire New Age community," said Jeremy P. Tarcher, spokesman for a Los Angeles firm that publishes New Age books. "Within the movement, there is no unanimity as to how to define it or even that it is significantly cohesive to be called a movement."2
Tarcher, like other New Age leaders, does agree, however, that the movement is based on salient premises. And more than anything else, the New Age movement is distinguished
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by a common vision, a shared worldview about the nature of existence and the purpose of life in the cosmos.
Members of the New Age Society — subscribers to the New Age Journal — were asked, "What does 'New Age' mean to you?"
"It is the beginning of a spiritual reawakening for many people of Earth," one member replied.
"Ideally, it represents nonhierarchical, global consciousness, respect for our bodies and who we are," said another.
Suzanne Robinson of Sugar Hill, Georgia, defined New Age as "moving into an era that emphasizes self-discovery, spiritual growth, and enlightenment. It is an exciting time of reaching past our limitations."
And Carolyn D. Ladner of Rancho Cordova, California, called New Age "a global and individual change in perception that promotes a shift in thoughts and actions toward a more cooperative way of being, instead of our current separating, competitive way of existence."3
The New Age, says new-religions expert J. Gordon Melton, "is ultimately a vision of a world transformed, a heaven on Earth, a society in which the problems of today are overcome and the new existence emerges."4
Underlying this radical vision are the following New Age premises regarding ultimate reality, humanity, God and religion, humanity's problems, solutions to the present crisis, and an agenda for the planet's transformation.
Ultimate Reality
The New Age bottom line can be stated in three words: "All is One." The cosmos is pure, undifferentiated, universal energy — a consciousness or "life force." Everything is one vast, interconnected process.
"The mystical experience of wholeness encompasses all separation," says Marilyn Ferguson.5
This premise is known as monism, where distinctions of apparent opposites disappear, as does the line between material creation and the force or energy that creates it. Consciousness is not confined to human beings, but applies
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to all reality. It is best described in impersonal terms such as Principle, Mind, Power, Unity, and, especially, Energy. This reduction of all reality to energy derives from metaphysical speculations extrapolated from quantum physics theories of matter and light.
In the ultimate state of consciousness, says New Age physicist and philosopher Fritjof Capra, "all boundaries and dualisms have been transcended and all individuality dissolves into universal, undifferentiated oneness."6 (This idea will be analyzed more fully in a later chapter.)
Humanity
Flowing from the premise that All is One is the twin assumption that, therefore, humanity is All One. In the New Age worldview, this is more than a figurative assertion.
Humans are nothing but "congealed energy," the seeming solidification of thought. Hence the oft-quoted New Age slogan: "You create your own reality."
"YOU are the only thing that is real," insists New Age editor Jack Underhill, publisher of the fast-growing Life Times magazine. "Everything else is your imagination, movie stuff you've brought into your screenplay to help you see who you really are. Nudge that around for awhile . . . There are no victims in this life or any other. No mistakes. No wrong paths. No winners. No losers. Accept that and then take responsibility for making your life what you want it to be."7
In the New Age context, humans, like everything else, are an extension of the Oneness, which is all the divinity there is. In other words, the only "miracles" are natural "processes" of impersonal energy.
The unity of all things, the subjective revelation most common in mystical experience, is usually called pantheism. There are not many selves but one Self, the One. This New Age version of the secular humanist position, which places great faith in human potential, has been dubbed "Cosmic Humanism."
"Man," comments New Age critic Douglas Groothuis in his book, Unmasking the New Age, "is not only [seen as] the measure of all things, he is the metaphysical master; we
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are one with the One and thus have access to unlimited potential."8
God and Religion
Humans have a "suppressed, or hidden, Higher Self that reflects, or is connected to, the divine element of the universe," according to Tarcher, publisher of Marilyn Ferguson's Aquarian Conspiracy.9 Ferguson goes further, saying that the "separate self is an illusion"; reality consists of an "even larger Self."10 This is the New Age "God," sometimes referred to as "Infinite Intelligence."
