To understand New Age Spirituality as expressed primarily in the 1960’s – 1980’s it’s important to note that it drew heavily on a form of revelation known as channeling. Religious and spiritual writings, myths, and folktales portray a supernatural dimension occupied by forces and beings and happenings that lie outside of, or beyond, the normal natural materialistic universe. We know about this because some humans down through the ages have reported that they received information from this dimension. When communication flows from the Divine to humans the process of communication is called revelation. The concept of revelation is a fundamental one in every religion that in any way traces its origin to God or a divinity. Revelation in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is the basis of religious knowledge. Humans know God and His will because God has chosen to reveal Himself to them.
The myriad of world cultures are also filled with accounts of communications or information from supernatural sources or entities that don’t fall into the realm of God or the Divine. A huge number of such nonphysical entities have been mentioned.
Klimo, in his book Channeling, places both of these forms of communication together in one generic process.Channeling Klimo defines as:
the communication of information to or through a physically embodied human being from a source that is said to exist on some other level or dimension of reality than the physical as we know it, and that is not from the normal mind (or self) of the channel.
Given this definition Klimo claims that channeling is a universal phenomenon that can be found in most or all religions throughout history. Thus, he believes, the study of channeling as it appears in the modern New Age sense appears to give us a new and exciting perspective on the real nature of old stories about revelations found in sacred writings.
Klimo points out that a distinction is sometimes made between mediumship and channeling. In his approach, the term mediumship is restricted to communication with deceased human beings. Channeling includes all other communication with any intelligence not occupying an embodied mind or associated with physical reality such as the channel’s higher self, ascended masters, nonhumans from angelic and other realms, extraterrestrials, group entities, gods, God, the collective unconscious, and the universal mind.
Channeling may be intentional with the individual deliberately initiating and controlling the phenomena, or it may occur spontaneously in an intrusive manner. During channeling the individual may enter a complete trance state during which he or she has no awareness of what is taking place, and a source entity takes control of the channel’s voice or body (automatic writing). On the other hand, some individuals enter only a light trance or remain fully conscious while channeling.
The range and variety of channeled information is vast. In addition to the personal information delivered through mediums to their sitters, Klimo identifies the following categories of channeled material: Ageless Wisdom, descriptions of the realities experienced by the sources, information about the future and past, “proof” of the identity of discarnate sources, subject matter for creative expression, and scientific and medical/healing information.
It is the Ageless Wisdom that primarily links channeling with other forms of visionary experience. Ageless Wisdom refers to a common view of the greater reality running through world religions, and the various esoteric, metaphysical, and mystery schools. Klimo summarizes the broad features of this reality as follows:
There is a consensus within the channeled material of all ages that the universe is a multidimensional, living Being, which some call God. Within it as aspects of itself are sentient beings of consciousness existing on many or all of its other dimensions besides the physical as we currently experience it. We have continually received messages about, and from, the etheric, astral , mental , causal, and other dimensions of this expanded nature. Wherever a being, personality, or entity may be within this cosmological hierarchy, that entity is always in a process of learning for the purpose of evolving toward greater unity with the one being that is the source and destiny of all separate beings. Reigning over wisdom, light, and pure force or energetic power is love, the supreme reality of all creation. We humans on earth are in a kind of classroom in which we are slowly learning to be loving beings that reflect the nature of our creator. Essentially we are of the same quality or nature as our creator and thus undying with many opportunities and contexts for this learning and evolution to take place. There is a recurrent theme of reincarnation, or multiple projections ourselves as the experience-gathering vehicle of consciousness.
Two bodies of channeled work of this type in the last half of the 20th century stand out as classics, the Seth material and the Course in Miracles.
The Seth material
The Seth material was channeled by poet and science fiction writer Jane Roberts over the course of twenty years. She described her first encounter with channeling in 1963 as she sat quietly at the table in her apartment in Elmira, New York.
