In 1976 a friend Mark Satin published a groundbreaking book, New Age Politics:  Healing Self and Society.  It was a slim volume, privately published, lacking the polish that a large, mainstream publisher could have given it.  But for all its modest appearance, it was a revolutionary document, the first attempt to marry the idealistic philosophy of the New Age movement with a political vision.  The purpose was to provide a means by which the good will and visionary ideas of the New Age could be translated into effective public policy and social change; it was a manifesto for a movement. 

An attempt was made in the late Seventies to translate the ideas in this book into a political party. This effort foundered in part due to problems with organization and fund raising largely because as the United States entered the Reagan years, the New Age movement itself turned away from being a transformative social movement.  Emphasis shifted towards self-development and psychic phenomena; attention turned inward to explore personal states of consciousness rather than outward to grapple with issues of societal wellbeing and wholeness.  Instead of being a symbol for positive change and a hopeful future, the New Age became an image of ridicule and narcissism.

Now Teena Booth and newagepride.org is daring to pick up the tattered and torn banner of the New Age and restore to it the meaning it once had. Once again, a passionate advocate for a better, more holistic future for our world is seeking to marshal a transformative spirit and vision to empower a movement for change.  This Web site [and Teena’s book Unfinished Evolution] seeks to do for our time what Mark Satin’s book did thirty years ago. It calls us to remember why many of us were attracted to the idea of a new age in the first place and the promise it held to make a difference in the world.  It once again calls us to heal self and society.

The New Age may seem like a strange candidate for such a calling.  In recent years, if we hear about it at all, it’s usually in a way intended to dismiss a person or group as self-indulgent or out of touch with the “real world.”  To be “New Age” is to be at the fringe of society, engaging in marginalized beliefs or practices.

But the idea of a New Age is hardly marginal.  It is an idea as old as humankind, found in all our visions of a better future.  It may spin off into utopian fantasies but it’s also present in all the dreams that ultimately lead to human progress.  It is at the heart of our power to imagine; it embodies our human capacity to revision the present in ways that open the doors to new possibilities and potentials.  In essence, the New Age idea says simply that the past need not determine the future.  Positive change is possible.

The beginnings of the movement

The modern New Age movement has many roots. Many of them are in Christian millenarianism, the expectation of the Second Coming of Christ and the end of history as we know it.  Indeed, as far back at the Twelfth Century, the mystic and monk Joachim of Fiore was prophesying in words that would parallel those of many modern authors about the coming of a new revelation and the birth of a New Age that would usher in a whole new spiritual consciousness for humanity. 

More recently, parts of what have become New Age thought can be found in the Transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau; likewise, the New Thought movement that grew out of the work of such people as Phineas Quimby, Mary Baker Eddy, and Ernest Holmes fed significant ideas into the mix that became in the late Sixties and early Seventies the New Age movement in the United States. 

The American Theosophist Alice Bailey was also writing about a coming New Age in the early years of the Twentieth Century, and decades before the performers in the musical Hair sang about the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, astrologers were anticipating this transition from one astrological age to another occurring in our time.

I first encountered the idea of the New Age in the late fifties.  Those were the days when the Cold War was heating up and fears of a nuclear war were rampant.  Some people were building backyard bomb shelters, but others were paying attention to prophecies received by different psychics, such as Edgar Cayce, the “Sleeping Prophet,”  that proclaimed that a New Age was about to begin ushered in by some form of apocalyptic event that would devastate the old order.  This event might be catastrophic earth changes or World War III or even the appearance of beings from another world.  The UFO phenomenon was ten years old at that time and many of those who believed we were being visited by helpful beings from other worlds were also those who believed in the prophecies of a New Age.

I found the idea of a New Age exciting, one that touched me deeply. But I was turned off by the apocalyptic fervor and expectation.  The reason was that all my life I have been in contact and communication with non-physical, invisible beings, a fact that makes me as strange in the eyes of some people as UFOs themselves.  Learning about the New Age, I questioned my invisible colleagues and was told that yes, humanity was in a time of profound and historic transformation and that a new age was emerging but that it would not come about through any form of apocalypse. 

