I still remember – vividly – the first time I read Shirley MacLaine’s Out on a Limb. It was 1983, and I was 19 years old and full of questions about reality and meaning and my purpose in the being alive, questions that seemed unrealistically (and depressingly) answered by my family’s version of Christianity-from-the-cradle. I’d never been exposed to any other worldview, and as I read throughMacLaine’s New Age experience, I had to set the book down every few pages to catch my breath and hold my swimming head.
She wrote that God is energy, the divine energy that makes up everything that exists. She wrote that physical reality is an illusion, the surface reflection of a deeper spiritual reality. She wrote that we each may have lived before, past lives in which we probably knew our loved ones. And I thought, is she serious? Are such things possible?
From that moment on, I was a New Ager. Yet it wasn’t because I swallowed whole everything MacLaine wrote in her book (I did not). It was because encountering the ideas her book was like being grabbed and spun around to look at the world from a different direction, a direction that, as it turned out, felt natural and “right” to me.
Before I picked up her book, the only view I’d ever had of the world was the dualistic religious view presented to me by my family and my church, and the materialistic scientific view presented my school. These views had been so confidently and clearly delineated that it had never occurred to me there might be another. It quite literally "saved" me to discover a way out from between the mental rock and hard place of the two mainstream points of view.
I loved the New Age. I loved how it took this basic and beautiful philosophy and braided it together with humanistic psychology, quantum physics, and mystical religion, along with a thread of occult mysteries for color. I loved that it was inclusive and respectful and supportive, and how it made right and wrong seem so crystal clear. I loved that New Age ideas made life make sense to me, and gave me a sense of balance that allowed me to navigate through intense challenges and difficulties.
More than anything, I loved the sense of hope it gave me for the world in which I was raising three children. I wholeheartedly embraced the vision of the future presented by the New Age, in which more people would "awaken" to the greater spiritual reality, one individual at a time, until we reached critical mass and tipped the planet into an actual new age of harmony.
Life is change
And then, sometime in the early 1990s, I first read the news: "The New Age is dead." The entire movement was declared over and done. People I knew, and read about, were not just dropping the term, but were suddenly embarrassed by it (for a number of admittedly valid reasons). They preferred to be just plain "spiritual" now, or "holistic;" they preferred to shop for books marked "Body/Mind/Spirit." Once thriving New Age magazines folded, or changed their names to something bland and generic.
Over the next decade, there would even be studies published that questioned whether there had ever been such a thing as a "New Age movement" at all.
Like any good idealist, I practiced be-here-now acceptance, and detachment from outcomes and meaningless labels, so part of me simply moved on with the times and allowed the New Age to fade away. But from time to time, I would be surprised by feelings of dismay -- even anger -- at the loss. One minute I had been one of millions, riding the leading edge of a transformation sweeping over society; the next minute I was sitting alone in the dry corner of a dead movement.
For years I had proudly called myself a New Ager. Now what was I going to call myself? How would I identify and explain my beliefs to others?
Like most of us, I didn't call myself anything at all. I felt denied an identity. When filling out a form that asked my religious preference, I would check the box marked "Other," then sigh at the blank line beside it. There wasn't enough room to scrawl in "The spiritual idealism briefly known as New Age."
Of course, spiritual idealism was alive and well, and many of the authors who were connected to the movement were still publishing books that enjoyed brisk sales. But these books seemed to me to arrive unconnected from their rightful context. They were addressed to the individual reader, not an audience with a collective identity and therefore the means to join together and effect change.
While I still clung to my dream of the gradual awakening of society --the same dream passed on like a torch by idealists of every society, in every century -- I could not help but notice that even the most hardcore idealists I knew (including myself) were becoming more preoccupied with materialistic goals.
Something’s wrong with this picture
In 2001, Shirley MacLaine, the person who first introduced me to New Age ideas, the person who had represented "New Age" like no one else, traveled the country on a speaking tour. I bought a ticket for her well-attended stop in Phoenix, and went with the hope of hearing her say something about the passing of the movement. Did she mourn it as well?