Quite suddenly “a fantastic avalanche of radical, new ideas” burst into her head with tremendous force, as if her head were some sort of “receiving station turned up to unbearable volume.” What she was receiving was not only ideas but intensified and pulsating sensations. It seemed to her as if “the physical world were really tissue-paper thin, hiding infinite dimensions of reality,” and she was “suddenly flung through the tissue paper with a huge ripping sound.” As she sat at the table her hands were furiously scribbling down the words and ideas that flashed through her head. Yet, at the same time, she seemed to be somewhere else,” traveling through things.” She went “plummeting through a leaf, to find a whole universe open up; and then out again, drawn into new perspectives. She felt as if knowledge was being “implanted “in the very cells of her body so that she couldn’t forget it. This was “feeling and knowing, ”rather than intellectual knowledge. When she came to she found herself scrawling what was obviously meant as the title of that “odd batch of notes: The Physical Universe as Idea Construction.” Later these ideas were developed in the Seth Material.
Inspired by this experience, Roberts and her husband started experimenting with a Ouija board to see what might happen After a few tries, they began to receive messages from someone claiming to be “Frank Withers.” Soon a larger entity began coming through of whom Withers was but a fragment. This entity, calling himself Seth, was to become the best known channeled entity in the 20th century. He described himself as an individual consciousness, ‘’an energy personality essence no longer focused in physical reality.”
Roberts soon abandoned the Ouija board and began to receive Seth’s communications in full trance and dictate them to her husband who took them down in shorthand. Mostly the communications consisted of monologues on a wide variety of topics. In 1969 Roberts published a summary, with substantial excerpts from the Seth personality, in a book titled The Seth Material.
Beginning in 1970 Seth began to dictate his own books with Roberts claiming no authorship beyond her own role as channel. The five resulting books, according to Roberts, were verbatim accounts of Seth’s remarks with only minor editorial corrections.
Roberts throughout the 20 years she channeled Seth continued to question what was actually going on. Was Seth merely part of her own psyche or did he represent some kind of separate being? What she said she was sure of was that Seth was her channel to revealed knowledge and that this knowledge was not discovered by the reasoning faculties.
As to who or what Seth is, his term “energy essence personality” seems as close to the answer as anyone can get. I don’t believe he is a part of my subconscious, as that term is used by psychologists, or a secondary personality…. . I do think that we have a supraconscious that is as far “above the normal self as the subconscious is “below” it … . It may be that Seth is the psychological personification of that supraconscious extension of my normal self.’
In her introduction to one of “Seth’s” books, Adventures in Consciousness: An Introduction to Aspect Psychology, Roberts further explored this issue, describing our present personalities as “aspects of a far greater consciousness of which our individual awareness is but a part, though an inviolate one.” Other aspects of our personalities are dominant in other realities. If, like Seth, they become activated they would have to communicate through the psychic fabric of ourselves as the focus personality. Although their own reality might exist in quite different terms than ours they would have to appear in line with our sense of personhood. Roberts noted that she always sensed that Seth was a “personification of something else—and that ‘something else’ wasn’t a person in our terms.”
The Seth Material discusses a wide range of topics, including the origins of the universe, the theory of evolution, the nature of physical reality, the nature of God, the Christ story, and the purpose of life.
The Course in Miracles
Only two years after Roberts began to channel Seth equally portentous experiences started to happen in the life of psychologist Helen Schucman who was, at the time, employed at the Psychiatry Department of New York’s Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. As she described her experience, at first she began to vaguely sense what soon became a clear inner voice. As a psychologist, atheist, and disbeliever in the paranormal, Schucman couldn’t make sense of what was happening. The voice wouldn’t leave her alone. It kept saying ‘This is a course in miracles. Please take notes.’
When she decided to comply, in her first session taking dictation the voice spoke what was to become the first introductory page of a volume that came to be called Text. The central theme of the work was announced: “Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.”
Schucman immediately became alarmed by the alien nature of what was happening and broke off the process after taking down only 15 lines. She tried to describe what the voice was like.
“It’s hard to describe. It can’t be a hallucination, really, because the Voice does not come from outside. It’s all internal. There’s no actual sound, and the words come mentally but very clearly. It’s a kind of inner dictation, you might say.” “It’s not automatic writing . . . because I’m perfectly aware of what I’m doing.”
For eight years Schucman continued to take down everything the voice said. What resulted was a self-study text of spiritual psychotherapy in a three volume set containing some 1200 pages, which was published in 1975. Volume I is the text; volume II is a workbook for students, with an exercise for each day of the year, planned around a central idea, and volume III is a manual for teachers.
