In Search Of A Definition
By Marion Long
Is it a movement? A concept? A twenty-first-century religion? A totally new worldview? An old worldview with a new label? What exactly is meant by New Age? To find out, Omni asked 12 of the leading thinkers and social commentators of our time for their perceptions of what this elusive yet alluring concept is – or at least should be.
SPALDING GRAY, a writer and performance artist, is the star and creator of Swimming to Cambodia
I see the New Age movement as the best carryover of the Sixties – and I'm still a convert and a fan. The movement is trying to keep a sense of openness, a holistic perspective that isn't psychological versus spiritual, physical versus psychological. And my God, there is a longing in me, a New Age longing, if you will, to find a community where people will be thinking, moving and being creative – without being sapped by longings the media creates.
But the New Age is too vague, it needs more spine. There's definitely an edge missing that was there in the Sixties. New Age people flit from one thing to another, it's so fragmented. Things shift fast – fads and whet can save you. If I started to look at everything that could save me, I'd go mad.
I went to a channeler in Los Angeles. My first impression: My God, this woman's a frustrated actress. The accent was so fakey, kind of Eastern European. Everyone asked about their past lives (a tricky business open to fiction because there's no way to prove anything). My question: "I don't know the difference between paranoia and intuition." The guy behind me, the one with the crystals, really heated up on that one: "Oh, wow! Know what you mean, man! Know what you mean!" The answer: "You must work more from your heart and not from your head."
Does this make sense? The whole evening was like eating really bad Chinese food, and it struck me that there are a lot of lost people in the world.
While there's a certain hilarity to some of this stuff, I think the invasion of the spiritual-realm charlatans or of strict commercialization is very serious business. It's as serious as nuclear proliferation, and I think it's a by-product of it. When you really look at it, we live in an apocalyptic time. It's very shaky and scary, and that's what turns people into couch potatoes when they aren't doing their channeling workshops or buying their crystals.
Hey! I know what is happening. There are many gods afoot. There are many evil powers and lesser ones and bigger ones. I don't think there is one overseer. There are hundreds of thousands of reals, just as there are visible and invisible universes. I know there is power in all of this stuff. But I don't think anything valuable or effective is gleaned by people playing around with this stuff or by this fragmented flitting.
ABBIE HOFFMAN has been a political activist since the Sixties and is the author of Steal this Urine Test
If I close my eyes and think of New Age consciousness, I see yuppies, that's what I see. I mean, that's nice if you're white and you make two hundred thousand dollars a year and support all the right causes. But don't delude yourself that such an attitude is helpful. It isn't. In fact, I see that attitude as the enemy. Now, talk about enemy opposition is not New Age talk. Supposedly we are all one. But if you see me and Ollie North as one, you had better switch your vitamins, go for another massage, or stay in your hot tub. Your view is irrelevant.
New Age consciousness is something that has to be manifested in the world of reality or else it's tokenism, just paying lip service to some cause: "Yeah, I stood hand in hand for world hunger." It's a false dichotomy to talk about internal change at some point in the future. If you draw that dichotomy, you are not sincere about either spiritual consciousness or political consciousness. You're mouthing words. You change yourself and society in the same process simultaneously. The more general the causes you believe in, the less relevant they are. The more specific the issues, the more you affect the balance of power in the world. The more you talk about peace and the less you talk about justice, the more you are part of the problem and less a part of the solution. New Age does not encourage collective organized action. It is self-indulgent, too much "I am the world."
The whole culture – teachers, churches, New Agers – are out there in space, worrying about the ozone, the snow leopard, and the tropical forests. But people just talk and never learn how to solve problems, how to gel rid of the damn toxic dump! You know, the New Age has no good jokes. Of course they have a sense of humor because that's nice, a good-vibes thing that goes along with being in touch and being against world hunger. But jokes are specific. Jokes take chances. Some laugh, some are offended. I don't think New Age people take risks.
KEN KESEY, merry prankster of the Sixties; author, most recently of Demon Box
We are coming toward a real New Age, what I think of as the
Fourth World. There's got to be something good in store for us
because there's no such thing as a one-sided coin. We've really
established the bad side of the coin, with Reagan and this cheap
macho jingoism and anti-intellectualism and this whole
militaristic consciousness. And the other side of the coin
hearkens back to the Sixties. We caught a wave back then. Drugs
had something to do with it, but the wave happened in science,
cinema, art, music, and politics. Once you've caught that wave,
you're addicted. You want to catch another one. You'll paddle
around in the surf for years looking. And I think there's
another wave coming.
"It's better to carry a flower than a gun" – peace was what the Sixties was all about, and New Age consciousness is also about peace and not about sending guns to Nicaragua. And if it isn't about peace, we're all goners and aren't going to survive the thing. Of course, the evolution of a new and peaceful consciousness in the face of seventy-six percent of the people voting for Reagan, in a nation where Ollie North is a hero, is a tough row to hoe. But the human being is a nimble creature, and I think we are going to make it.
