All communities form according to a predictable pattern, says M. Scott Peck in The Different Drum, his analysis of how communities work.  He outlined four general stages of community, and the first is pseudo-community, in which all members are nice to each other, no one challenges each other, no one goes very deep. This is certainly an apt description of the New Age in the 1980s.

Next, there is a stage of chaos and blatant resistance to community in which people defend their positions and their place. Clearly, most New Age idealists spent the 1990s in resistance and refusal to identify themselves as anything at all. 

The third stage, which I believe has been unfolding these past few years, Peck calls emptiness.  In this stage, people begin to release their expectations, preconceptions and judgments which prevent the formation community, and start understanding their need for each other.

This brings us to the final stage, or “true community,” in which the members of the community finally begin relating to each other with true empathy, and together discover a new ability to reach their common goals.  I believe the New Age has reached that threshold now. I believe the movement has evolved through all the stages of preparation and is poised for the development of a true New Age community.

The opportune moment

I have been working on these pages for months, years, reading everything I can find about the New Age movement and its dramatic rise and fall in our culture.  I have studied its philosophy, its meaning, and its promise as a vehicle for transformation.  And now, as I prepare to rest my case for a New Age revival, I wonder -- how practical is this effort?  Have I been toiling on a pipe dream, or is revival a real possibility?

On one hand, it sounds a tremendous uphill battle to rekindle a movement that many assume to be extinct.  Sometimes I feel that me trying to talk people into bringing the New Age back is no more sensible than trying to get one of my favorite TV shows back on the air.  The kids on the Brady Bunch are all grown up and have moved on, as well they should.

On the other hand, rekindling the movement could be far easier than we‘d imagine.  After all, the idealistic movement formerly known as the New Age did not really die.  There are still just as many idealists in the world going quietly about their lives, working to live up to their ideals.  We merely stopped calling the movement the New Age and, without a name for it, stopped thinking about it as a collective force at all.  But the movement is still all around us, burgeoning with potential. 

William Irwin Thompson suggested even though the New Age “desiccated” in the 1990s, there is every reason to believe that, like a tightly-packed spore that goes underground for the winter, it will make itself known again.  “Even when there is no aboveground evidence that there is anything there," Thompson wrote, as soon as the opportune moment arrives, then wham!  The hidden and underground mushrooms will spring up everywhere, and we will once again have the opportunity to be part of a movement that changes lives. 

I believe Thompson is right, and the New Age movement is still with us, mostly anonymous, but thriving in its own fashion.  Of course, it’s a much different movement that the one than that burst so colorfully pell-mell onto the scene in the 1980s.  The faddish surface has been scuffed away by the well-aimed slings and arrows of its critics. We thankfully no longer hear much from trance channelers or those who tell tales of a past life on Atlantis. To be New Age is no longer a “hot” trend.

But as Ann Powers writes of alternative bohemian culture, “That its façade is out of fashion makes it easier to get to what’s inside.” Like bohemia, the New Age movement is no longer “a show staged for others.”  There is a lot less anything-goes silliness, and a lot more time-tested and truly helpful ideas to ground us and guide us. Most of us have read quite a few books now – we have experimented, contemplated, meditated and practiced.  We have taken many wrong roads, and also stumbled upon many right ones. 

In other words, the New Age has grown up, and now represents a more enlightened spirituality which takes into account knowledge of spiritual stages, as well as a spirituality more balanced between the individual and the community.  Today we are much better prepared, Powers adds, “to confront and reinvigorate the premises of society.”

And our society desperately needs to be reinvigorated.  The “old paradigm” has failed us utterly.  We are moving in great leaps ever closer to ruin -- from war and terrorism, from peak oil and economic collapse, and most ominous of all, from environmental disaster.   Advancing an idealistic paradigm and helping people move up the spiral of spiritual development is quite literally essential for our future survival. 

“This we know about the mysterious ways of the paradigm,” writes Professor Michael Nagler. “No alternative, no shift.  No matter how outmoded the old paradigm has become, no matter how dangerous, there must be an alternative before one can abandon it.” 

The New Age is our best alternative; in fact the only real alternative available -- offering us a conceptual framework for transformation, along with the language and imagery for change. 

The opportune moment is upon us.

But I have asked myself over and over, is it really possible?

In the end, no matter how certain I feel that the troubled world is waiting for us, hoping for us, rooting for us to discover our purpose -- I admit that I don’t really know what the world thinks or hopes for.  I only know what I think and hope for the world. 

I don’t know how sound my arguments, how far away from reality, or how close.  I don’t know what lies in people’s hearts, or what they think is possible.  I don’t know whether I am just like every other blind-faith believer in Stage Two spiritual development, preaching my little New Age gospel, so certain that if only the world would come round to seeing things my way, we’d all be saved from the disaster that looms.  

Yet as David Spangler writes, “One does not manage the New Age.  It is not a product that we create.  It is a process in which we participate.”  It is a process to which, he adds, we must surrender. 

So here I sit in Phoenix, Arizona, trying to surrender to what is, trying to detach from my hope that there are thousands of idealists out there, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, more -- who will read these words and say, yes!  Just what I’ve been thinking!  Yes, this is just what we need to do!  Identify ourselves, help each grow in spirit, help each other reach the next stage of development, help each other work for the transformation of society. Help each other, period.  

I don’t know if such a thing is possible.  I write as if we all somehow have a choice in this, when I believe the concept of choice is largely illusion. All our thoughts, feelings, ideas, beliefs, impulses --  are all formed by circuitry in our brains over which we have no control, are all formed by life.  “Something very vast is living you, doing you,” write the sages. 

Life happens, events unfold, and we trail after them, dreaming up stories to explain them, dreaming up movements and meaning.  But surely, this no accident.  Surely, this is what we are here to do, to dream up a life of love and meaning out of the chaos tumbling willy nilly from the void…

In the story I have dreamed for myself, I am New Age and will continue to be, whether history whisks it off into the dim past or not.  And if your life allows you the choice, I invite you to dream this story with me. I invite you to stand up for the New Age, wherever you are, today, now. 

The opportune moment is upon us.  It is time to claim the power of our identity.  It is time to set aside ego, and recognize soul.  It is time to open up the spiral of development, move from differentiation to integration, from individuality to collectivity.  It is time to give birth to a genuine New Age, with the power to transform not only ourselves, but our world. 

Go to What Next?.