In their book, “Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society,” the authors point out that when people “start to see themselves as the source of their problems, they invariably discover a new capacity to create results they truly desire.”

Essentially, we will remain powerless to effect change until we ask the critical question, “What have we done to ourselves?”

Taking Responsibility

It is difficult – and painful -- to accept that we can be part of problem.  It is so much more logical to blame the state of the world on them, the unaware hordes with all their unenlightened policies. But others’ lack of awareness is not nearly as problematic as aware people who do little to effect change.

As Andrew Cohen writes, we need “to embrace the overwhelming urgency of the evolutionary crisis we are in.”  While many of us can intellectually appreciate our predicament, he adds, that’s not enough. 

“We have to bridge the gap between our capacity to appreciate the problem and our willingness to actually become the solution ourselves,” Cohen adds.

In other words, we have to stop shifting the burden onto others to change – a strategy doomed to failure – and do something differently ourselves.  The future has always depended on us, not them.    

Changing course

We idealists may have unintentionally wandered off toward irrelevance, but we can turn around and head back to the heart of the matter at any time.

Do we want gain more spiritual payoff by remaining anonymously free, or do we want to engage in a larger relationship with spirit and community?  Is it better to keep spirituality a separate “category” of our lives, or do we want to make it part of who we are? 

Yes, it is important to understand the drawbacks of labels, how they can limit and reduce, and how the ego craves them for its own purposes.  But rejecting “on principle” an emblem like the New Age, an emblem with the potential to unify and empower us as a group, has proved to be terribly shortsighted.  We have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. 

Instead of allowing the New Age emblem to generate a sense of community, we discarded the symbol and descended into fragmentation.  Instead of promoting the New Age as a symbol for spiritual awakening, we allowed our critics to define it as cultural incoherence, a “spiritual seeking that went everywhere and nowhere,” as Schmidt put it.

It is true that the desire to belong to a group can be based in ego.  But even more egoic is the idea that we are too unique to belong in any group at all. And the idea that spirituality is too pure a process to be sullied by naming it is elitist and unenlightened. Idealism has never demanded such righteousness.

It remains important to develop individual consciousness. This is the foundation for all genuine growth.  But at some point we need to step beyond the self into the greater world. Even as we “preserve the holiness of the single I,” writes Benedikter, we need “to form a community where those single I’s can transform themselves and break through” and realize our deepest collective purpose.

The "New" New Age

Of course, we might now recognize it is time to make a step toward community, we might even feel ourselves ready. But if we are to unite under a single emblem, why choose New Age?  Especially since most spiritual idealists have never really felt an affiliation with the term New Age, at least not in its pop culture connotation of “New Age means woo woo.”  

But if we look at the New Age of the 21st century, we find it is a much different movement that the one than that burst so colorfully pell-mell onto the scene in the 1980s.  The faddish, trendy surface has been scuffed away by the well-aimed slings and arrows of its critics.  And as Ann Powers writes of alternative bohemian culture which grows from idealism, “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.” Indeed, New Age spirituality has been such a quiet, individual matter for over a decade, it could not help but evolve into a more mature, more authentic spirituality. 

In other words, 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 grown up and we are now much better prepared “to confront and reinvigorate the premises of society.”

It is time, Powers adds, for these important matters “to overshadow the flashy performances of the past.” 

I agree.  It is time for us to claim the power of our transformation.  

Go to Pride Power.