Schucman continually questioned her role as the recipient or channel of the material. At one point she asked “‘Why me?’ I’m not religious; I don’t understand these things; I don’t even believe them. I’m about the poorest choice you could make…” The clear answer she received was’” On the contrary: You are an excellent choice. In fact, the best.” ‘But why?’ she asked. The answer was, “Because you’ll do it.”
The central question was and remained, what was source of the material she was scribing.
Schucman said this:
Where did the writing come from? Certainly the subject matter itself was the last thing I would have expected to write about, since I knew nothing about the subject… At several points in the writing the Voice itself speaks in no uncertain terms about the Author (i.e., as Christ) … which literally stunned me at the time… I do not understand the events that led up to the writing. I do not understand the process and I certainly do not understand the authorship. It would be pointless for me to attempt an explanation.’
A number of passages in the material itself clearly say that the author is Christ.
“You cannot forget the Father because I am with you, and I cannot forget Him. To forget me is to forget yourself and Him Who created you. . . . The name of Jesus Christ as such is but a symbol. But it stands for love that is not of this world. It is a symbol that is safely used as a replacement for the many names of all the gods to which you pray… This course has come from him.”
However, while the Course clearly makes this claim and uses terminology and theological elements found in traditional Christianity, it is not aligned to the doctrines of this religion. In fact, it appears to be more closely aligned to fundamental premises of Eastern religion and has been characterized as a Christianized version of non-dualistic Vedanta. The physical world of our separate perceptions is viewed as basically illusory and can only offer us violence, sorrow and pain. This world is to be differentiated from the “real world,” where there are no dreams of hatred or revenge. Students of the Course seek an ultimate goal of existence in a radically different mode of being than that found in this physical world. This can be attained through a unified vision with the Holy Spirit or that part of the mind that sees all actions as rooted in love. (Wikipedia, A Course in Miracles)
The introduction to the Workbook for Students states that it is divided into two main sections, the first “dealing with the undoing of the way you see now, and the second with the” acquisition of true perception.”
“The purpose of the workbook is to train your mind in a systematic way to a different perception of everyone and everything in the world.”
Following are a few of the 365 daily lessons
1. “Nothing l see means anything”
2. “1 have given everything 1 see all the meaning that it has for me.”
32 “I have invented the world I see.”
43 “God is my source. I cannot see apart from Him,”
67 “Love created me like Itself.”
121 “Forgiveness is the key to happiness,”
195 “Love is the way I walk in gratitude.”
222 “God is my life. I live and move in Him.”
Major Themes in New Age Spirituality
Let’s examine in more detail some of the main themes running through New Age Spirituality as discussed by Hanegraaff (New Age Religion and Western Culture, 1998).
Nature of Reality
To understand New Age thinking it’s important to recognize the basic framework of attitudes and beliefs about the nature of reality. One of the most important is holism. Holism has many expressions, and, as is typical in other New Age belief areas, it’s easier to describe what it’s not than what it is. Proponents of a holistic worldview are strongly opposed to what they see as two very powerful themes inherent in contemporary society, dualism and reductionism. Dualism underlies fundamental distinctions in a number of areas: between God the creator and His creations, man and nature; between man and nature themselves, with man having been given dominion by God over nature; the fundamental distinction between matter and spirit; and, in the realm of the psyche, between mental and physical, mind and brain. Reductionism became increasingly prominent with the dominance of rational and empirical based science and is seen in two major areas. Organic wholes are treated as mechanisms that can be reduced to their smallest components, and explained on the basis of these component parts, and spirit is reduced to matter and explained as epiphenomena of physical materialistic processes.
According to most New Age literature all of reality is derived from one ultimate Source. By virtue of their common origin all phenomena in the manifest realm are thus linked on some deep level. This one source of all being gives a wholeness to reality. However, the Source is not only described as imminent, giving this view a definite pantheistic flavor, but is also said to be totally transcendent. This dual aspect of God is, of course, not a new problem for Western religions.
