“Community is something more than the sum of its parts, its individual members,” writes M. Scott Peck. “What is this ‘something more?’ Even to begin to answer that, we enter a reality that is not so much abstract as almost mystical.”

Anyone familiar with New Age literature has read descriptions of the universe as a field of energy that connects everything within it to everything else. Different writers from different disciplines will assign aspects of this field different names.

The biologist Rupert Sheldrake talks about the “morphic field,” an organizing intelligence within organisms -- whether that organism is a cell system, an animal system, a human system or a social system.  Or, from the discipline of physics, we find David Bohm theorizing an “implicate order,” which he described as a “language” that arises from reality, allowing different parts of the universe to communicate with each other.

Looking from within the discipline of psychology, Carl Jung identified the “collective unconscious” which connects all individuals and explains shared instincts and common experiences such as particular dreams. Meanwhile, the inventor Buckminster Fuller identified the abstract principle that holds everything together as “pattern integrity.”

What these disparate thinkers are telling us is that a collectivity creates a special dynamic.  Whenever we join with others in a shared identity, and mutually agree to operate using the same set of ideals or “language,” we create a social field that becomes a generative source for everyone within it.  This field gathers us up, invisibly connecting us.  And within this growing network of connections, we are empowered by the law of “increasing returns,” through an ever-growing series of positive feedback loops. 

Look at how traffic works, how a multitude of people can move together at high speeds down a highway in a feat of remarkable collective cooperation.  We each, at separate times and places, agreed to take on specific rules of the road because those rules allow us all to get where we are going without careening into each other.  Strangers who have never met each other are able to travel together in perfect accord in order to get to different locations.  This social field has created a positive feedback loop:  The more we use the system of roads, the more roads are built, and the more places we can go.

By taking on the identity of “New Age,” we can form a social field with other like-minded idealists.  We will continue to move along toward our own individual goals, but our shared understanding of “the rules of the road” will allow us to move more quickly.  More sensible patterns will emerge, more new doors will open, and helpers will pop up more often in a synergistic multiplier effect.

The law of increasing returns

In his report on a group synergy conference sponsored by the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Robert Kenney explains how experiences of communion in groups taps into the law of increasing returns, for what tends to transform the group members “serves not only them but also those with whom they subsequently interact.”  The effects, he adds, “strengthen over time and smaller fields would influence larger fields throughout the culture, thereby inducing more frequent and more intense experiences of communion and synergy.” 

Any social field, no matter its size, will inevitably impact the whole, which in turn increasingly impacts the individual, drawing us out of the ego and helping us to locate the self in soul --  the part of us that is connected to others through the field.  The pull toward the whole steadily weakens the gravitational pull of the ego which keeps us stuck in place. We grow weary of playing only our own loud inconsonant notes on our own, we begin to yearn to join the common score and play in harmony with others.  In other words, we begin to resonate with the needs of the whole rather than the demands of the ego. 

As Kenney goes on to explain:

Resonant means ‘resounding, re-echoing; increasing the intensity of sounds by sympathetic vibration.’ Group members can come into increasingly greater levels of resonance -- empathetic vibration and rapport with each other and with life itself... A resonant group does seem to be able to allow a greater, more intense flow of energy to come through it and to channel this energy for constructive purposes and in service. [And] what sound, vibration, or energy might a group be reinforcing, prolonging and allowing to flow through it, via empathetic resonance? I would suggest that it is Spirit and its manifestations.

Identity connects us to the social field and serves as the passport to growth, to community, to Spirit itself.  By taking on a spiritual identity, we can better change ourselves.  By taking on a spiritual identity, we can better change the world.

So for argument’s sake, let’s say this is exactly what we decide to do.  Let’s say we are all good and tired of being invisible and ineffective.  Let’s say we feel ready to join with our fellow idealists into an identifiable collective that will allow us to set common goals and work together to create a real transformation in society.  Why on earth should we keep calling ourselves “New Age?” 

The term has been maligned and misused and misunderstood for decades now.  So why not let it die?  Why not find a better emblem? 

Go to Why "New Age" Is Still the Right Emblem.