As soon as the New Age came to the attention of the mainstream, attacks from critics inflicted a lot of damage on the fledgling movement.  World events shook its foundations still further. However, if we New Agers had decided to rally together and stand up for our beliefs, pressures from the outside would not have had such destructive impact. 

But that’s not what we did. Instead of defending our movement and the ideals from which it was born, we surrendered it to pop culture for mockery and mutation and walked away, distancing ourselves from it as quickly as possible.

In the end, the New Age movement was undone by its own adherents.

Why did we abandon a movement that could have -- should have -- helped us transform society?   Ironically, the idealism of the New Age is itself much to blame. 

A pathless land

Idealism, especially its Eastern varieties, has always been quick to tell us that a particular spiritual path really isn’t all that necessary.  As Krishnamurti put it, “truth is a pathless land and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever.” 

The more we delve into the idealistic viewpoint, especially in its Zen and Advaita expressions, the more we are told that all religious and spiritual systems are merely thought-constructs that are essentially meaningless.  The more we are exposed to New Age philosophy and books and teachers, the more we are encouraged to stop identifying with New Age philosophy books and teachers.

“Real spirituality is about having no answers at all,” writes Joan Tollifson in her marvelous book, Awake in the Heartland.  “It is about living without formulas, without conclusions, without beliefs, without comforting ideas, without saviors.” Real spirituality, she adds, asks that we “drop all the labels, categories and frames that we use to contain experience,” and simply “be present, without answers.”

After reading such words of wisdom, it seems clear that in order to deepen one’s spirituality, one must forsake all paths and movements such as the New Age.  And clearly, many New Age spiritual seekers have taken this “high road” away from the movement and a spiritual community that works together for the greater good. 

But maybe we should ask ourselves, is this really the high road? Or is it simply the path of least resistance?   Does refusing to identify with a philosophy lead us to genuine spirituality?  Or does it lead us to ego-indulgence?  

All wishbone, no backbone

It was from Debbie Ford, author of The Dark Side of the Light Chasers, that I first heard the expression “a wishbone where your backbone should be.” That is certainly a good description of the New Age attitude at the movement’s giddy peak in the 1980s.

Author after author grandly announced that the evolution of human consciousness would make the transformation to a new paradigm all but inevitable. We were told that all we had to do was develop our own consciousness, and then voila!  By some hundredth-monkey osmosis, the rest of humanity would follow in a massive wave of awakening into harmony.  Rarely were we told that it might require some sort of action on our part to bring about the changes we wished to see.

Throughout the 1990s, and the years of war and disaster following 9/11, it became obvious that it would take real work to change the habits of an imbalanced, consuming society threatening to annihilate itself.  While a courageous few rose to the challenge, the rest of us shirked it.  Instead, we wandered off to indulge in our own personal, pathless quests.  After all, our spirituality practically demanded that we detach and disengage and devote ourselves to simply being present.  Plus, there were all those attacks from the status quo, and that image problem with the media...

Today, spiritual idealists have no allegiance to any path, no sense of obligation to any ideology or set of values, no sense of responsibility for anything or anyone but ourselves. We are disengaged to the point of docility. (See re-election of George W. Bush, the Iraq War, et al). As Michael Lerner points out in the book Common Sense, we spiritual idealists by and large lack the “backbone” to fight for our ideological positions, or “to stick with our most visionary perspective.”  Barbara Ehrenreich is much more straightforward; she calls it “craven cowardice.”

Early Christians walked unflinching toward the hungry lions, early scientists stood unflinching in the face of the Inquisitors, but early New Agers turned and slinked away.

Arrested development

How did this happen?  Historically, spiritual idealists have always been the most impassioned participants in our fights for a better world.  Think of any battle over the past few centuries -- for the abolition of slavery, for the rights of workers, for women’s suffrage, for civil rights, for peace in time of war -- and idealists have always led the way, risking money, comfort, safety, and even their very lives to stand up for what is right and moral and just. 

So why are idealists today so apathetic? Our dream for a harmonious future is bigger and more hopeful than ever -- why does it not inspire us to work for it more assertively?  Isn’t the whole point of a spiritual quest to better see ourselves as part of a greater whole?  Why do we put ourselves and our own comfort before the greater good?

Clearly, we’ve become stuck in place.  And it’s not in the profoundly deep “staying present and working our way down to reality” place.  It’s more of a flat “I should be able to do -- or not do -- whatever I want” ego-centered place.  Whatever we’ve learned about seeing through meaningless thought-constructs and being present hasn‘t served us very well. 

Overall, we spiritual idealists seem to be suffering an acute state of arrested spiritual development.  I am the first to admit it is true for me. Looking back at my own life, I can see I went decades without any change in my worldview or any real change in my habits.  Throughout several marriages and divorces and raising three children -- along with unexpected deaths, numerous health crises and reversals of fortunes -- I learned many lessons about myself and how to navigate life.  But all in all, my philosophy remained intact and unthreatened.  Not even the tragic events of 9/11, and the intense wave of anger and grief I felt for the victims, was able to knock me from my point of view. 

We’re stuck, and there’s no getting around it, not when the evidence is all around us.  Our technology has advanced by leaps and bounds, but our social systems, our institutions, our politics, along with our general approach to problems are all still the same.  Socially, very little has changed since the 1970s, despite our common acknowledgement that these systems don’t work.    

We’re stuck, and in order to figure out just how we got into this situation -- and how to get out of it --we first have to find out exactly where we are stuck.  And merely “being present” with our stuck-ness is not going to help us figure that out.  We need to look at a map of the spiritual territory, and see how spiritual development unfolds.  We need to understand the concept of spiritual stages.

Go to "The Map of Spiritual Growth "