Personally, I want my spirituality pure and from the source. I don't want it all gussied up with a lot of Oriental froufrou. I've read that New Age people are trying to find "drug-free access to altered states of con, consciousness." Well, I'd rather go through drugs than through Jimmy Swaggart. I'd even rather go through drugs than through Shirley MacLaine, to tell you the truth. I've stopped throwing the I Ching, and I've thrown it steadily for twenty years. You just don't need to keep asking and keep asking and keep asking and keep going back and checking and getting signs and going to mediums and having spirits talk to you through horns or bells or see goiters drop off people at the healer's. All that stuff really belies a lack of faith.
Maybe the New Age is the place where Bach was composing and Van Gogh was painting and Shakespeare was writing. Maybe the New Age doesn't exist in linear time; it exists in lateral time and isn't connected by cause and effect.
KARL PRIBRAM, the Stanford University brain researcher best known for his theory of the holographic brain
There is no doubt in my mind that there will be a rapprochement between the spiritual values that New Age people hold so dear and what we are discovering in science. The data and the discoveries in science will bring about this rapprochement – quite apart from the values that people bring to it or don't bring to it.
I do believe there is a great deal of bridging that has yet to be done. Some changes these people advocate are poppycock, some are superficial; but with common sense and time, the good stuff comes out and makes its way into society.
ALLEN GINSBERG, Beat poet; Sixties visionary; teacher at Naropa Institute, the first Buddhist college in the West
The New Age concept was introduced around the time of the Beat era as a sort of holistic approach to life – opposed to the hyperindustrialization, hypermilitarization of the Cold War. New Age ideas involved rehabilitation of Mother Earth, reintegration with nature, ecological sentience, the notion of a fresh planet. We had reached the end of the land, as in Kerouac's "end of the land sadness, end of the land gladness" – meaning we had reached the West Coast and the new pioneers were to go inward and explore inner space using Yoga, meditation, herbal medicine, Zen.
But people tend to collect experiences: a vision, a message
from beyond, a flying saucer sighting, neurological buzzings and
zappings. That's what Tibetans call spiritual materialism,
treating spiritual materials as collectibles rather than, as in
classical
traditions, treating spiritual experiences as something you let
go immediately. You can't step in the same river twice. But I do
not think that the New Age mentality is strictly the invasion of
the spiritual realm by a kind of consumerist mentality.
New Age has had great effects. Meditation practices have been introduced into some forms of therapy. Chinese herbs, pulse diagnosis, acupuncture have proved to be shortcuts to health restoration.
I hope people have enough sanity to adapt rather than to commit mass suicide, whether through nukes or nuke by-products, destruction of the watercourses, the ozone hole, or just so much garbage spread around that people choke on their own waste products. But animals know not to defecate where they eat. Unless they're penned in like rats.
DORIS LESSING, author, most recently of The Good Terrorist
What I have in common with New Age people is the same hopes and fears: no major war; that minor wars should cease; no pollution; that we won't destroy our planet; that we find a cure for AIDS very soon; that there should be no more inexplicable sickness, disease, epidemics. If there is one fact that emerges from even the slightest study of history, let's say even from the turn of the century, it is that what happens comes as a surprise to everyone
FRANK ZAPPA, musician; founder of The Mothers of Invention; spokesman against rock-lyric censorship
I would never pretend to be an expert on New Age theology, but from what I've seen and read, it bears a striking resemblance to the same sort of superstitious bullshit that the televangelists are making a fortune out of – minus Jesus, though in some cases with a tangential Jesus. Everyone wants a kingdom to go to and a guy, a big guy who waves a wand and makes it okay – a mass of people who are starved for the supernatural.
We live in an age that is full of fear. And when people are afraid, they try to reinforce their relative position in the universe by reliance on supernatural assistance. It's an unfortunate time for civilization, what we are going through right now.
The New Age movement lacks a sense of self-criticism. I think it would be great if as a tenet of their faith or whatever, they tried in an authentic way to put things together for themselves. I mean, who knows? Maybe they'll come up with something that works. Nobody has done that yet. That would be a real scientific achievement. But people want to maintain a fiction, and as long as they do, there's going to be yet another New Age that comes along after this one, with another guy with a chingus on his head and crystals dangling down. Maybe it'll be mothballs by then, who knows?
New Age music is baffling to me. It has no tension, and it's often promoted as therapy. As far as I'm concerned, music has better things to do than to find one drone chord to help you achieve your mantra. If it's therapy, let's not call it music. I don't think that the composers who were really doing their job over the years were all that concerned about whether or not the listener was going to achieve Nirvana by the end of the tune.
But all of this stuff is pretty much irrelevant to a pop-consumer society because nobody in the society knows what composers do. Oh, well, that's okay. We live in a country where they think Oliver North is a national hero. What can we deduce about the mental-health situation in the United States from this Oliver North hysteria?
DANIEL BERRIGAN, priest; peace activist
The New Age movement is very American: an endless quest for novelty and stimulus in every direction and the satisfaction of appetite. We end up with a self-centered therapeutic instead of any contact with what might be called God or responsibility to others. Spiritually speaking, the whole movement is just the death of the reality of God in one's life and the degradation of the human being who yields to it. I think that we become less than human by any kind of traditional norm if we seek more and more vindication of ego and appetite and self-worship. It's idolatrous.