But MacLaine did not mention the phrase "New Age" at all; she referred to herself instead as a "cultural creative." Yet, in the Q&A session that followed her talk, a woman stood up to say how "lonely" she felt in her spiritual quest, how difficult to find others who shared her beliefs. MacLaine said something about how we all need to be complete within ourselves, something smart and true. Still, I'm sure the woman left feeling no less lonely.
Truly astonishing and horrifying events soon followed. The attacks of 9/11. The war in Iraq. The rise in fundamentalist fervor and conservative power. And then came the election of 2004.
As far as I was concerned, this was it -- our big defining moment, the test to answer the question posed to us by the events of 9/11 about who we are and how to manage the problem of love versus hate. If there was any validity to the assumption of a steady awakening and enlightening of society, and any hope at all for a New Age of harmony, then surely this was the time, and this was the election, when it would become apparent.
Along with so many others I knew, the choice seemed so clear to me, so obvious, that I was sure that George W. Bush's conservative politics of fear and force could not possibly carry the day…
Except that it did. On November 2, 2004, long after the dawning of the Age of Aquarius in the most enlightened society on earth, the idealism of "we are all one" failed. Instead, the materialism of greed and the dualism of good vs. evil was voted into power. From an idealist's point of view, if American society was moving in any direction at all, it was backwards.
Face to face with my convictions
Now, it may seem that I have wandered from my New Age subject with this digression into presidential politics. But for me, the election of 2004 brought me face to face with my convictions in a way no personal crisis ever had.
I felt as depressed as anyone about the outcome of the election, but as my liberal friends despaired and made half-joking plans to leave a country that suddenly seemed "hostile territory," I heard myself talking about the lessons of idealism and the nature of progress. I talked about Hegel's dialectic (every thesis creates an antithesis in order to reach synthesis), how every expansion is necessarily followed by a contraction, how every step back after the two steps forward does not mean that progress is not being made.
And, like any good idealist, I practiced be-here-now acceptance, and detachment from outcomes, while gently holding to the dream of an eventual New Age of harmony for my children.
But I tell you what, since that election, I am really feeling the tension that has always existed within spiritual idealism – whether of the New Age, the Buddhist, the whatever variety – a tension between the imperative to accept what is, and the imperative to take responsibility for changing it.
And I tell you what else, I feel unreasonably certain that if the New Age had not been allowed to drift away like a fashion trend without value, but had been supported and refined and been allowed to mature, with its ideas shared and nurtured as the saving instruments they are, the world would be a much different place right now.
A clear purpose
I want the New Age back. And I am going to do whatever small things are in my power to do to bring it back. I intend to go out and find that vehicle and see if it will start up again, that remarkable vehicle that once made it possible for me and so many others to explore reality and share ideas and join together for the purpose of creating a better world.
I want it for myself, I want for my children, I want it for everyone.
Of course, the New Age may well and truly be dead, and I may simply need to better learn to let go and move on, learn to be plainly spiritual, or humbly holistic.
But just in case it's still there, hiding quietly in the hearts of idealists everywhere, waiting for the next moment of expansion to once again make itself known and take up its important work -- I am going to make my case on this Web site and get it out into the world. And I am going to ask you, and anyone who will listen, to help me in this cause.
It could be that in my stubbornness (or egotism perhaps, see Blog), I will find that in holding up my banner with “New Age” printed in bold, purple letters, few others will care to join me, let alone pay me any attention. But I will, at least, have saved myself from being another lonely “other,” stripped of designation and cast adrift on a sea of nameless spirituality. And if nothing else, I will hopefully discover a few others who see the world the same way and might enjoy sharing a conversation.
I am a New Ager and proud of it. In these Web pages I explain what New Age is and what it means to me, and what I think it once meant to others. I explore what may have happened to cause the movements to its unfortunate demise, and why I believe it can still hold meaning and value for us today. Most important, I ask you to consider the implications of reviving it.
Are you, perhaps, a New Ager too? Then please, send me your photo, tell me your story. I will help you share it.
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