As the overview continues:  “Many Americans say they attend worship services of more than one faith or denomination — even when they are not traveling or going to special events like weddings and funerals. Many also blend Christianity with Eastern or New Age beliefs such as reincarnation, astrology and the presence of spiritual energy in physical objects. And sizeable minorities of all major U.S. religious groups say they have experienced supernatural phenomena, such as being in touch with the dead or with ghosts.”

The subtitle of the report says “Eastern, New Age Beliefs Widespread.”  And there are many fascinating things in the report which indicate a New Age style of belief is indeed widely embraced.  For example:  35 percent of Americans have attended churches of different belief systems within the past year (the New Age encourages spiritual exploration, “one mountain, many paths.”)  Meanwhile, 24 percent of Americans (many of them identify as Christian) say they believe in reincarnation, 25 percent believe in astrology, 23 percent believe in “yoga not just as exercise but as a spiritual practice, 15 percent have consulted a psychic and of the 49 percent of who say they have had a mystical experience.  And lest you assume this referring primarily to Pentecostals, the report says: “ This year’s survey finds that religious and mystical experiences are more common today among those who are unaffiliated with any particular religion (30%) than they were in the 1960s among the public as whole (22%).”

But the most telling percentage to me was the question: Do you believe spiritual energy is located in things like mountains, trees and crystals?   A full 26 percent said yes. 

This is a metaphysical question about reality, about where we think spirit resides in the universe, if at all.  Traditional Christians would say spirit is outside the world, up in heaven with God, materialists would say there is no spirit.  But an idealist says spirit and physical reality are the same thing.  And, as I’ve argued many times, this idealism is the basic philosophy, the basic position on reality, that makes one a New Ager.  

This poll makes it pretty clear that a quarter of the population holds beliefs that are explicitly New Age in nature.  And yet in their questions about religious identity, New Age is not an option in the questions on religious identity.  Nor is “spiritual but not religious” or “cultural creatives.”  Even in a survey which finds that our beliefs “dont’ fit in conventional categories,” only the conventional categories are offered.  The little demographic chart only separates out Protestants, Catholics or the “unaffiliated.” (25 percent)

Of course, few who hold New Age beliefs are likely to identify themselves that way.  Most of us still run from the New Age label as if it was poisonous.  Not that we don’t have good reasons.  I discovered this poll through a Reuters article that popped up on Yahoo  which was subtly making fun of those 26 percent of people who believe there is spiritual energy in trees. 

But if we shirk from a label because of mocking by the mainstream, we are doing a terrible disservice to ourselves, and our society.  We New Agers are in possession of a perspective that the world very much needs right now.  If we are going to avert global catastrophes like global warming, more people need to see the planet as spiritual in nature, and ourselves as interrelated parts of one spiritual whole.   Yet, because we don’t have a label, those of us who practice holistic spirituality have no common ground, no forum in which to discuss these ideas and share them with others.  Worse, we have no voice, no social capital, no power in society when it comes to changing things.  

If we hold New Age beliefs, and 26 percent of us clearly do, then its time to publicly stand up for them. www.newagepride.org

In November, word got out that the school system was blocking web sites with “inappropriate content” such as sites on alcohol and illegal drugs, tobacco, gambling, pornography, violence and hate, and “alternative spirituality/beliefs.” They helpfully explain this category to include such notions as Wicca and “Occult practices, atheistic views, voodoo rituals and or any other forms of mysticism.” Never mind the odd lumping together of contradictory beliefs. The point was clear: anything other than traditional religion is not acceptable, and possibly dangerous to young minds.

Now what is most interesting is that the blogosphere ran with this only because an atheist organization decided to send the school system a letter of protest.  (Interesting note:  in the fanfare announcing the letter, the atheistic  Freedom From Religion Foundation linked to a ARIS report that says 14 percent of Americans are “non-religious.”  But this puts the actual number of athiests and agnostics at a total of only 1.6 percent of the population, meaning they are using the “spiritual but not religious” numbers to bolster their argument.) And from that one letter, atheist sites and blogs everywhere joined in the outrage over the censorship. I eventually found a few comments from pagan organizations as well.

