We are creating energy, matter and life at the interface between the void and all known creation. We are facing into the known universe, creating it, filling it. . . . I am “one of the boys in the engine room pumping creation from the void into the known universe; from the unknown to the known I am pumping.”
EASTERN MYSTICISM POSES one way out for Western people caught in naturalism’s nihilistic bind. But Eastern mysticism is foreign. Even a watered-down version like Transcendental Meditation requires an immediate and radical reorientation from the West’s normal mode of grasping reality. Such reorientation leads to new states of consciousness and feelings of meaning, as we saw, but the intellectual cost is high. One must die to the West to be born in the East.
Is there a less painful, less costly way to achieve meaning and significance? Why not conduct a search for a new consciousness along more Western lines?
This has been done by a host of scholars, medical doctors, psychologists, religious explorers, and ordinary people looking to make sense out of a confusing world. There has been an avant-garde in a number of academic disciplines from the humanities to the hard sciences, and the spillover into culture at large is at flood stage. To change the image, we are experiencing a worldview in its late adolescence.1 Not yet completely formed, the New Age worldview contains many rough edges and inner tensions, and even flat-out contradictions. Because of its inherently eclectic character, it may now be as mature as it will ever get. Still, it has taken shape, and we can visualize it in a series of propositions as we have done with other worldviews.
When this book was first published, there were very few attempts to bring all these New Age notions together in one place. The schema that follows was at that time almost unique.2 Since then there have been many attempts, most notably those of Marilyn Ferguson in The Aquarian Conspiracy, Fritjof Capra in The Turning Point, and Ken Wilber in A Brief History of Everything. The first is the more enthusiastic and popular, the latter two the more guarded and scholarly.3 All three writers have made an impact on the New Age movement itself, giving it a sense of coherence and focus it had formerly lacked. Moreover, Douglas Groothuis in Unmasking the New Age and Confronting the New Age has contributed to a clearer and more comprehensive definition.4 James A. Herrick has dug even deeper into the roots of the New Age movement, arguing persuasively that these roots originate in ancient Gnosticism and can be seen in subsequent stages of Western civilization, emerging into what he calls a New Religious Synthesis. His The Making of the New Spirituality is, at least for now, the definitive history of New Age spirituality.5
By the mid-1970s articles and cover stories in Time magazine and other major popular magazines touted the growing interest in the weird and the wonderful.6 By the mid-1980s interest in psychic phenomena had become so widespread as barely to raise an eyebrow. Many magazines, such as Body and Soul and Yoga Journal, propagate New Age ideas and are readily available on newsstands.7 According to the Mayan calendar a Harmonic Convergence was scheduled to take place in August 1987. The date came with much attention in the media, but no evidence ever surfaced that the Age of Aquarius, a time of great peace, had arrived.
At the end of 1987 Time magazine again focused on the New Age, with a cover featuring Shirley MacLaine and a story surveying “faith healers, channelers, space travelers and crystals galore.”8 MacLaine had become for the 1980s perhaps the most visible proponent of New Age thought and practice. After writing a host of autobiographies and instruction on the new consciousness, she eventually dropped out as a major New Age leader.9 And by the mid-1990s, New Age stories disappeared from the media, not because it had vanished but because it had become no longer odd, no longer newsworthy.10 Still, the popularity of New Age thinking continues: some twenty popular New Age journals are, for example, carried in my local bookstore.
THE RADICAL TRANSFORMATION OF HUMAN NATURE
Basing much of their hope on the evolutionary model—a leftover from Western naturalism—a number of avant-garde thinkers have been prophesying the coming of a New Man and a New Age. In 1973 Jean Houston of the Foundation for Mind Research in Pomona, New York, said that what this world needs is a “psychenaut program to put the first man on earth.” But even if we don’t get a psychic counterpart to NASA, our psychenaut is coming: “It’s almost as if the species [humanity] were taking a quantum leap into a whole new way of being.”11 She concludes that if we learn “to play upon the vast spectrum of consciousness, . . . we would have access to a humanity of such depth and richness as the world has not yet known, so that our great-great grandchildren may look back upon us as Neanderthals, so different will they be.”12
An authentically empowered person is one who is so strong, so empowered, that the idea of using force against another is not a part of his or her consciousness.
