I’m an alt-dabbler from way back. I spent my late teen years reading the classics — as in Deepak Chopra and Shakti Gawain, not Dickens and Bronte — and visualizing success. I was always the youngest at any crystal or pyramid workshop, and finished my lovely alternative experience by getting kicked out of a (I am not making this up) new age entrepreneurial cult when they figured out that the 20 year old was not going to raise the requisite $20,000 for the next “stage of training.”
See, I’ve been there. I’ve been there, done that, gotten the organic cotton t-shirt complete with “om” symbol, and even had some very limited success with what I learned.
BUT…
It seems to me that most “new age” thought is a strange Frankenstein creation of eastern philosophy and western mysticism, although neither side is examined in its entirety — or in context. The new age is a total mash-up of disparate pieces of many different systems placed within a false framework of psychobabble. It lacks cohesion, and for the most part, meaning.
Furthermore, the way a lot of new agers use these fractured belief systems is more akin to a modern Protestant circle jerk than a way to empowerment and self-knowledge. The most disturbing aspect of this is the “blame the victim” mentality firmly embedded in most new age work.
Just lost your job? That was your fault, you were too negative. Got hit by a car? Also your bad — you drew that experience to you. Molested as a child? Oh, well, you picked that experience before you were born, so that was all you, too. Any negative experience you have is completely and totally because you drew it to you.
And I…I don’t buy it.
Bad things happen, frequently to good people, and those good people don’t need a nice, new age, nose-rubbing Pollyanna to point out that they should think more positively so it won’t happen again.
Magick — even folk magick — is a little more honest. No practitioner worth his or her salt would dare tell you to do a spell and then just “think good thoughts.” You have to do work on the real physical plane, too. You want a date? Do a love spell and then mingle. If you don’t get a date, that may not be your fault (unless you just ate a big plate of garlic before you mingled) — the timing just isn’t right. Try it again later, preferably when Venus is favorable.
And the worst trick of the new age? If you try all of their bullshit and fail…it’s still your fault. It’s a closed loop. It’s always, always YOU. It’s such a big, crazy extension of our basic cultural fallacy that humanity is something “above or apart from nature.” We’re just big dumb animals, folks — and there’s no shame in admitting that.
Also, no one ever seems to point out that if you are using the “law of attraction” to draw things to you, are there others working at cross-purposes to you? If so, what happens then? If you’re busy trying to “manifest” a BMW in your driveway, and your neighbor is busy trying to “manifest” your early demise due to a property line dispute, what does that mean? Okay, that’s a terrible (though amusing) example. What if you and your cube mate are both trying to “manifest” the same promotion? If your company decides to hire someone outside your firm, does that mean that you cancelled each other out? Does it mean that you’re both a couple of negative thinking self-defeaters? Or is it just another signal that we don’t control the quantum particles around us at all times, but in fact live in a dimension of consensus reality?
There’s some food for thought. We could stop the mental masturbation and start actually examining the world around us, but we would rather wish for new cars and lots of money. Anything else is just…too hard.
Did I ever mention I was a cynic? I probably shouldn’t have left that out.
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