But by and large, voices that represent alternative and holistic spirituality, or the cultural creative contingent, were conspicuously absent. Of course, that is partly because there are no “alternative spirituality” organizations. It would be impossible to organize such a thing since most people who practice alternative spirituality prefer to do so without a label — perhaps the better to avoid getting pelted with tomatoes like the one just launched by Indianapolis schools.

Sadly, the result of this label avoidance, besides the freedom to hunker down anonymously, is that the religious intolerance against alternative spirituality flourishes unchecked. The mainstream continues to literally block us out of existence in the culture, as the Indianapolis schools just did.

This means the ideas we hold, ideas the world desperately needs right now, stay hidden at the fringes of society. We have no social capital, no voice, no ability to stand up and make ourselves heard on issues that matter.  This is a ridiculous state of affairs when according to Newsweek, 30 percent of Americans now consider themselves “spiritual but not religious,” and most of these presumably practice some form of alternative spirituality.

I grow weary of being misjudged and misunderstood and powerless. I want young people to be able to discover a strong and definite alternative to the failing paradigm that is destroying their future, not just sort of mushy nameless blocked whatevers. I want a strong and proud New Age back.  www.newagepride.org

His post was about the silly things some people believe and why those people should not be allowed to hold political office, and he made very good points in the article.  I do not want a man who thinks the world is only 6,000 years old to be my president, nor would I want a man who consults psychics for guidance to be my president either.   But while Mr. Ebert took the trouble to separate reasonable Christians from fundamentalist Creationists, he did not extend the same courtesy to New Agers.   In his view, all New Agers are crackpots likely to have personal spirit guides or think they “were royalty in a previous lifetime.”

Of course, that is the view of the culture at large, so in one sense it is unfair to criticize Mr. Ebert for doing what so many others do.  But as the point of his article is that we need more critical thinkers who do not blindly swallow silly myths, I find it ironic that he is uncritically perpetuating silly myths about the New Age.  It is simply not true that all New Agers (also often called Cultural Creatives or “spiritual but not religious”) subscribe to strange superstitions.

Ebert makes a broad generalization that “New Age beliefs have largely stolen the stage from traditional religion in progressive circles.”  He then goes on to describe dinners in which he often hears people talk about off-the-wall beliefs, like having a personal spirit guide who talks to them.  As someone who works in Hollywood circles, I hear plenty of the same.  But I also know that those people do not speak for the rest of the table; in fact, there is almost always eye-rolling around the table.  

So, I could just as easily say that most progressives do not give the New Age the slightest bit of respect and believe as Mr. Ebert does, that all New Agers are clueless idiots.  But of course, that would be a generalization, too.  There are many who understand that the New Age is a broad umbrella which encompasses many idealistic belief systems and practices, and that while there indeed a number of New Agers who get lost in occult practices and superstitions, there are also many many more who study Eastern religions and practice yoga adn holistic spirtiuality and who live by a profound holistic philosophy with nary a bit of superstition in it.

Unfortunately, few who understand this reality seem to work in the media.  I have often wondered why it is such a popular sport in the media to bash and belittle the New Age.  They paint their own subjective picture of the New Age and then criticize the picture they themselves have painted, and that is the idea of the New Age that seeps into the culture.  I tend to assume it is one way in which the mainstream ideology tries to marginalize competing ideologies, but of course, I can’t speak for the intent of Mr. Ebert.  All I can say is that I found his post to be irresponsible, and a better title for it would certainly have been “Occultists and Creationists should not be President.”  (But then, that might be an unfair generalization as well, for there have been many intelligent and respected thinkers, William James for one, who have approached the occult and paranormal with an open-minded scientific curiosity.)

I will also say that as most of the New Agers of my acquaintance are incredibly smart and no-nonsense spiritual people who undertake serious inquiries into what is real and important and helpful to all.  And I cannot wait for the day we get a real New Age president.

