What is 'NewAge', and why is it bad?

Originally Posted by Snow Goose

W
Wicca is definitely not ancient either, some say it was developed by Alister Crowley to catch those who are interested in the occult but maybe don't have the best intensions.

Quite. A 20th century thing, IIRC by Gerald Gardiner. It had to be secretive because the Witchcraft Act wasn't repealed until 1951. It was replaced by the Fraudulent Mediums Act!

Edit: I reckon the new age splurge needed that change in the law. Most occult stuff was difficult to lay hands on until well into the 1960s I'm told. There were places like the Atlantis Bookshop and Sorcerers Apprentice in Leeds but even that got attacked by born again Christian arsonists sometime in the 80s.

2nd Edit: I have to correct myself. The Sorcerers Apprentice set up in the 70s. A once fascinating place. Difficult site now.

[markings]

The New Age is inextricably linked to the perennial philosophy and the following is a critical view from
http://www.philosophyforlife.org/exp...ual-pluralism/

This week, I read a book which made some trenchant criticisms of the Perennial Philosophy. The book’s called Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality, by Jorge Ferrer, a professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

Ferrer makes three main criticisms of the Perennial Philosophy approach:

1) All religions are not the same

The Perennial Philosophy, by being so universalist and essentialist, ends up doing violence to the traditions it tries to cohere. The Tao is not the same as the Christian God (the Tao cares nothing for individuals, as Lao Tzu says), nor are either the same as Buddhist sunyata or emptiness. The eternal now of Buddhism or Stoicism is fundamentally different to Christianity’s radical hope for the future. The mystics themselves do not agree that all religions are talking about the same ultimate reality.

2) Perennialists tend to rank religions hierarchically

All religions are equal, but some are more equal than others. Perennialists tend to rank religions, and even sects within religions. Shamanism is the lowest, then monotheisms like Christianity, Judaism and Islam, then mystics within these traditions (Rumi is better than Mohammad, Meister Eckhart is better than Jesus), then Buddhism and Hinduism, and the peak of the mountain is non-dualist philosophies of emptiness like Advaita and Tibetan Buddhism’s Dzogchen.
All religions are equal, but some are more equal than others

Christianity is usually near or at the bottom – Sam Harris says it has basically nothing useful to say about the human condition, Aldous Huxley said the Bible was an obstacle to evolution – and Tibetan Buddhism is at the top. Look at the Contemplative Studies conference I’m going to in Boston this month – I’d estimate 90% of the speakers are western Buddhists, hardly any are Christians, and the key-note speaker is, obviously, the Dalai Lama.

Perennialists tend to be western and tend to have rejected their Judeo-Christian background, and therefore rank Christianity low in their wisdom rankings. And of course Christianity, like Islam and Judaism, fits uneasily within a Perennial framework, with their tribal eschatologies and their faith in their unique revelation.

3) Perennialism often tends to the tyranny of empiricism and Cartesian reductionism

Perennialists like Huxley, Maslow, Wilber or Sam Harris tend to describe the Perennial Philosophy as a ‘science of consciousness’, providing empirical certainty for some of the claims of the mystics. Your mind is the laboratory, in which you can go and check these facts for yourself. This attitude, while understandable in its attempt to validate spiritual experiences within a hostile scientific materialist environment, tends to reduce such experiences to subjective occurrences in the individual brain.

Originally Posted by The Necromancer

...What the "New Age" did to Tantra...we shall not go there.

Ah but we should! That is the kind of criticism I hear often, and I can understand that. That said though, someone may get into it because they are ignorant or naïve, but with continued investigations could wind up neither. The information is now out there, just a few keyclicks away. I think it's no coincidence that the new age and the information age are coincident.

Originally Posted by Lorelyen

There are alternative responses

1) Of course they can!

2) Go away (or words to that effect) preferably the latter. If I used the terms
I'd be banned but they end in 'off'.

I appreciate being given a choice. Methinks my reference was misplaced - but you do play the piano wonderfully.

Originally Posted by Lorelyen

In fairness to these opinionated souls, I am a murderer of all sorts of sacred cows, a shatterer of false idols and illusions, a whistle-blower on frauds and fakers, so I guess that does make me controversial since so many ‘newagers’ and ‘weekend warriors’ are happy to simply toe the party line and believe any old carp (misprint) they’re told – including the newage (in my vocabulary this word rhymes with sewage)"...

I find this quote very interesting, primarily because by my definition New Age itself is the biggest 'slayer of sacred cows', but secondly here he is claiming to be an authority under what authority? Just the weight of his own word, which is extremely New Agey, IMO.

