Occultism is the willful use of conscious force, albeit subtle, to effect objective changes in reality by quasi-‘physical’ means, vs. spirituality, which is essentially the devotion, service and surrender to the Divine Will in and through the vehicle of the physical as a conscious instrument of it.

It is currently an urgent necessity that seekers shed the materialistic bias as an end in itself, and the subsequent preoccupation with occultism which has wrongly in many cases taken the place of now obsolete definitions of and relationships to God/Highest Self that were previously mediated by various institutions of traditional religion. These have been very effective but many seekers have evolved to a place where they are ready to supersede them in the same way that religion itself once represented a superseding of more primitive forms.

The key difference in the shifting of the ‘ages’ is that new-age will constitute a predominance of self-mediation, vs. centrally imposed via any institution. But there is nothing inherently any more deceptive within the emerging new-age than that same ignorance impeding and distorting what came before it. This is a difference of form in the spontaneous emergence of the spiritual aspiration in human nature. Focus on occultism is a shift in CONTENT and intent, as that focus is a diversion from the spiritual. It is a mistake, and just because there is presently a great deal of evidence that this mistake is prevalent does not mean that it is necessarily the ideal. In fact it represents a crisis.

Yes, aspirants who find traditional organized religion now obsolete or not appropriate for their personal evolutionary requirements need to strike out on their own and find their own spiritual path intuitively - but mistakenly many think this will necessarily involve occultism, which believe it or not, has no necessary connection to spirituality (see Bartholomew’s recent thread).