~James R. Hickman

After my recent posts on why atheism is an immature belief system, as well as why the New Age movement encourages exploration of different spiritual practices rather than telling us to stick with a single ancient disclipline, I was happy to received this short essay from my friend Judith Watson which just so happens to illustrate these points:

There are a few key concepts that make life easier for us to accept and deal with. They are not necessarily complicated ideas, and even children can readily understand most of them.

 For example, consider this thought: Knowledge changes.

Knowledge actually changes all the time—or, more accurately, our perspective on what we know keeps expanding. Science at last has come to acknowledge that. Accounts of history finally show more than one perspective and include women and minorities who never appeared before. Even permissible sentence structure and language usage changes. Few acknowledge that we spend years in school learning information that does not remain the same!

People have a difficult time with change. They want the truth to remain intact and unchanging partly because that feels dependable and safe and partly so they don’t have to do the work of thinking things through in light of new information. But it is a good thing to keep learning! That is what makes progress possible.

Smart as we now think we are in this age of technology, there is an enormous amount still to be discovered. In Bill Bryson’s amazing book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, he includes:

We don’t have the faintest idea of the number of things that live on our planet. Estimates range from 3 million to 200 million, and it may be as many as 97 percent that we haven’t discovered yet.

We live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.

With each passing day, we may discover new information, which in turn makes an adjustment in the body of knowledge available to humanity.

The other related concept it is important to remember is this: You can’t know something until you know it. That’s a statement of the obvious, true, but consider how many times you’ve felt like a complete fool for not knowing something—simply because you didn’t know it yet. We test and evaluate students on whether or not they have assimilated information they may or may not find interesting or pertinent, and there will be more discoveries in their lifetimes than ever before in human history. Surely it is only fair to tell them that knowledge evolves. 

A change in your beliefs about reality is called a paradigm shift. A paradigm is simply the way you see things, like the widespread belief most people held at one time that the world is flat. But that belief has been disproved, and we can never go back to it again. Once you know something, you can’t return to not knowing it. We’re not capable of un-evolving.

Sometimes a paradigm shift happens because of a new invention, like a jet engine or a cell phone. New ideas can also cause a change in paradigms. They are not always easy to accept. Sometimes people have died to make paradigm shifts happen.

Whether they happen gradually or in an instant, painfully or peacefully, internally or publicly, paradigm shifts do happen, and there will be more of them in the coming few years than humanity has ever experienced. There will be so many that the cumulative effect will create—and, in fact, is already creating–an entirely New Paradigm on earth. Many people call it the New Age.

That’s the way things become clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they’ve been all along.                                    ~Madeleine L’Engle

Wise words, Judith.  Thanks very much. 

I would also add Aldoux Huxley’s little gem that “Knowledge if a function of being.”  As our being changes through life experience and spiritual growth, so does our knowledge.  This is what makes life such an exciting and unexpected journey, eh?

Most polls on belief in America reveal that somewhere between 9 and 12 percent of Americans are atheists, although a 2005 Gallup poll put that number at less than 5 percent, and a 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) put that number at only 1.7 percent.   This means that vastly more progressives are either “spiritual but not religious” (30 percent of the population says Newsweek) or liberal Christians, Jews, Buddhists or some other alternative New Age sort.

So why are the atheists sucking all the air out of progressive discourse on belief?   First, they clearly feel it is their turn.  Atheists have only recently become loud and proud, and they’ve been enjoying their moment in the media spotlight.  (Although it looks like a media backlash could be brewing, see Lisa Miller in Newsweek.)  

But the main reason the discussion is so lopsided is because it is so often poorly framed in terms of either/or between non-belief in God or literal belief in the biblical God, as if those are the only two choices available to us.  As Lisa Miller writes again in Newsweek, “The new atheists are, in effect, buying into one particular modern, Western fundamentalist notion of God in order to make God look ridiculous and knock him (or her or it) down.”  In other words, atheist writers like Greta Christina, so frequently featured on Alternet, paint their own picture of what religion is, then attack the picture they themselves painted.