Originally Posted by Lorelyen

Quite. A 20th century thing, IIRC by Gerald Gardiner. It had to be secretive because the Witchcraft Act wasn't repealed until 1951. It was replaced by the Fraudulent Mediums Act!

Edit: I reckon the new age splurge needed that change in the law. Most occult stuff was difficult to lay hands on until well into the 1960s I'm told. There were places like the Atlantis Bookshop and Sorcerers Apprentice in Leeds but even that got attacked by born again Christian arsonists sometime in the 80s.

2nd Edit: I have to correct myself. The Sorcerers Apprentice set up in the 70s. A once fascinating place. Difficult site now.

I must say you are a veritable gold mine of information! Welcome to the discussion.

Originally Posted by Snow Goose

Well as far as I'm aware the new age got its name from he 'new age' of aquarius.

I wouldn't class myself as new age, I see it as being superficial but that's just my take on it. I grew up with a new ager and I seen her as very superficial so it be due to mother issues ;-)

She would make lots of money holding tarot reading parties or would be on those chatlines for tarot readings. I thought she was a pretty rubbish tarot reader tbh.

Also she was a reiki master, not the she ever done any healing with anyone it was so she could do group reiki 1/2 courses and make a mint doing it.

There were Buddha heads and charkra charts all over the house but she never actually done any work on herself.

One positive thing I like about the new agers is that they are charging places like stonehenge with all the energy they are putting into the area and that's all good!

Wicca is definitely not ancient either, some say it was developed by Alister Crowley to catch those who are interested in the occult but maybe don't have the best intensions.

Very interesting. Have you ever asked your daughter just what she gets out of it? She does sound very successful, which beats the alternative, being a father of 3 and grandfather of 2 myself.

[Snow Goose]

Originally Posted by Kioma

Very interesting. Have you ever asked your daughter just what she gets out of it? She does sound very successful, which beats the alternative, being a father of 3 and grandfather of 2 myself.

My daughter? I was talking about my mother. Are you asking me what my children learn from my interests? Confused but it doesn't take much!

Originally Posted by markings

The New Age is inextricably linked to the perennial philosophy and the following is a critical view from
http://www.philosophyforlife.org/exp...ual-pluralism/...

Perennial philosophy? Back to Wikipedia:

The Perennial philosophy (Latin: philosophia perennis),[note 1] also referred to as Perennialism and perennial wisdom, is a perspective in modern spirituality which views each of the world's religious traditions as sharing a single, metaphysical truth or origin from which all esoteric and exoteric knowledge and doctrine has grown.

A more popular interpretation argues for universalism, the idea that all religions, underneath seeming differences point to the same Truth. In the early 19th century the Transcendentalists propagated the idea of a metaphysical Truth and universalism, which inspired the Unitarians, who proselytized among Indian elites. Towards the end of the 19th century the Theosophical Society further popularized universalism, not only in the western world, but also in western colonies. In the 20th century universalism was further popularized in the English-speaking world through the neo-Vedanta inspired Traditionalist School, which argues for a metaphysical, single origin of the orthodox religions, and by Aldous Huxley and his book The Perennial Philosophy, which was inspired by neo-Vedanta and the Traditionalist School, culminating in the New Age movement.

I am learning so much in this thread! Thank you all for your participations.

As regards the 'trenchant criticisms', it seems to be a case of the reductionists against the universalists, or to paraphrase something I've seen around the forum, "It's not what you look at, it's what you see that counts."

This certainly deserves more discussion.

Originally Posted by Snow Goose

My daughter? I was talking about my mother. Are you asking me what my children learn from my interests? Confused but it doesn't take much!

Ah. You see, I totally took that the wrong way.

So, yeah - did you ever ask her?

[Snow Goose]

Did I ask her erm yes im sure we spoke about it, not sure I asked that direct question but the cards where always in the house, just part of life.

It was about making money Kioma. She would make a few hundred £ for a Saturday night party, this would be held by family and friends of the family. The telephone readings were a paid for service through a private company, she would get a bonus from keeping people on the phone longer. She didn't do this over the long term so it's not like she had returning customers.

Reiki was also just about making money she would get over a £1500 from holding 1 training block which was 1 or 2 days long as she would hold group days. She never done any healing with this reiki master qualification it was purely for to make money training others. She soon ran out of willing trainees.

Successful I'm not too sure about that, I could go about charging money for tarot reading or I could go and do my reiki master course and then train others, would be quite easy to do and I could make a lot of money from it but it doesn't make me any good at it.

I believe that you have to have taken the time to work on yourself before you work with others or charge others for your services. Which she certainly didn't.

Well Snow Goose, in all honesty it sounds less to me like she was a New Ager and more like, to put it delicately, she was of an entrepreneurial spirit.

Of course I wasn't there, so really couldn't say.