So, we can expand the bottom line of the New Age premise: All is One. We are All One. All is God. And we are God.
"I am God," shouts Shirley MacLaine on the Malibu beach. "You are God. Honest," swears Jack Underhill in his magazine. "I know your driver's license says differently, but what does the DMV know?"11
But then, the God of New Age is nobody special. He — or, rather, it — is everything. There is nothing that isn't God. Human beings are a mode, or an expression of, the God who is a principle, a consciousness, a life force. The God of pantheism, remarked Christian theologian Vernon Grounds, is "merely a convenient designation for the all-embracing process which has been grinding on through the ages."12
This premise doesn't nullify appreciation for the man Jesus. But most New Agers regard him as one of many enlightened masters. To use popular New Age phrases: We, too, may share the "Christ consciousness" or "the cosmic Christ Spirit." Or, as Ferguson declared in an interview with the Yoga Journal: "The myth of the savior "out there' is being replaced with the myth of the hero 'in here.' Its ultimate expression is the discovery of the divinity within us . . . [I]n a very real sense, we are each other."13
The New Age movement considers Christianity just one of many inner spiritual paths, all leading to the same goal of cosmic unity. All religions are essentially one. Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, Lao-tse, and other founders of major religions all
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taught the same thing: how to become one with the One. This is called syncretism.
Rounding out this "universal religion" is the common belief in reincarnation, the theory that the soul progresses through many life cycles according to the working out of one's karma — the rule by which the universe returns rewards and punishments."14 The final goal is to merge with the cosmos, or God, and end the repetitious and painful birth-death-rebirth process.
Humanity's Problem
What's wrong with the human race? Why can't we achieve instant God-consciousness or godhood? The problem, according to the New Age worldview, is our essential blindness. "Metaphysical amnesia" has caused us to forget our true identity.15
"The New Age movement says we have forgotten we are one with God and we . . . have infinite potential at our fingertips if we allow it to flow," summarized Dean Halverson, a researcher-critic of new religious movements.16
According to the New Age mind-set, much of the blame lies with the numbing influences of Western culture, which has caused most people to accept the fragmented vision of self-limitations and "failures" rather than to know they can be "like God." But New Agers believe a "New Order" is about to break out of the "old" epoch of rationalism: The Age of Aquarius, with its mystic way of "knowing," is dawning.
Solution to the Crisis
Just when the darkness seems blackest, the despair seems deepest, there is a way out of the contemporary crisis. Spiritual evolution often comes through an intuitive leap that brings enlightenment. New Agers buoyantly refer to this opportunity for change as a "paradigm shift": a distinct new way of thinking about old problems.
Here's how Marilyn Ferguson describes it: "New perspectives give birth to new historic ages. Humankind has had many dramatic revolutions of understanding — great leaps,
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sudden liberation from old limits. We discovered the uses of fire and the wheel, language and writing. We found that the Earth only seems flat, the sun only seems to circle the Earth, matter only seems solid. We learned to communicate, fly, explore."17
Each of these discoveries, Ferguson says, were paradigm shifts.
How does humanity embark upon a paradigm shift? Through an "awakening experience" that changes the way people think and live and communicate and perceive "reality," by taking part in "conscious evolution." And in adopting a new worldview that sees "holistically" rather than "dualistically." The old paradigm that divides and separates and analyzes must be sloughed off — even abruptly snuffed out — to make room for the new assumed unity between reality and the divine. All is One; God is All, and All is God. Humanity is deified, death is denied, and ignorance — not evil — is the enemy.
The New Age premise is that knowledge, or gnosis, is the key to being awakened from our ignorance of divinity. The slumbering "Higher Self" can be roused. Creation and humanity are simply "elevated" to divine status through personal transformation.
Each individual may "actualize" his or her divine nature and achieve union with the Ultimate Unifying Principle by applying a plethora of consciousness-changing techniques, or "psychotechnologies," to body, mind, and spirit.