There is actually a third option when it comes to belief, the one that developmental psychologists say is the most mature approach to belief.   Let’s call it “spiritual idealism,” based on the idea that a spiritual element or force is at the heart of all reality. 

This idealism underlies all progressive and alternative forms of belief – from liberal Christianity and Judaism to paganism, Buddhism, Kabbalah and New Age –  and fuels a great deal of the moral drive toward progressive politics.  And yet, progressive politics makes no official room at the table for spiritual idealists.  

Of course, thanks to the excesses of fundamentalist religion, we have long operated on the assumption that politics and belief should be kept scrupulously separate.  This helps explain why atheism has been able to run off with the conversation, because atheism it bills itself as non-belief.  Yet, because it takes a definite metaphysical position about spiritual matters (i.e., anything outside our current capability of empirical measurement must not exist), atheism is just as much a faith-based metaphysical “belief” as any religion. 

So, if progressive politics can make room at the table for atheists to talk about their beliefs, why shouldn’t it also make room for spiritual idealists, who far outnumber atheists, to talk about their beliefs as well?   There are compelling reasons for it, beyond the simple fairness of having our numbers represented.  As Michael Lerner wrote in his insightful book, The Left Hand of God, because conservatives have been the only ones allowing their arguments to take on the moral weight of their spiritual convictions, they win many political debates in the minds of the American people by default.   Giving liberal spirituality a voice in the debate would help level the playing field.  Especially when it comes to issues like health care reform and how to address climate change, the idea that we human beings are all part of the one interrelated spiritual whole can lend progressive positions a profound sense of moral obligation that atheism simply cannot provide.

Atheists have every right to air their views and make their arguments, but they should not be the only voice in the debate about belief in progressive politics.  And if the number of frustrated comments I see on Alternet following atheist diatribes are any indication, I believe a great many spiritual progressives would agree it’s time to bring some balance to the conversation.

“The biggest problem I have with the New Age movement,” said he, “is it bastardizes the great religions and butchers traditions by trivializing religious beliefs, carelessly blending traditions together and transforming faiths of rigorous discipline into a spirituality one can squeeze into the afternoon along with a cup of coffee.”

I have run into similar sentiments so many times that it now passes for conventional wisdom about the New Age. Naturally, I commented on the post, asking the author whether he knows a number of New Agers and has seen for himself that this is the case. This started a friendly and respectful exchange that led me to truly think about why I disagree with the oft-repeated charge that the New Age encourages a “shallow” dabbling of different religious traditions.

I am a technically a dabbler, it is true, but I have never been mistaken for shallow. Rather, I think of my approach like a liberal arts education. Instead of majoring in one discipline, I am looking for breadth of knowledge. And because virtually all the religions explored by New Agers — Buddhism, Hinduism, Zen, Taoism, Kabbalah, even liberal Christianity – are different expressions of the same idealistic philosophy, to explore each of them is actually a way of going much deeper into idealistic thought than you could go by delving into only one of them.

I also remarked that most traditional religious disciplines grew from an ancient time, when they could be practiced in pockets of isolation, but the world has changed so much, we can’t today be expected to practice them in the same way they were practice then.

This point was driven home to me a few days later when I came across a John Tierney column in the New York Times called “How Will Religion Evolve?” It discusses a book by Nicolas Wade, The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures, and in it Wade asks: “Is there not some way of transforming religion into versions better suited for a modern age? The three monotheisms were created to meet conditions in societies that existed many centuries ago. The fact that they have endured for so long does not mean they were meant to last forever, only that they have become like some favorite Mozart opera that people are happy to hear over and over again. But the world of music did not achieve final perfection in Mozart.”

Wade also suggests that traditional religions, especially the three monotheisms, “seem long ago to have reached the limits of their development, lagging behind the increasing complexity of human societies and vast growth of organized knowledge… Those who administer religions should not assume they cannot be altered. To the contrary, religions are Durkeimian structures, eminently adjustable to a society’s needs.”