No understanding of evolution is adequate that does not have at its core that we are on a journey toward authentic power, and that authentic empowerment is the goal of our evolutionary process and the purpose of our being. We are evolving from a species that pursues external power into a species that pursues authentic power. We are leaving behind exploration of the physical world as our sole means of evolution. This means of evolution, and the consciousness that results from an awareness that is limited to the five-sensory modality, are no longer adequate to what we must become.
Gary Zukav, The Seat of the Soul
For thirty years Houston has spoken the same message: human beings evolve toward higher consciousness; societies and cultures evolve toward greater comprehensiveness. In the 1990s, she said we may already be in the first few years of a “Type I High-Level Civilization,” during which “our great-great-great-great grandchildren” are going to be on other planets or space colonies “creating paradise, creating a viable ecology and a world which we mutually nourish and which nourishes us to the fullest of our capacities.” After that will come “Type II–Level Civilizations in which we become responsible on the sensory level for the orchestration of the resources of the solar system. . . . We will mythically probably also be coming close to in some way incarnating the archetypes. We will become the gods that we have invoked.” Later still, in Type III–Level Civilizations “we will join the galactic milieu and become the creators of worlds, capable of Genesis.” And as the third millennium was beginning, she offered counsel on how to live in and promote “jump time,” those times of transition to higher states of being.13
In 2003 Ken Wilber and Andrew Cohen outlined an even more elaborate scale of evolution (eight levels) from one hundred thousand years ago (the instinctive/survival stage) to thirty years ago, when a few people first entered the holistic stage. More than half of the world’s population, though, is less than halfway up this evolutionary ladder. Yet when a person discovers that “it’s up to me,” evolution proceeds. As Wilber says, reflecting on the transition, “Yes, it’s co-creation because right at that frothy, foaming, chaotic emerging edge of spirit’s unfolding is where lela, the creative play, is.”14 The evolution of humanity (body and soul) is up to each and every person. But it’s coming. “A thousand years from now,” says Wilber, people will “look back on all this as ‘that kindergarten stuff’ that we were pushing back then.”15
Though the theme of personal and cultural evolution has been present from the 1970s into this century, its ubiquitous emphasis by New Age teachers seems more important to me now than ever before. And well it might be, for nothing has happened in the past fifty years to improve our human lot. Apart from a radical transformation, humankind continues to go from one bloody tragedy to another. So New Age hopefuls read modern accounts of those who claim to have made a breakthrough to another dimension. They read (or, better, misread) the ancient religious teachers—Jesus, the Buddha, Zoroaster—who still have some credibility, see in them a hint of the progress that awaits all humankind, and conclude that there is a New Age coming.16
One major strain of optimism about the New Age, however, has become more muted than transformed. In the early 1970s Andrew Weil, MD, a drug researcher and theoretician, argued for a new, more relaxed approach to psychedelic drug use and to alternative ways of achieving new states of consciousness. The drug revolution, he thought, was the harbinger of a New Age, an age in which humankind—because it wisely uses drugs and mystical techniques—will finally achieve full health. Weil wrote, “One day, when the change has occurred, we will no doubt look back on our drug problem of the 1970s as something to laugh about and shake our heads over: how could we not have seen what it was really all about?”17 Today this optimism is linked with what Douglas Groothuis calls “technoshamanism.” Advanced by followers of the late Timothy Leary, the great hope now is to lose one’s normal self and take on godlike powers in the virtual reality of cyberspace.18
Weil himself has turned from emphasizing the safe use of mind-altering drugs to promoting “integrative medicine,” which Brad Lemley describes as “a medical model that pulls the best from therapeutic systems ranging from allopathy (the drugs-and-surgery regimen of American MDs) to homeopathy, acupuncture, herbalism, nutritional science, hypnotherapy and many others.”19
THE PANORAMIC SWEEP OF NEW AGE THOUGHT
From what I’ve said so far it should be obvious that the New Age worldview is not confined to one narrow band of humanity. We have here more than the current fad of New York intellectuals or West Coast gurus. The following list of disciplines and representatives within those disciplines emphasizes this fact. For the people listed here, New Age thought is as natural as theism is to Christians.