To my inner friends, the New Age was not an event—certainly not a world-changing disaster—but a symbol of humanity’s creative power to shape its future.  In other words, the New Age was an invitation to understand and use an innate capacity for change.

When I broached this idea with some of the people in the emerging New Age movement, I was usually rebuffed. The glamour of apocalypse and prophecy was often too strong.  I came to know many of the psychics who were the sources of these prophecies, and many of them had a deep seated hatred for the existing society (and, I think in some cases, for humanity itself) which I always felt fed their visions of planetary catastrophes.  In other words, many of their prophecies were projections of their own feelings of alienation. And needless to say, none of these prophecies ever came to pass.

The movement reshapes itself with the times

In 1965 I became a spiritual teacher and lecturer. Although I have come to be associated with the New Age movement, in the beginning of my work I spoke about spiritual development, not the New Age.  It wasn’t until 1970 when I became a co-director of the Findhorn Foundation Community, an international, spiritual New Age community in northern Scotland, that I began to lecture directly about the possibility of an emerging new culture.  But before that, the audiences that came to hear what I had to say were often the same people who were interested in the New Age, so in that sense I was part of the movement since its modern inception.

During the sixties, I lived and taught in the San Francisco area. This area was the heart of several major social movements that emerged at that time.  There was the anti-war movement that had one of its major centers in the student body of the University of California at Berkeley. There was also the drug and hippy counterculture centered in the Height-Ashbury region of San Francisco whose slogan was to turn on, tune in, and drop out.  Further down the San Francisco peninsula around Stanford University in Palo Alto, humanistic and transpersonal psychologies were evolving at this time as well, giving birth to the human potential movement. 

The convergence of these movements created a different kind of womb for the New Age.  When the New Age was thought of as the result of some prophesied disaster, there was no room for human agency or creativity.  One simply waited until the apocalypse came to usher in the new era.  But both the civil rights and anti-war movements demonstrated the power of individual citizens to make a difference. 

Likewise, the human potential and counterculture movements also proclaimed the innate power of the individual to make radical changes in consciousness and behavior.  Under the influence of these ideas, the New Age metamorphosed into something very different from what it had been. It became a vision for culturally creative and visionary individuals to remake society in a more humane and holistic image.  In other words, the New Age wasn’t something we waited for; it was something we could bring into being.

As the Seventies began, the New Age sought to bring a spiritual visionary element to the forces of change represented by the antiwar, civil rights, and counterculture movements.  In a similar way, though this might seem strange today given its current reputation for narcissistic self-involvement, the New Age movement took the self-development focus of the human potential movement and put it into a cultural, collective and visionary context.  It proclaimed the power of self-development as a way of unleashing one’s creative power to imagine and work for social change.

This movement took on a new form in the early Seventies with the Arab oil embargo which raised petroleum prices to unheard of heights. Ever since Rachel Carson published her landmark book, Silent Spring, in 1962, there had been a growing environmental movement.  With lines at the gasoline stations stretching around the block in many American cities, the need for conservation took center stage, which in turn bolstered ecological awareness.  ustainability became a buzzword as various forms of alternative energies began to be explored with greater social support. This in turn gave the New Age movement a more ecological and earth-oriented character as well. 

The New Age hits its stride

In 1971, a cultural historian from M.I.T., William Irwin Thompson, published a book, At the Edge of History, about the transformation of modern culture. It was a finalist in 1972 for the National Book Award (the Whole Earth Catalog was the winner that year). It was followed three years later in 1974 by Passages about Earth: an Exploration of the New Planetary Culture.  These two books cemented Thompson’s reputation as a literate and scholarly spokesperson for the possibilities—indeed, the need—for a global social transformation.

In 1974, Thompson founded the Lindisfarne Association. Among its goals were “the fostering of a new and healthier balance between nature and culture through the research and development of appropriate technologies, architectural settlements and compassionate economies for meta-industrial villages and convivial cities;” and “the illumination of the spiritual foundations of political governance through scholarship and artistic communications that foster a global ecology of consciousness beyond the present ideological systems of warring industrial nation-states, outraged traditional societies, and ravaged lands and seas.”