Maybe, Wade continues, “religion needs to undergo a second transformation, similar in scope to the transition from hunter gatherer religion to that of settled societies. In this new configuration, religion would retain all its old powers of binding people together for a common purpose… It would touch all the senses and lift the mind. It would transcend self. And it would find a way to be equally true to emotion and to reason, to our need to belong to one another and to what has been learned of the human condition through rational inquiry.”

And this, to me, perfectly describes the efforts of the New Age movement to create a spirituality more relevant to our lives here and now, today, in a complicated melting pot society. I don’t think this is a shallow effort, nor is it disrespectful “butchering” of the various religious traditions if we are moved to explore them without committing to their traditional practice. Religion has always shaped itself to the place and the times, and these are times in which so much knowledge is available to us, it seems almost be irresponsible to ignore big chunks of it. Which is why the New Age movement represents the most reasonable and honest and open-minded approach to spirituality today.

So I would like to retire that old cliché about the New Age movement and holistic spirituality encouraging shallow cafeteria-style spirituality. That is not what is going on for most of us who explore different traditions. Certainly, there are shallow people in the New Age. But even the most orthodox of religions can be practiced in a shallow way. My experience with New Age people tells me you will find more people concerned with depth, more people truly committed to living in a spiritual way, than in almost any other “pure” religious tradition.

Not surprisingly, once the novelty of the visual spectacle wore off, I found myself a bit bored in my seat, and I spent a good twenty minutes wondering why Disney went to the trouble of presenting to us a story we already know. And then as poor Scrooge stood there terrified before his future grave, it hit me.   This is a story of spiritual transformation.  And that is why it never gets old.

By the time Scrooge was dancing with joy at having a second chance, I was swept up and fighting tears.  All these years I’d remembered A Christmas Carol as a story about learning to be nice at Christmas.   But it’s really a classic transformation story in which Scrooge comes face to face with reality by seeing the entire sweep of past, present and future all at once.  And through this glimpse of what is real and important, he is able to step free of his ego – his fear, his smallness of mind – and align with his soul. 

In those giddy last few minutes of the story, Scrooge is no longer trapped in his pain and loneliness, but is able to face the world as an open-hearted person for the first time in his life.   I felt joy rise in my own heart to watch his rebirth, and inspired to keep on the path of my own efforts to be free of ego and align with soul.  And I promised myself to make it a point to watch or read some version of this timeless tale every year come Christmas. 

I don’t suppose many people would think to call “Christmas Carol” a New Age movie.  But with ghosts marching around, and time compressed into one eternal now, all culminating in a profound spiritual transformation… well, how much more New Age can you get?

Ehrenreich first encountered the positive thinking  police while a cancer patient.  She was surprised to find herself being constantly chastised for any negative emotion and so, she went investigating.  This book is the result, and she has bluntly laid bare most of the unsightly implications of the Law of Attraction:  “It requires deliberate self-deception, including a constant effort to repress or block out unpleasant possibilities or ‘negative thoughts’,” she writes.  It also drains of us of empathy by shifting blame for what happens onto victims of crime and illness and injustice.

The result, she notes, is that the Law of Attraction has become “a water carrier for the business world, excusing its excesses and masking its follies.”  The push toward this way of thinking “has made itself useful as an apology for the crueler aspects of the market economy,” giving cover to an unjust system that exploits workers and widens the gap between rich and poor.      

Worse, she concludes, it contributed greatly to the destruction of our economy by fueling the irrationality of the bankers and brokers on Wall Street.  She describes positive thinking motivational speakers being invited frequently to Wall Street to help keep employees upbeat and optimistic and willing to make risky decisions even in the face of evidence that things were not likely to turn out well.   