Some examples of what Ferguson calls "intentional triggers of transformative experiences"18 are: meditation, Yoga, chanting, mood-altering music, mind-expanding drugs, esoteric systems of religious mysticism and knowledge, guided imagery, balancing and aligning "energies," hypnosis, body disciplines, fasting, martial arts, mechanical devices that measure and alter bodily processes, and mental programs ranging from contemporary psychotherapies to radical seminars designed to obliterate former values and inculcate the New Age mind-set.
Mastery of "spiritual tech" and mystical experience leads the New Ager to psycho-spiritual power and enlightenment. And power-filled, self-realized individuals stand poised to
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enact "a benign conspiracy for a new human agenda" on a larger scale.19
The New Age Agenda
The sequel to expanded personal awareness is planetary transformation, characterized by mass enlightenment and social evolution. Although New Agers selectively endorse programs and causes, the New Age agenda shares major planks with liberal American politics and with the concerns of many Americans who are in no way connected with the movement.
The movement's broad agenda advances ecology (nature and God are merged); androgyny (because all are One, male-female distinctions are irrelevant); world peace and nuclear disarmament (including rapprochement and possible political unification between the United States and Soviet Union); and natural foods and healing processes. Other goals are to overcome world hunger; humanize technology; dismantle much of corporate America and replace it with "alternative" economic units such as small industrial and agricultural collectives; foster cooperative living styles; and organize global politics.
All is One also applies to nations. National boundaries are obsolete, according to the New Age worldview. Thus, the New Age agenda calls for an emerging global civilization and one-world government, including "planetary taxation" and the United Nations as the sole central governing agency. It would also create an eclectic "world religion" that closely resembles Eastern religious systems rather than Western monotheistic faiths.
Undergirding the New Age worldview is this crucial premise: Humans have access to a source of "transcendent knowing, a domain not limited to time and space."20
The "Source" of New Age transcendence, which animates the cosmos, is said to be tapped intuitively by the brain's right hemisphere via the various psychotechnologies.
To attain godhood, New Age style, writes psychologist Maxine Negri in a critique of the movement, "one has only to rid oneself of the limitations imposed by the human brain's
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left hemisphere's reasoning which Western culture, by way of its technological advances, holds in such high esteem. The pathway to godhood lies not in the left-hemisphere logic but in the right hemisphere's intuitive 'knowing' and creativeness."21
To understand the New Age, therefore, we need more information about that marvelous "three-pound universe" we call the brain.
Chapter 4 || Table of Contents
1. Rivendell Times, 1 September 1987.
2. Jeremy P. Tarcher, "New Age as Perennial Philosophy," Los Angeles times Book Review, 7 February 1988, 15.
3. See "The Members Speak: What Does 'New Age' Mean to You?" New Age Journal (November–December 1987): 52.
4. J. Gordon Melton, Encyclopedic Handbook of Cults in America (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1986), 113.
5. Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy, Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s (Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, 1980), 380.
6. Fritjof Capra, Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), 371.
7. Jack Underhill, "New Age Quiz," Life Times Magazine, no. 3, 6.
8. Douglas R. Groothuis, Unmasking The New Age (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1986), 53.
9. Tarcher, "New Age as Perennial Philosophy."
10. Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy, 100.
11. Underhill, "New Age Quiz," 6.
12. Cited in Joseph M. Hopkins, "New Age: What to Watch For," Evangelical Newsletter, 5 July 1985, 4.
13. Ronald S. Miller, "Marilyn Ferguson: Changes for a New Age," Yoga Journal, July–August 1981, 70.
14. Melton, Encyclopedic Handbook of Cults in America, 114.
15. Groothuis, Unmasking the New Age, 22.
16. Dean Halverson, interview with author, Denver, Colo., 1 December 1987.
17. Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy, 26.
18. Ibid., 85.
19. Ibid., 23.
20. Ibid., 176.
21. Maxine Negri, "Age-Old Problems of the New Age Movement," Humanist (March–April 1988): 26.