As part of the Association, Thompson created the Lindisfarne Fellows, a gathering of scientists, artists, mathematicians, economists, ecologists, political scientists, and spiritual teachers who would meet once or twice a year to discuss and collaborate with each other’s ideas and projects, all in pursuit of a more holistic and planetary vision of human culture.  A list of the Fellows is like a Who’s Who of the men and women who were the leading edge thinkers of that time, including such individuals as microbiologist Lynn Margulis, economist E. F. Schumacher, poet Wendell Berry, scientist James Lovelock, mathematician Ralph Abraham, anthropologist Gregory Bateson, futurist Stewart Brand, monk David Steindl-Rast, architect Paolo Soleri, ecologists John and Nancy Todd, and composer Paul Winter.

As one of the Fellows myself, I soon came to realize that this group of individuals and their work collectively represented the very heart of what the New Age was about.  For this group, as for many others during the Seventies, the guiding image of the New Age was not some apocalyptic prophecy but the development of a planetary consciousness and the emergence of a holistic society.  The catchphrase was to “think globally but act locally” in order to create a better future.  It was in this context that Mark Satin published his book New Age Politics. 

This was the New Age I knew best and the one I lectured on continuously for over ten years.  And it seemed for a time, particularly during the Carter Presidency when, for example, his Administration was actively supporting efforts in alternative energy research and application, that the possibility of real cultural transformation was at hand.  An example of some of the pioneering work that was done in this area is that of Belden and Lisa Paulson and the creation of the High Wind ecological and alternative energy community and center in central Wisconsin. This was overtly a New Age center at the time, the story of which has been recently published in Odyssey of a Practical Visionary.  For anyone interested in the history of the New Age movement as a social, environmental and political force in the Seventies, I recommend it highly.

The movement takes a turn

But everything changed during the Eighties. It was as if America’s and the world’s collective spirit took one look at the possibility of transformation and said, “Um, maybe later…”  With the Reagan years and the return of cheap oil, there was a pulling back from all the efforts at conservation and the research into alternative energies. 

The New Age movement changed, too, slowly at first, but then more rapidly as interest in cultural transformation shifted to interest in psychic phenomena and personal development, a change in emphasis that became cemented in the public awareness with the airing of Shirley MacLaine’s miniseries on television Out on a Limb. Her description of her adventures with channels and psychics, past lives and power points, and esoteric spiritualities was enthralling but also defined  the meaning of “New Age” for most people from then on. 

The effects of this were immediate and dramatic for me. Literally the day after her miniseries ended, I went into my local bookstore, part of a national chain, and discovered that the label “New Age” had been moved that morning from the shelves that contained books on alternative energy, ecology, new science, and cultural change to the shelves that held books on astrology and psychic development.  Within a matter of weeks, organizations that had hired me to give talks on the New Age wrote either to cancel the engagements or to ask that I drop the term “New Age” from my title.  In a stunningly short period of time, New Age went from meaning a positive, transformative social movement for a better future—the kind of New Age Teena writes about so eloquently in this book—to a private quest for esoteric spiritual development.

Of course, the real impetus and work for cultural change continued under other names.  The desire to envision and work towards a better future is innate in human beings and is unaffected by labels as such.  But as Teena Booth describes, the shift in direction for the New Age movement did have a dampening effect on many thousands of people who might otherwise have played a more significant role in the political and social events of the past twenty years.

Lessons learned

It’s possible to look at the story I’ve told and say that the New Age failed. Indeed, in the mid-Eighties, the leader of a successful New Age center said to me in some despair, “the New Age is dead.” It’s possible to say that when times are tough, as they were in the Seventies, people look for transformation but when times get better and everything is going along fine, particularly economically, as they were for many in the Eighties and Nineties, people simply want to keep the status quo.  But I think there is a cyclical movement to changes in consciousness and society.

