Is the New Age spiritual?

Is the New Age spiritual?

HP seems a good place to pose this open question, as it's fairly but not exclusively New Age.

It's a question never going to have a yes/no answer as there are many different hues and areas to the New Age, and I'm into some too. I think it's a point often worth keeping in mind, however - to what extent it is or isn't.

It's not an easy question necessarily since some supposedly 'spiritual' people nothing to do with the New Age may not appear to be spiritual to us anyway! On the other hand some New Age ideas or activities which aren't overtly spiritual may have obvious connections to spiritual ideas. (And not all of HP is about the New Age of course. And it's hard to define 'the New Age' as well!)

But there are many well-grounded kinds of spiritual people and movements - movements young and traditional - who find much unease at some aspects of the New Age which seems, to them, unhealthy.

There's the charlatans and the sometimes-emphasis on money-making galore in the NA ... but then you can get them in 'spirituality' as well when it isn't true spirituality.

I think among the main confusions and issues outside (non-NA) people who are spiritual would pose here are such things as:

1) 'Spiritualism' simply even as a word is sometimes confused with 'spiritual'. Nothing against spiritualism, but it's not the same thing as spirituality (though it could coincide). If we are talking to a dead person, it may not differ to talking to a person in the street who is certainly unspiritual.

2) 'Psychic' abilities are often confused with spirituality, and as always they again may coincide in ways but are not the same thing as spirituality. Such abilities can be had by people who are spiritual, dark, or indifferent. (Crowley, Rasputin...) 'Psychic' simply means of the psyche or mind, which can be good, bad, indifferent. They appear to be fairly neutral abilities rather like being born with a certain colour of hair, or working out in a gym to build muscles - but not actually a spiritual thing in themselves. People often seek these abilities and call it a spiritual path. It seems clearly not to be, since the great sages and saints and spiritual people of the past called them 'siddhis' or 'distractions'. The Indian concept of siddhis is that along the spiritual path you may get visions or abilities yet these are not the goal - they can side-track you like baubles and trinklets from the spiritual Goal. Distractions from what? Well, from real spirituality, and there's no room here to also try to define that. 😀

This all came home to me some years back when I'd sent a book to a publisher and they made editorial corrections (in 1992). The book was on spiritual matters, I hope enlightened and modern, and this was the publisher's area. They advised me not to use the term 'New Age' for the concept of something like 'a new rebirth in spirituality spreading round the world'. They pointed out that a lot was now plain wacky and had a truly bad rep. I took the point. The term did fit in the 1960s-70s. Since the early 80s many disassociate themselves from it.

I then started calling it 'The coming Golden Age' but people just co-opt terms and bring the same sometimes-questionable vibes along. So the same sources can be found using that term too. Whatever the term, you can't escape the mindset.

This post was triggered by picking up Mick Brown's 1998 book, "The Spiritual Tourist". In it he embarks through England, America, and India in a very genuine, but honest, exploration for spirituality among some of the better-known 'New Age' ideas, teachers and movements - and what he finds is pretty astonishingly wacky, ridiculous, hilarious, and basically often just not remotely sane. It opens with him going from one source to another with friend Van Morrison, both arriving open-minded, and VM leaving saying each time, "What a foo*** joker!" 😀 (About Benjamin Creme, various oriental 'teachers'...) The book is an eye-opener, enough to make you reassess the sanity of a lot of the