An enormous selfishness has been built into our culture from the start. We want to control other lives, other countries, other political forms to keep the goods flowing toward us and keep the ego on high.
LAURIE ANDERSON, poet; musician; performance artist
I don't know about this New Age music. I wish people would make it their own. It's a bit like a graft right now and has very little to do with American culture. But New Age musicians have set themselves a difficult task trying to be dronelike and musically interesting at the same time.
It's significant to me that almost no words are used in New Age music. It's ethereal because it doesn't have the sweat of real people. Angel music definitely doesn't sweat. But someone will do something really interesting with this music. I don't think there are any forms of music that are inherently boring or stupid. There is room for every single kind of music. Isn't that a suitably bland New Age response?
But it's not the kind or music I like. It doesn't make me happy or interest me or scare me or thrill me – it is just there gliding over me, background music. When I listen to music, I listen to it obsessively. You know, like one thing fifty times over. It's becoming increasingly popular because it goes down pretty easily, but it does something for people besides being easy.
KEN WILBER, transpersonal psychologist; author; general editor, New Science Library imprint, Shambhala Publications
There are some very good things about the New Age and some extremely narcissistic, flaky aspects about it. This movement is the first popular American movement to acknowledge mysticism or a genuinely transcendental, experiential, contemplative realm. That's good. In other words, religion is not merely something you do in Sunday school. Real religion, like Zen or Taoism, involves contemplation.
But it then made the great mistake of thinking that anything spiritual is therefore antirational or antiscientific. And this produced the flaky parts of the movement: quartz crystal healing, psychic channeling, and massaging your psychic aura and I mean just the craziest stuff in the world. And the bad aspects are rampant.
It's one thing to say that there is a spiritual reality. It's quite another thing to say this movement is producing the most profound transformation that ever occurred in the history of the world – and I'm part of it. That's an incredibly narcissistic stance. The global transformation, the great spiritual descent, is not anywhere near. It is not going to happen for centuries, maybe millennia, for all we know.
One of the exciting things that the New Age tapped into is that we ought to borrow from Zen, Taoism, Hinduism – they all tell us some very important things. And when we put them together, we get a universal view of what's going on. That's part of the great excitement generated by the New Age. It's amazing, a lot of fun, exciting.
I actually wrote a chapter for a book I'm doing now, called "Baby Boomers, Narcissism, and the New Age." There's no mystery as to why the New Age came out of the me decade. The me decade became the my decade, with the yuppies.
Channeling, for instance, is incredibly narcissistic. In essence the channeler says, "I am channeling the greatest intelligence that ever lived, and it tells me – did I mention that – me?" It's California-holographic-bleached-brain garbage. The Baby Boomers, who produced the New Age, were the first television generation. They got steered into immediate gratification. You don't like channel two, switch, Channel five, switch. And so on. We have the highest divorce rate in history. We have the most difficult time forming lasting, stable relationships. We're instant gratification. Don't like present reality? Switch. New Age Pow!
MARILYN FERGUSON, editor, publisher of the Los Angeles-based Brain/Mind Bulletin; author of The Aquarian Conspiracy
I think the label "New Age" is like "yuppie" – it is virtually meaningless. As a friend of mine said, "The New Age baby is probably drowning in the bathwater." The webbing that might tie many of these philosophies together is, at this point, so ill-defined that one would be hard-pressed to say for sure what is and what is not New Age. There is a movement, a very broad-based one, growing in strength. Actually, what it should be called is a shift of cultural values, a shift toward the experiential, toward an interest in cooperation and relationship. Enough people are interested, and now it has become significant to the critics of popular culture. I think we're seeing what Alexis de Tocqueville predicted in 1830 in Democracy in America: The United States would eventually become spiritual for the simple reason that it was so materialistic.
The New Age has become the latest thing, and the questions about it have focused on certain subjects – crystal healing, trance mediums, and that kind of thing. What will happen is that we will miss an opportunity, as a society, to take advantage of an openhearted spirit that I would say is increasingly evident. There is something in the air. People would like an excuse to be kinder. Certainly there is some very fringe stuff, and people are involved who mean well but may not be very substantive. I've been a critic myself, asking that we please get our act together. But the heart of this paradigm is very old and just keeps recurring. It's characterized by cooperation, spiritual values, and respect for nature. What we are really talking about is caring, about closeness – that's what the New Age should be about.
RICHARD BACH, author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull
The New Age movement is this amorphous thing that seems to affect some people in irrational ways. I don't want to make any claim that this particular label has touched me. I hate labels.
But more and more people, at younger and younger ages, are asking the questions, Who are we? and What are we doing on this little planet? Any movement toward recognizing our individual identity and power is a good thing. I have a better sense of well-being because I know more people are concerned with the invisible things that matter rather than the little flashes and glitters. I want to be a part of a world where people are experimenting with the nature of consciousness.