Hanegraaff refers to Lovejoy’s view that these two aspects are so antithetical as to actually constitute two Gods. One is absolute, other worldly, totally self-sufficient, totally outside of human thought and experience. The other is a God whose essential nature requires the existence of all kinds of other beings, whose prime attribute is generativeness, whose manifestations are found in the temporal order and diversity of creatures. This sets up a pervasive ambiguity when it comes to ultimate values. To strive for the good through contemplation or imitation of God requires, on the one hand, suppression of natural interests and desires and withdrawal of the soul from worldly life to prepare for divine perfection, and on the other, an adoring delight in the sensible natural universe, a desire to know it as fully as possible and to consciously participate in God’s activity of creation.
The Seth Material sets forth one of the strongest arguments for the view of God as the generative source of reality. For Seth, God is “All That Is” whose purpose in creating the cosmos is to bring being out of nonbeing. We human beings are active participants in the creative energy of the “All That Is” which gave birth to the universe. In fact, it is only through us that “All That Is” is able to create manifest realities.
Seth make it clear that the ultimate goal for us is not to flee from the world which is ultimately illusory, maya as the Eastern concept would have it, to become reabsorbed into the One Source. This would mean the annihilation of our personality in a bliss that would destroy the integrity of our being. We are not fated to dissolve into “All That Is,” which is the creator of individuality, not the means of its destruction. Rather, the goal of existence for us human beings is to become fully conscious “co-creators with God.”
Health, Healing, Human Potential, and Holistic Health
No doubt, for many people the term New Age is likely to be thought of as closely associated, if not synonymous, with alternative medical beliefs and practices. However, a careful examination of New Age clearly indicates that it is a far broader spiritual movement. Alternative approaches to healing are one important aspect.
What most clearly distinguishes these alternatives from conventional medicine is their emphasis on illness and healing as opposed to disease and cure. Disease in the biomedical model of modern medicine is a biophysical pathological condition, an abnormality in the structure and/or functioning of organs and organ systems. The purpose of medicine is to cure this condition. Illness refers to the complex physical, psychological, social, and spiritual condition of a sick person. This condition is ameliorated or healed through therapeutic efforts directed toward or at least cognizant of the interaction between the sick person’s physical, emotional and spiritual aspects. New Age critics of modern medicine point out that its remarkable success in science based curing has come at the huge cost of the lost art of healing. Traditional cultures that have managed to hang on to their healing beliefs and practices provide New Agers with a rich source from which to draw. For these cultures the overall whole being of the sick person within his or her cultural setting must be recognized. Physical and mental illness are not sharply differentiated. Illness is interpreted within the context of the culture’s beliefs and thus is given a kind of symbolic interpretation. Health, illness, dying, and death have real meaning beyond their biophysical, empirically determined objective reality. Often elements that, viewed from a contemporary medical perspective, could be called religious or supernatural are prominent. One of these traditional healing systems will be explored in some detail when we discuss Lakota Sioux
spirituality and healing.
A second prominent feature of the New Age, closely related to alternative healing, is the importance placed on personal growth. The notion is that we are born with an inner potential to become more than simply a person who is free from significant physical and mental disease. Because of the demands of our social environment we learned to suppress much of our potential for spontaneity, zest for living, capacity for love, and ability to experience a sense of meaning and connectedness with our spiritual source. The goal of personal growth is to actualize these potentials, to develop into the fully human person we are meant to be.
The various beliefs and practices promoting personal growth in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s formed the highly popular New Age Human Potential Movement. Because health is viewed as more than the absence of disease most of those involved in the movement do not view themselves as diseased or emotionally disturbed requiring cure, but as reasonably healthy desiring something more.
The Human Potential movement had its inception in the 1950’s in Sensitivity Training and, early on, emphasized an increased capacity for such things as awareness, creativity, empathy, emotional expressivity, and inner exploration. With the emergence of Esalen Institute in California as a premier site for new approaches, Gestalt therapy, bioenergetics, and an array of bodywork practices became popular. During the 1970’s an influx of Eastern religious ideas and practices, along with the emerging field of transpersonal psychology, changed the movement’s emphasis from essentially psychotherapeutic to increasingly spiritual. Getting in touch with one’s inner divinity, increasing connection with the divine source, enjoying altered or enhanced spiritual states, indeed achieving full enlightenment became sought for goals.