While the book is thorough in describing all the ways in which positive thinking has crept into every corner of the culture, Ehrenreich does not delve too deeply into how and why this is the case, other than to point out  the addiction to positive thinking is born of a deep insecurity and lack of trust in life.  (The more the middle class becomes squeezed, the deeper our insecurity, and the higher the demand for Law of Attraction products) 

I wish she had explored other reasons why the Law of Attraction so attracts us in the holistic spirituality movement, and acknowledged the ways in which people feel it has been helpful to them.  I know many who feel The Secret helped them examine their habitual thoughts for the first time, and understand how they often sabotage themselves through negative assumptions.  If she had gone there, perhaps Ehrenreich could have pointed out you can get these benefits, through meditation and other techniques, without having to adopt a philosophy that has proven to be so damaging to our society – not to mention our own psyches.  

Yet while the book is not balanced by the personal, I think Ehrenreich’s criticisms are fair and her conclusions accurate.  Unfortunately, the sharp tone might push away the people who most need to consider her arguments.  We New Age-y types are not used to being challenged (“I’m right for me, you’re right for you”), we are used to gentle validation at every turn, so I don’t have a lot of hope that this book will be widely embraced in New Age circles.  But for those burned out on The Secret, those weary of floating around isolated in their own wishful dream world, Bright-Sided is a bracing blast of reality.

As Kull settled into his stay, he recorded a number of realizations about the nature of being – realizations both ordinary and profound all at once.  The result is a a deep and lovely meditation not just on solitude, but on life, nature, spirit, ego, soul, anxiety, joy, pain, transcendence, wind, rain, outboard motors, the willfulness of cats and the mating habits of butter-bellied ducks.  

In language plain yet evocative, Kull gives us candid look inside a the mind of someone who has bared himself to the wild world and all its unexpected joys, and all it its unrelenting sorrows.  With few distractions, he was better able watch his mind try to twist away from what is, and better able to bring it back.   It was a courageous undertaking, and he ended up as we all do at the end of the great tasks we set for ourselves  — both disappointed and grateful that things didn’t turn out as expected.  I felt enriched by reading this book.

By Teena Booth

After my Google alert told me that “new age movement” had been mentioned in a half –dozen reviews of the new George Clooney comedy, “The Men Who Stare At Goats,” I headed down to the multiplex, braced for another round of mockery of the New Age. What a surprise to find a nuanced picture not only of all that is wrongheaded about the New Age, but also much that is right.

Ewan McGregor plays hapless small town reporter, Bob Wilton, with convincing wide eyes and gullibility as he sets off on an archetypal fool’s journey to prove himself with a trip to Iraq to report on the war.  He immediately runs into the mysterious Lyn Cassady, the loose and hilarious Clooney playing “one of the best psychics on the planet.” Through entertaining flashbacks, we learn about Cassady’s glory days in the New Earth Army, a stand-in for the U.S. government’s true experiments in the paranormal.  This battalion is headed by Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), a true believer in the philosophy of “make love, not war,” and he is determined to use the military to spread peace throughout the world with a new breed of psychically gifted spiritual warriors, which he calls the Jedi.  (To see Ewan McGregor, the young Obi-wan Kenobi, innocently ask, What’s a Jedi? — well, that’s just plain fun.) 

Alas, the New Earth Army falls prey to the excesses of the New Age movement itself,  fake psychics and jealous, egomaniac leaders like Larry Hooper, played with delicious sneering by Kevin Spacey.  Meanwhile, in the present, Wilton trails through the Iraqi desert after Cassady, who is himself trailing after his intuition on a secret mission that is admittedly a little murky.  Along its unpredictable way, the well matched pair encounter enemies and allies, and Wilton learns many lessons about appreciating the esoteric.

With a sharp and clever script and that frothy tone, the movie seems at first glance a straight romp, zipping fast through the silliness of the New Age and holisitic spirituality (Jeff Bridges soaking in hot tubs with bare-chested hippie chicks.)  But the jabs are light, in the teasing manner of a fond uncle who knows you well and helps you laugh at your own naivete.  And beneath the comedy there is a recognition of the prfound “we-are-all-one” philosophy which fuels the efforts of all us New Age-y types as we move along the path less traveled.  At movie’s end, we are left with the sense that the world very much needs more people like us.  

Go see it; you’ll leave the theater well-entertained and surprisingly uplifted.