About ten years ago, I lived in Oregon and worked for my county in a new youth drug and alcohol prevention program that coordinated the efforts of many different agencies.  A few months into the job, I attended a prevention conference, and in one of the workshops on multicultural issues, we were asked to introduce ourselves and explain why we were there.  Most people said things like, “My boss sent me,” or ”I want to learn more about being racially sensitive,” things like that. 

I stood up and bluntly said, “I’m here because I want to save the world.”

A long moment of uncomfortable silence, and blank stares, greeted this. The facilitator said “Isn’t that nice,“ condescending tone unmistakable, then moved on.  Even in a group of idealistic teachers and social workers, my statement smacked of naïve 1960s hippie-style idealism, or worse -- embarrassing 1980s New Age-style utopian blather.

Back when the New Age first appeared on the cultural radar, many a New Age writer waxed rhapsodic over what a New Age would look like.  War and hunger and disease would be a distant memory, the air would be bright and clean, birds would sing in abundant trees, and people would hop in their solar-fueled cars and head off to perform meaningful jobs wearing blissful smiles of inner peace. 

Now let’s compare that with reality in 2009:  The nightly news shows us death tolls from bombs (many of them ours) exploding all over the Middle East and Europe, experts setting the odds on terrorists exploding nuclear devices here in America, as well as the acute suffering of refugees from famines and wars and disease.  Here in the U.S., people are losing their jobs and their homes and living in their cars, while entire cities run dry of gas and our government is bailing out Wall Street to avoid complete economic collapse.  Meanwhile, we are absorbing one climactic catastrophe after the next -- freak storms and yearly 100-year floods and wildfires and hurricanes and ice shelves the size of Manhattan collapsing into oceans with vast dead zones of floating garbage.

No wonder people like me who prattle on about saving the world get blank stares and condescension. 

Idealism, writes Todd Gitlin in his wonderful book, Letters to a Young Activist, can actually shield the status quo by appearing so “exotic” that it renounces any hope of serious influence and “leaves center stage to the tough guys of realism.”

He’s absolutely right.  But at the same time, it is only very tough and hard realism that allows us to recognize that if we do not change the course of society, it is going to collapse in on us and kill us all -- or at least make life so miserable and desperate and marginal that it won’t be worth living. Those who don’t recognize that are the true, out-of-touch dreamers.

We have to insist on saving the world, no matter how much condescension we encounter.  We have no choice, not if we want our children and grandchildren to have a chance at decent lives.  However, we must also make sure our efforts are grounded in reality. 

“Resist the temptation to think you are ushering in an earthly paradise,” Gitlin continues.  “Fantasies of an ideal realm will not do.  The place to stand must always be solid, substantial, right here at hand.” 

So then, realistically speaking, what would a New Age of harmony look like? 

Choosing the future

Back in the 1980s, I confess I was one of those who believed that awareness was building throughout the whole of the population.  I believed this growing awareness would, at any moment, build to the critical point that would allow us to see ourselves in each other, allows us to lay down our weapons and begin caring for each other, allow peace and prosperity to reign -- and solar-fueled cars to zip along the highways. 

It was not really such a crazy notion; after all, I was only 20 years old and in my short lifetime, society had advanced in huge stunning leaps – with civil rights and the peace movement and the women’s movement and men walking on the moon. What reason did I have to expect that all that progress, however chaotic, would come to a screeching halt?

Now that I have a better grasp on history, and a better understanding of the dialectic of progress, I understand why there haven't been any stunning leaps of late.  I still believe that human beings are meant to evolve in awareness, and that this will happen on its own, in fits and starts as it always has.  The problem is that the normal pace of evolution is lagging behind the pace of societal breakdown from the failures of the old paradigm. Human consciousness is not evolving nearly as fast as the planet is degenerating in its ability to sustain us.  

Clearly, we long ago sailed past our chance to create utopia, and now it is simply a matter of surviving long enough to fight another day.  This might be one of our first critical junctures in history where “it could go either way” (the dawning of the nuclear age being the very first), but it is certainly not our last.  Life on this increasingly crowded planet will likely always be teetering on the brink of disaster -- and the efforts of idealists will always be our only hope of keeping us all from crashing over the edge.

Whatever a real New Age might look like, we’re not going to get there in one glorious moment.  There will be no magic tipping point when we will finally be able sit back with a “Whew!  Mission accomplished.”  Rather, every moment will continue to be critical, and I imagine a New Age-saved world will look very much like the world today. 

The news will still be full of stories of violence and bombs exploding, stories of Third World countries struggling to pull themselves up from chaos to order, and stories of terrible weather as the climate absorbs the damage done over the past hundred years.  Our politicians will still do epic battle in Washington, police will still arrest criminals, people will still go to church and grope their way toward God, and our children will still go to school and be under too much influence of Hollywood and the celebrity culture.