There is another set of beliefs and practices closely associated with the alternative healing and human potential movements, typically referred to as holistic health. While sharing the same basic views regarding illness, healing, and whole person potentials, holistic health emphasizes the major role that the mind plays in healing the physical body. This system holds that stress and other psychological factors involving perceptions, interpretations, and reactions to inner and outer events influence our immune system which, in turn, influences the physical organism and can cause illness. An illness plays a role in the context of one’s overall life; it has a meaning. Changing the psychological conditions causing illness can thus repair the damage or at least prevent further damage. Discovering its meaning gives insight into how and why someone gets sick in the first place, that is, the needs and purpose the illness fills. One’s illness can thus become an instrument for learning and growth. Rather than being a victim of the illness, the individual assumes responsibility for it. Holistic health emphasizes the point that we are responsible for our own sickness and health.
A huge number of approaches for promoting holistic health enjoy current popularity, some from traditional cultures, some developed in the past couple of hundred years, and some newly minted since the advent of the New Age movement itself. Most, if not all, could just as well be considered under the umbrella of the human potential movement as they address key elements of personal growth. Among the best known are all kinds of stress management techniques including basic relaxation and guided imagery, massage, rolfing, reflexology, therapeutic touch, nutritional therapies, herbal medicines, and various therapies involving music, color and crystals.
New Age Religion
As with other key dimensions in the extremely diverse array of beliefs and practices that can be identified as New Age, when it comes to New Age religion there are common and distinctive themes. While these have all, no doubt, previously surfaced at various times and places before, if not in American Christianity, at least in American spiritual life, nevertheless, proponents of New Age religion see themselves as different from mainstream Christian denominations and are typically critical of them.
Basic to the New Age belief is the view of God as the fundamental and ultimate source of reality. From this oneness and wholeness the world of apparent diversity and fragmentation arises. New Agers often refer to this primary integrating essence as the Mind of the universe. It is the superconscious dimension, principle, or realm in which our individual minds exist like ripples in a universal sea. God is a kind of universal creative energy that births and sustains life and all aspects of reality. This energy or force creates from within. God is thus not, as in the traditional theistic sense, seen as the creator of the world.
Although New Agers are critical of mainstream Christianity they nevertheless hold Christ in the highest esteem. Not surprising though, they have a somewhat different notion of who/what they view as ‘the Christ.’ In the New Age literature this term has three different but closely associated meanings. There is Christ consciousness, which is a state of complete love and compassion, total enlightenment. This is the kind of consciousness that Jesus developed, and He encouraged us to do the same. Like Him, we can become directly aware of our oneness with God while living in the manifest world of diversity. We can experience total love and compassion for all beings. Christ is also viewed as a spiritual reality, typically referred to as the Christ principle. It is the spirit of service, of sacrifice for the highest good of all. It is not, however, only an inherent human potentiality, but has been described as an objective spiritual reality, a kind of evolutionary force or energy which acts to oppose the pull of ordinary materialistic consciousness The third sense of Christ is the incarnation of this force or principle in the form of Jesus the man. For some New Age writers the incarnation didn’t end with His life but initiated a process in which Christ energy permeates the entire earth.
While both God and Christ have been described by New Age authors as having an impersonal and personal pole, with God, the impersonal dimension tends to dominate. Conceiving of the ultimate power and energy animating and sustaining the universe, the creator of planets and galaxies, in personal terms seems difficult. With Christ, the personal aspect clearly dominates. Christ epitomizes love and compassion. He is personally involved with the fate of humanity, the mediating reality between God and humanity.
As with traditional religion, New Agers recognize other entities in addition to Christ that in a sense mediate between ourselves and God. Angels and demons enjoy a very ancient history among the religions of the world. New Age literature is replete with descriptions of a wide variety of such beings. There are accounts of encounters with guardian angels, personal guides, ascended masters, teachers, and many other such beings, who are aware of what is happening with us humans, particularly our spiritual progress, and wanting to assist us individually or collectively. There are also entities that are closely related to the earth and the nature world, often referred to as devas or elementals, but also including more familiar mythological and shamanic beings such as animal spirit helpers, nymphs, sylphs, and gnomes. These latter entities are thought to occupy a deeper, invisible dimension of nature which is at the same time accessible to or at one with the inner realms of the mind. Thus, like all such intermediate beings they can be contacted in altered states of consciousness. However, as is characteristic of their overall emphasize on the positive or light dimensions of reality, New Agers rarely mention the darker dimensions involving demons and the demonic.