From my point of view, the modern New Age movement was the result of a powerful influx and stimulation of spiritual energies beginning in the mid-Fifties, setting in motion changes in human consciousness.  I think of it as a tide coming in to shore and reaching a high water mark in the late Seventies and then, as tides do, receding.  A time of activity and turmoil was replaced by a time of consolidation. It’s a natural cycle and gives an organism a chance to reflect, digest, and assimilate. 

In effect, what became known as the New Age movement in the late Eighties and since then is in some ways only the surface moisture left on the land as the water recedes, but underneath the surface, largely out of sight, water is soaking the land and germinating seeds. The “New Age” ideas of the Fifties and Sixties have taken root in society in forms such as holistic healing, yoga, health food stores, meditation, and a greater ecological awareness. The efforts to transform society in positive ways haven’t disappeared; they people involved with them just don’t want to call them “New Age” anymore for fear of not being taken seriously.

Still, in one important way, the shift in the perception of the New Age from that of a William Irwin Thompson or a Findhorn to that of a Shirley MacLaine is more apparent than real.  The real New Age has always been more about capability than about content, a point often overlooked in discussions of the “death” of the New Age. What changes—what has changed—is largely content, what people talk about when they say they are “New Age.”  What has not changed is the sense that we have a power to keep the future from being simply a rerun of the past.  We have the innate capacity to choose and implement transformation.

This capacity doesn’t by itself determine the nature of that transformation. We can make things worse as well as better.  Intelligence, wisdom, love, compassion, a sense of the larger wholes of which we are a part, and skill in action are all required to shape our creativity in positive directions.  But we don’t and won’t bring these qualities into play unless we first understand and believe that we each, through our attitudes and our actions, really can make a difference in our world.  That is what the New Age is really about.

Does “New Age” have a future?

In her book, Unfinished Evolution [and throughout this Web site], Teena Booth brings back the possibility that New Age can once again inspire people to engage with society and act with vision to create a safer, saner, healthier future. She links the valuable work that has been and is being done to explore and integrate new forms of consciousness and self development with an engagement with society that can be healing and transformative.

Is this possible?  Can she succeed? Certainly the times are ripe. As in the Seventies, we again face rising oil prices and the need to rethink and change our lifestyles. The environmental challenges are more threatening than they were thirty years ago, largely because we let slip the opportunities that we had then to make meaningful changes.  We are faced with global climate change and other effects that also will force us to rethink and change the way we live. A spirit of anxiety and anticipated apocalypse is again rising in the land. All the elements are there to make a call for creating a new age once more meaningful.

Can the New Age overcome twenty years of ridicule and marginalization? Can its adherents overcome twenty years of focus on the self to embrace once more a larger vision and the challenges and responsibilities that come with it?  These are vital questions, for which I do not have an answer. 

It’s possible that “New Age” has had its day, shot its bolt, and now some newer term must appear to galvanize the spirit and focus our energies.  But as Teena points out, none of the candidates so far have made the grade. And like her, I believe that there is inherent in the term New Age a simplicity and a directness that is hard to beat when it comes to talking about new visions for the future.  For that is what the work is about. Put simply and directly, we must create a new age for the benefit of our children and all our descendents, or we are lost.

Having lectured on the New Age for many years, in recent time I have been focused on developing what I call an incarnational spirituality. This looks at the inner, creative resources we have as individuals to make a difference in our lives and in the life of our world.  I have not written or spoken on the New Age hardly at all for ten years. It wasn’t that I had given up on it; I simply had other work to do.

But when I received Teena’s manuscript and went to her Web site, I felt a thrill and a passion I had not felt for some time.  I felt like an old New Age workhorse that was ready to wear the saddle again.  I was inspired.  It honored the work that I and colleagues of mine such as Belden Paulson and William Irwin Thompson have done over the years on behalf of the New Age.  It told me that the New Age as an idea, as a call to service, as a vision of constructive and compassionate change, and as a statement of human possibility has a future, not just a past. 

So I will end by saying again what I said in A Pilgrim in Aquarius, a book I wrote many years ago at Findhorn’s request:  I am proud to be a New Ager.

David Spangler

June 2009           

(This essay is excerpted from the foreword to Unfinished Evolution: How A New Age Revival Can Change Your Life and Save the World.)

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