In psychology the first theorizer to recognize the validity of altered states of consciousness was William James. Later he was to be followed by Carl Jung and Abraham Maslow. Now there were or are Aldous Huxley, novelist and drug experimenter; Robert Masters and Jean Houston of the Foundation for Mind Research; Stanislav Grof at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, who gives dying patients LSD to help them gain a feeling of cosmic unity and thus prepare them for death; and John Lilly, whose early work was with dolphins but who progressed beyond that to drug experimentation with himself as prime subject.20 Ken Wilber’s “transpersonal synthesis of various schools of psychology and philosophy makes his work intellectually appealing and places him on the cutting edge of the New Age intelligentsia.” Finally, psychologist Jon Klimo has issued an extensive study of channeling (a New Age term for mediumship).21
In sociology and cultural history are Theodore Roszak, especially in Where the Wasteland Ends and Unfinished Animal, and William Irwin Thompson, whose At the Edge of History and Passages About Earth trace his own intellectual journey from Catholicism through naturalism and on into an occult version of the New Age. Thompson’s work is notable because as a former history teacher at MIT and York University and as a recipient of Woodrow Wilson and Old Dominion fellowships he was recognized and approved by establishment intellectuals. Passages About Earth shows how completely he has moved out of establishment circles.22
In anthropology is Carlos Castaneda (1931–1998), whose books have been bestsellers both on university campuses and in general bookstores. The Teachings of Don Juan (1968) set the pace and was quickly followed by A Separate Reality (1971) and Journey to Ixtlan (1972). Other books came later but found a less interested public. Castaneda, who began by studying the effect of psychedelic drugs in Indian culture, apprenticed himself to Don Juan, a Yaqui Indian sorcerer. Having completed the initiation rites over several years, Castaneda became a sorcerer whose alleged experience with various kinds of new realities and separate universes makes fascinating, sometimes frightening, reading. In the 1970s and ’80s Castaneda’s works were one of the major doorways to the new consciousness.23
Even in natural science elements of New Age thinking are to be found. People involved professionally in physics often take the lead, perhaps because at its most theoretical it is the most speculative and least prone to falsification by fact. The case for a New Age interpretation of physics is most popularly put by physicist Fritjof Capra and popular science writer Gary Zukav.24 More muted in their espousal of New Age ideas are Lewis Thomas and J. E. Lovelock. Thomas is a biologist and medical doctor whose Lives of a Cell has attained a solid status in the field of popular science writing.25 And Lovelock is a specialist in gas chromatography whose Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth is a seminal work on seeing Earth (Gaia is the ancient Greek earth goddess) as a single symbiotic system.26
In the health field the number of nonordinary therapies proposed in what has come to be called “holistic” or “alternative” medicine is legion. Acupuncture, Rolfing, psychic healing, kinesiology, therapeutic touch—these are just a few of the techniques used by New Age health practitioners.27 Both doctors and nurses have been affected. Nursing education, in fact, may be the discipline most affected by New Age ideas and techniques. Under the guise of “spiritual care,” a wide variety of New Age therapeutic techniques are now being taught to students of nursing.28 Weil, an advocate of “spontaneous healing,” says that about 30 of 134 medical schools offer some instruction in alternative medicine; he now directs a program in integrative medicine linked to the University of Arizona College of Medicine.29 Deepak Chopra, MD, has also emerged as a popular teacher of New Age alternative healing.30
Science fiction as a genre has largely been dominated by naturalists whose hope for humanity’s future lies in technology.31 But a few of its writers have been prophetic. Arthur C. Clarke, for example, wrote two scenarios for a radical human transformation along New Age lines. Childhood’s End (1953) is one of his most successful works of imagination. His script for 2001 (1968), which in its movie version is as much Stanley Kubrick’s as his, ends with the dawning of the New Age in a new dimension with a new “man,” the Star-Child.32 And Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), first an underground classic, became in the 1970s a tract for the New Age. Valentine Michael Smith, who groks reality in its fullness, is a prototype for the new humanity.33 The final three novels of Philip K. Dick (Valis, The Divine Invasion, and The Transfiguration of Timothy Archer) are fictional attempts to come to grips with his own encounter with “a beam of pink light.”34
In movies, one of the most effective communications media of the modern world, we should note the work of Steven Spielberg, especially Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and George Lucas, especially the Star Wars series. The Force, the divine power that pervades the world of these movies, is much like the Hindu Brahman, incorporating both good and evil, and Yoda, the lovable guru of The Empire Strikes Back, spouts pure New Age metaphysics. Not least among films encapsulating New Age thought is the brilliant, surprisingly interesting My Dinner with Andre, an autobiographical excursion into the mindset of André Gregory.35 The movies of the 1990s and the early 2000s that venture into future scenarios have tended to be more postmodern than strictly New Age; witness the series of Matrix movies.