Good and Evil in New Age Religion
New Age authors contend that at the fundamental level from which all phenomena emerge there is no duality. Thus, good and evil cannot be absolute metaphysical realities. From the viewpoint of the soul they are ultimately meaningless concepts, self-created illusions. However, as with other self-created illusions the apparent duality of opposing forces is not necessarily negative as long as evil in contrast to good is seen as a tool for learning. From a New Age perspective the traditional religious view of evil as a metaphysical reality fundamentally hostile to good, some kind of cosmic force that must be fought against, prevents us from reacting to it in a constructive way. If instead we view everything that happens as an aspect of one ultimately benevolent cosmic design, then what may appear as evil, bad, negative, can be approached as having potential lessons that we can learn from.
However, although this view may appear to reflect extreme ethical relativism, nothing is wrong, there are some kinds of actions that are undesirable. The most typical distinction between desirable and undesirable human behavior has to do with whether or not it assists in the process of cosmic or spiritual evolution. Because we are, in essence, co-creators with the divine principle, Mind, God, Source, the full development of our spiritual potential helps evolution move forward and is good. We owe it to not only ourselves, but to our fellow humans, to discover and manifest our full potentials. The primary ethical criterion from this New Age perspective is thus not so much whether or not an action produces suffering or is motivated by evil intentions but whether it runs counter to cosmic or personal spiritual evolution.
For New Age writers, suffering is not, as in traditional theology, a pressing moral problem that raises doubts about cosmic justice. Using it to demonstrate the existence of evil, they believe, doesn’t work. For them suffering isn’t a moral problem at all but accepted as necessary for learning and growth. Hanegraaff points out that the real moral issue is not so much the existence of suffering but the human intention to cause suffering in others. Ethics in New Age religion aren’t centered on the will. There are no moral prescriptive injunctions forbidding s harmful actions – the “thou shall nots.” This may reflect a general New Age opposition to religious authoritarianism but also the influence of psychology that calls into question the autonomy of the conscious will.
Not only does the presence of unconscious motivation weaken the ego centered autonomous will, but acceptance of transpersonal dimensions of the psyche further restricts it. For New Age proponents only the Higher Self is theoretically capable of making free moral choices, and only it can be held fully responsible for them.
[I]t is clear that the will of the limited ego personality cannot possibly be condemned to bear the burden of full moral responsibility for its actions. It is for this reason that we mostly find a striking absence in New Age sources of moral indignation even in the face of overtly evil behaviour. Instead, we find an essentially “pedagogical” reaction: evil behaviour is regarded as the regrettable outcome of spiritual ignorance on the part of limited egos. If people behave aggressively towards others, it is only because their consciousness is so limited that they do not realize how their actions hinder their own evolution. It is only to be expected that people who are ignorant of their inner divinity – out of touch with their own Higher Self – should engage in negative behaviour. They should not be condemned for the products of their ignorance; for they literally “do not know what they are doing”. Hanegraaff
Neither the reluctance of New Agers to judge their fellow human beings nor their disinclination to see that responsibility as the purview of a judgmental God means that one can avoid any kind of repercussions for harmful actions. The cosmos is ever unfolding toward greater good, and what sweeps us along in that process, in the long run, whether we consciously intend this or not, is the working of karma. This is grounded in a belief in reincarnation that pervades New Age thinking.
Because of cosmic interconnectedness any action by anybody ultimately rebounds on the actor. We cannot escape sooner or later having to experience the equivalent of whatever we have done to others. We can trust the cosmic law of cause and effect to be completely just and perfect. For us to judge someone is thus unnecessary. Besides, we aren’t in a position to have a complete and unprejudiced perspective on the full karmic unfolding of another person that goes back over many lifetimes. Attempts on our part to interfere with that might create more problems than they would solve.