In a realistic New Age, most of our problems will not disappear.  But there will be subtle differences.  You might not be able to put your finger on it, but the panicked bite of the times will be gone.  Instead of inching closer to disaster, we will be inching away from it, and you will start to see glimpses of it here and there.  A story about soldiers coming home and the lessening of anti-American sentiment around the world.  A story about high school dropout rates falling thanks to new tax dollars going to public schools.  A story about unemployment being at its lowest point in thirty years thanks to the explosion in green jobs and the alternative fuels industry. 

You may notice a few new “spiritual centers” popping up in your town, and some of your friends trying out meditation or yoga, and seeming less stressed.  Another friend might invite you to do some volunteer work with her at a homeless shelter one night a week.  Your drive to work will suddenly seem faster because more companies are encouraging their employees to telecommute.  And then one day you will see it -- a cute little solar-fueled car zipping by…

Or maybe it won’t look like that at all.  Who knows how a New Age will really unfold?  It could take many rocky decades of things getting worse before they get better.  Then again, if a few million more people evolve toward idealism, and another million or so idealists evolve into the integral stage of activism, we might be surprised how fast the rusty gears of change engage again.  It’s possible we could even see a stunning leap or two. 

The only thing I know for sure is that we certainly will not see a New Age of any kind if we don’t envision it, don’t consciously choose it.  And we must choose it over and over again, each and every day. Saving the world must become a way of life, a way of understanding oneself in relation to the world. 

Still, I have not answered the question of how the New Age can change the world.  What makes any New Ager so sure that idealism holds the means to a better-world end?

Paradigms, old and new

One thing, and one thing only, defines the meaning of your life, forms the basis for your decisions, and guides your contribution to the choices made by your society.   And that one thing is your philosophy -- your set of beliefs about why you are here on this planet and what you’re supposed to accomplish while you are here.

We all have a philosophy, there’s no way around it.  And that philosophy determines what we do with our hours and days, how we spend our money, how we vote, how we support this issue or that, how loudly or quietly we support it, how responsible we feel for each other, how likely we are to get involved.  And as true as this is on the individual level, it is even more true on the collective level.

Our collective philosophy gives us the basis for collective policy decisions, lets us know whether or not we should go to war, or cut down trees, or invest in schools, or regulate markets, or rehabilitate criminals.  

Today, our collective philosophy is largely determined by the longstanding paradigms of authoritarian dualism and capitalistic materialism.  Most people would agree that the policy decisions coming from these two paradigms have not been healthy for people or planet.  (Not exactly true, the old paradigm works great for the rich, but even they can't hide from global warming.)

As the old paradigms are failing us so abjectly, we are clearly in urgent need of a “new paradigm” to guide us to better choices for self, society and planet. “For 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 provides a fully formed alternative -- an idealistic paradigm that has been tested throughout many centuries of spiritual practice, and been sharpened and refined in these last decades of scientific advance and study.  It is a paradigm which provides us with a new, common sense way of approaching problems in which our unity and interdependence and the well-being of the whole point us to obvious solutions. 

But, of course, as we know from our map of spiritual development, we don’t just need one paradigm, we need the structures of a number of increasingly-evolved paradigms that allow movement up the spiral of growth through many stages.  The key to saving the world is not getting everyone to adopt an idealistic paradigm, but rather to raise the center of spiritual gravity for everyone across all the paradigms.  More of us have to move from Stage One to Stage Two, from Stage Two to Stage Three, and so on.    

Stage Four idealism is not somehow more important than any other stage on the spiral, but neither is it less important. As the most popular and accessible form of Stage Four idealism available to us over the last forty years, the New Age for a long while formed a vital bridge between Stage Three and Five. Unfortunately, the New Age has dropped off the cultural radar, been kicked to the side, and as I’ve argued in these pages, our spiritual evolution has suffered as a result. 

Without the New Age, the spiral breaks down and our evolution remains unfinished.  Those ready to grow from Stage Three skepticism are unable to find a well-marked path toward idealism, and they either stagger off on an uncertain hunt for it hidden in pockets of the culture, or more likely, they stay unsatisfied in Stage Three.  Meanwhile, those of us in Stage Four have no solid structure beneath us to support movement, and no particular philosophy to point the way beyond.  We are alone, isolated, stuck -- and blocking the spiral for all others trying to find their way.

Without New Age-style idealism to provide a prominent alternative paradigm, we all end up stuck, no matter which stage of the spiral currently dictates our worldview.  In my opinion, bringing the New Age back not only can save the world, it may, in fact, be the only way to save the world -- by giving us the means to unstick ourselves and restart our collective evolution.

You can help rebuild a strong and proud New Age by declaring yourself a part of it.  In identifying with the movement, and living by its principles, you can create a connection in the social field that will strengthen around you and support your growth and that of many others.  In identifying with the New Age, you can help restore a most vital piece of infrastructure on a spiral of development which holds the flow of all of humanity.

In identifying with a New Age, you can help make it possible for each of us to save the world.

Go to The Opportune Moment .