It can be easily replied that those whose books and ideas I have just listed are on the fringe of Western society. Their ideas do not represent the mainstream. Of course, that is to a large extent true. Some of the most popular New Age authors come from the Wow! school of journalism, and it is hard to take their ideas seriously. Moreover, establishment scholars, reviewers, and critics—by which is largely meant naturalists whose naturalism is not yet pure nihilism—have been highly critical of New Age books of all kinds.36 But that is actually a tribute to the power these ideas are beginning to have. The people whose work I have cited above have an enormous influence—by virtue of their position in key universities, hospitals, and research centers; their personal charisma; or their celebrity status—sometimes by all three. In short, a worldview of immense cultural impact and penetration has been formulated and is being promoted. In fact, perhaps the most influential promoter of New Age spirituality is Oprah Winfrey, not primarily through her own voice but through her television guests—Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson (A Course in Miracles and 2020 presidential candidate), Gary Zukav, and Iyanla Vanzant.37 Her promotion of Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth drew millions of readers to his fairly standard New Age worldview.38
RELATIONSHIP TO OTHER WORLDVIEWS
The New Age worldview is highly syncretistic and eclectic. It borrows from every major worldview. Though its weirder ramifications and stranger dimensions come from Eastern pantheism and ancient animism, its connection with naturalism gives it a better chance to win converts than purer Eastern mysticism.
Like naturalism the new consciousness denies the existence of a transcendent God. There is no Lord of the universe unless it be each of us. There is only the closed universe. True, it is “peopled” by beings of incredible “personal” intelligence and power, and “human consciousness is not contained by the skull.”39 But these beings and even the consciousness of the cosmos are in no way transcendent in the sense required by theism. Moreover, some language about human beings retains the full force of naturalism.40 Fritjof Capra, Gary Zukav, and William Irwin Thompson point to the seeming corollaries between psychic phenomena and twentieth-century physics.41
Also borrowed from naturalism is the hope of evolutionary change for humanity. We are poised on the brink of a new being. Evolution will bring about the transformation.
Like both theism and naturalism, and unlike Eastern pantheistic monism, the New Age places great value on the individual person. Theism grounds this in each person’s being made in the image of God. Naturalism, reflecting a memory of its theistic roots, continues to maintain the value of individuals, grounding it in the notion that all human beings are alike in their common humanity. If one is valuable, all are.
Like Eastern pantheistic monism, the new consciousness centers on a mystical experience in which time, space, and morality are transcended. One could define new consciousness as a Western version of Eastern mysticism in which the metaphysical emphasis of the East (its assertion that Atman is Brahman) is replaced by an emphasis on epistemology (seeing, experiencing, or perceiving the unity of reality is what life is all about). Moreover, like the East, the new consciousness rejects reason (what Weil calls “straight thinking”) as a guide to reality. The world is really irrational or superrational and demands new modes of apprehension (“stoned thinking,” for example).42
But the new consciousness is also related to animism, a worldview I have not yet discussed in this book. Animism is the general outlook on life that underlies primal or so-called pagan religions. To say the worldview is primal is not to say it is simple. Pagan religions are highly complex interplays of ideas, rituals, liturgies, symbol systems, cult objects, and so forth. But pagan religions tend to hold certain notions in common. Among them the following are reflected by the New Age: (1) the natural universe is inhabited by countless spiritual beings, often conceived in a rough hierarchy, at the top of which is the Sky God (vaguely like theism’s God but without his interest in human beings); (2) thus the universe has a personal dimension but not an infinite-personal Creator-God; (3) these spiritual beings range in temperament from vicious and nasty to comic and beneficent; (4) for people to get by in life the evil spirits must be placated and the good ones wooed by gifts and offerings, ceremonies and incantations; (5) witch doctors, sorcerers, and shamans, through long, arduous training, have learned to control the spirit world to some extent, and ordinary people are much beholden to their power to cast out spirits of illness, drought, and so forth; (6) ultimately there is a unity to all of life—that is, the cosmos is a continuum of spirit and matter; “animals may be ancestors of men, people may change into animals, trees and stones may possess souls.”43
The new consciousness reflects every aspect of animism, though often giving it a naturalistic twist, or demythologizing it by psychology. That Roszak should call for a return to the “Old Gnosis” and the visions of William Blake and that Castaneda should take the long apprenticeship that ended in his becoming a sorcerer are indications that those in the New Age are well aware of its animistic roots.44
Can the New Age, with roots in three separate worldviews, be a unified system? Not really. Or not yet. In fact, not likely at all. Yet, though not all the propositions I list below fit neatly together, there are many in virtually every area of culture who hold something like this way of looking at reality.