If we should not interfere with another person’s karma by judging his behavior as wrong, and if everyone gets exactly what he needs, why should we attempt to actively reform the world, fight injustice, attempt to relieve suffering? Hanegraaff suggest that the New Age response would be something like this. It’s true, if we see someone sleeping in the gutter on a cold winter day, we cannot perceive his situation as unfair because we do not know his karmic circumstances and what is being completed for his soul. But it is appropriate that we respond to his circumstances with compassion. Why? Because positive actions create positive karma which enhances evolution. The question as to whose karma is actually affected, who is ultimately helped, has to be the compassionate helper not the suffering victim.
In New Age thinking, as we have seen, whatever contributes to spiritual development is good, while whatever stands against it is bad. This opposition boils down to spiritual ignorance, a limitation of the personality dominated by narrow interests of the ego. Our ignorance results from a negative state of mind,exclusively focused on the earth plane of reality with its fragmentation and dualism. We are conditioned by society to be ignorant of our true nature. We are alienated, out of touch with our own divinity as co-creators in the larger cosmic reality. But this negative limited state of mind is not necessary. It only exists because we have come to believe in this illusory reality of our own making. Our goal is to awaken from the dream and reprogram our culturally conditioned beliefs and assumptions about reality. Indeed, for any negative condition to be changed what is required is a restructuring of implicit beliefs. We create our own reality the New Agers never cease to emphasize. In principle at least, things are as they are only to the extent that we believe they can’t be otherwise. We are never at the full mercy of circumstances.
By far the most negative and destructive mental state or attitude for New Agers is judging and blaming other people and ourselves. It comes from our fundamental belief in the reality of sin and guilt and our belief that we are victims of circumstances. These are not objective truths, only limiting assumptions. Once we accept that there are no accidents in the universe, that everything that happens is meaningful, that our circumstances are self-created, and we start taking responsibility for whatever happens to us, we naturally have to give up blaming others. Sin can best be regarded as merely a word that we use to project guilt upon others. And to consider ourselves sinners is degrading our inner divinity and absolving ourselves from the necessity of taking responsibility for our actions.
At the core of all negative mental attitudes including judging, blaming, guilt, resentment, and shame, is fear. What we fear and try to escape from is confrontation with our own Self. Fear and distrust of self lies at the heart of all suffering. The supreme antidote to fear is love. ‘Love is letting go of fear’ is a statement so widely proclaimed that it has become kind of a New Age slogan. Love is described both as a state of mind and as an energy, the energy of cosmic harmony. Love enables us to overcome self-imposed limitation and all the negativity that flows from it. Love of others must start with love of self. Only from our own loving center, attuned to the loving harmony of the cosmos, can we project positive healing energy to others.
Hanegraaff sees this way of thinking as an exact reversal of traditional Christian ethics.
Human beings are not seen as fundamentally flawed by sin and guilt, which makes salvation possible only by outside grace; rather, the belief in the existence of such flaws is the flaw. Similarly, fear is not justified, by reference to a God who punishes transgressions: rather, it is this very belief which produces the problem in the first place.
For New Ages sin and guilt, like evil, don’t actually exist, but our belief in their existence produces negativity, particularly because it legitimizes and causes fear. As Shirley MacLaine, movie actress and New Age writer, puts it: “we are not victims of the world we see. We are victims of the way we see the world. In truth, there are no victims.” It is only by our judgmental attitudes towards others and towards ourselves, and by psychological projection of sin and guilt upon others and ourselves, that we keep perpetuating the “circle of fear.” In a way, it is by our ingrained belief in “original sin” that we needlessly increase suffering in the world and create “negative” karma.
Creating Our Own Reality
Seth tells us that, although we may not be aware of it, we are constantly creating our reality as naturally as we breathe. The nature of our reality is a direct reflection of our conscious and unconscious beliefs. Because most of us hold limiting and restricting beliefs about the world the universe confirms these convictions. If we change our belief we will find that reality changes with it. Actually, there are no limits to the realities we can imagine and “make real” if we only believe they are possible. Thus, the many-leveled cosmos emanating from the generative source of All That Is is actually constituted of realities created by individual “entities” participating in the universal creative energy. The levels of reality reflect the extent to which they have become aware of their own creative potential. Human beings live in their own self-created dreams, and the apparent stability of “physical reality” is conditioned only by the intersubjective consensus of many individuals believing in a similar reality. For Seth, the fact that that reality is a self-created illusion provides the motivation not to flee from it, but to create ever better and more beautiful realities to be enjoyed to the fullest.
Most of us would probably go along, to a certain extent, with the belief that we create our own reality. What we expect to happen we are likely to discover comes about. If I expect that I will get a low grade on a test, that is likely to happen. Because I expect this I don’t study. If I don’t study I do poorly. We therapists encourage our clients to assume that they are largely responsible for the negative things that they think just happen to them, or are caused by someone else doing something to them. The New Agers, however, take this much farther, as we have seen,. For them we create all of our reality. Everything that happens has a deeper meaning for us personally.
Although New Agers may seem to be saying that creating a better reality to replace the one we’re in is a simple process of changing one’s mind, most are certainly sophisticated enough to realize it’s not that easy. We live in a shared reality. If I don’t like war, I can’t simply make it stop by affirming peaceful thoughts. Even if I have undertaken the hard psychospiritual work necessary to clear this negative consciousness out of my being, I’m not alone responsible for creating or maintaining it. Many, many people’s consciousness has gone into creating a war. Many, many would have to change their consciousness to make it end.
Obviously, a lot of seemingly negative circumstances that we find in life – social conditions, inherited diseases and the like – were already here when we were born. New Agers see these kinds of circumstances as consciously chosen by us (our soul) before embarking on our current incarnation. We set up the kind of classroom we will need on earth to pose the challenges we need to face and overcome for the learning our soul requires. This learning may involve mistakes made in previous lifetimes. If, for example, we were cruel and inflicted pain on others in one lifetime, we may find ourselves on the receiving end of other’s cruelty this time around. To blame fate or other people, and see ourselves as victims, just keeps us stuck in our self-created ignorance and suffering.
Consistent with the idea that we create our own reality, New Agers tend to see all illness as linked to former incarnations or to our unhealthy beliefs in this life. Illness is not some random phenomenon that afflicts us for no reason, but has a deeper meaning. We need to figure out what lesson it contains. This belief has provoked intense criticism from health professionals and incurable patients who interpret it as seeing our illness as some kind of punishment, and implying that we should feel guilty for causing it. New Agers respond that this interpretation is entirely inappropriate and reflects a socially conditioned ethics based on sin, guilt, and punishment.
In the great cosmic scheme embraced by New Agers, death is not the great enemy which to contemplate provokes existential despair. It is not the occasion for a final judgment that will send us forever either to the heavenly realm to be with God, or to the fiery pit to suffer eternal torment. Rather it is a doorway to another lifetime on earth or perhaps to another realm or dimension of reality. Upon our death the larger higher immortal aspect of our consciousness has an opportunity to take stock of the life just lived, the lessons learned and neglected, the good and bad karma accumulated, and design the next classroom that we will move into. Death and dying are transitory but necessary experiences in the journey of our soul.
Proponents of New Age thinking express a belief in other realities that can be experienced in altered states of consciousness. These realities may be induced by certain psychospiritual techniques, or they may appear spontaneously. What is particularly interesting about these inner realms of the mind, relative to a consideration of death, is the great similarity between them and the realities the soul is believed to enter after death. They may in fact be the same.
The other realities that the psyche journeys to in altered states, New Agers believe, are as real as our own world, not merely subjective fantasy. They differ in several respects, most importantly in being much more strongly influenced by the consciousness of the experiencer. In our normal waking life our individual perspectives color our perceptions of the phenomena around us, such that we don’t perceive them in exactly the same way. In altered states our perceptions of phenomena may be so different from that of other persons that we find ourselves in completely different self-created environments. We can directly influence and change these environments by changing our consciousness.
One of the main features running through New Age thinking is the close connection between religion and psychology, what Hanegraaff calls the psychologizing of religion and sacralization of psychology. Certainly a psychological interpretation of religious phenomena was around long before the dawn of the New Age. The gods, which according to traditional beliefs are supernatural beings existing apart from human beings, psychology, beginning with Freud, see as mere projections of the human mind. It is us humans who create the gods, not the other way around. New Age proponents of this perspective, Hanegraaff says, “agree that religious entities are “all in the mind,” but then go on to assert that whatever is in the mind is real.”