THE BASIC TENETS OF THE NEW CONSCIOUSNESS
Realizing the tenuousness of this set of propositions as an accurate description of the New Age worldview, we may yet begin, as with the other worldviews, with the notion of prime reality. Other worldview questions follow, but not in the stricter order found in previous chapters. Rather they are taken up as they naturally fall as one ponders this particular eclectic worldview, a mélange of elements derived from more orderly worldviews.
1. Worldview Questions 1 (prime reality), 2 (external reality), and 3 (human beings): Whatever the nature of being (idea or matter, energy or particle), the self is the kingpin, the prime reality. As human beings grow in their awareness and grasp of this fact, the human race is on the verge of a radical change in human nature; even now we see harbingers of transformed humanity and prototypes of the New Age.
If the transcendent God is the prime reality in theism and the physical universe the prime reality in naturalism, then in the New Age the self (the soul, the integrated, central essence of each person) is the prime reality.
A comparison (and contrast) with the central proposition of Eastern pantheistic monism is helpful. In essence the East says, “Atman is Brahman,” putting the emphasis on Brahman. That is, in the East one loses one’s self in the whole; the individuality of a drop of water (symbol of the soul) is lost as it falls into a pail of water (symbol of the whole of reality). In the New Age the same sentence reads in reverse: “Atman is Brahman.” It is the single self that becomes important. Thus we see the influence of theism, in which the individual is important because made in the image of God, and naturalism, especially naturalistic existentialism, in which individuals are important because they are all that is left to be important.45
Just exactly what this self is is problematic. Is it idea, or spirit, or a “psychomagnetic field,” or the unity that binds the diversity of cosmic energy? Proponents of the New Age do not agree, but they do insist that the self—the consciousness center of the human being—is indeed the center of the universe. Whatever else exists besides the self, if in fact anything else does, exists for the self. The external universe exists not to be manipulated from the outside by a transcendent God but to be manipulated from the inside by the self.
John Lilly gives a long description of what it is like to realize that the self is in fact in control of all of reality. Here are his notes taken after experiencing what he believes to be the highest possible state of consciousness:
We [he and other personal selves] are creating energy, matter and life at the interface between the void and all known creation. We are facing into the known universe, creating it, filling it. . . . I feel the power of the galaxy pouring through me. . . . I am the creation process itself, incredibly strong, incredibly powerful. . . . I am “one of the boys in the engine room pumping creation from the void into the known universe; from the unknown to the known I am pumping.”46
When Lilly finally reaches the inner space he calls “+3”—the fullest, deepest penetration of reality—he becomes “God” himself. He becomes, so to speak, both the universe and the universe maker. So, he says, “why not enjoy bliss and ecstasy while still a passenger in the body, on this spacecraft? Dictate thine own terms as passenger. The transport company has a few rules, but it may be that we dream up the company and its rules too. . . . There are no mountains, no molehills . . . just a central core of me and transcendent bliss.”47 For Lilly, imagination is the same as reality: “All and everything that one can imagine exists.”48 For Lilly, therefore, the self is triumphantly in charge. Most people do not know that—it takes a technique of some sort to realize it—but the self is indeed king.
Shirley MacLaine speculates on whether in fact she has created her own reality (something she mentions many times in her books). She writes,
If I created my own reality, then—on some level and dimension I didn’t understand—I had created everything I saw, heard, touched, smelled, tasted; everything I loved, hated, revered, abhorred; everything I responded to or that responded to me. Then, I created everything I knew. I was therefore responsible for all there was in my reality. If that was true, than [sic] I was everything, as the ancient texts had taught. I was my own universe. Did that also mean I had created God and I had created life and death? Was that why I was all there was? . . .
To take responsibility for one’s power would be the ultimate expression of what we called the God-force.
Was this what was meant by the statement I AM THAT I AM?49
She concludes that for all practical purposes that was the case. Most readers will, I presume, find all this to contain more than a touch of megalomania.
Deepak Chopra, who has become one of the more active and visible New Age promoters, in The Third Jesus, says that the essence of each of us is a “speck of God, the soul substance of everyone that never became separated from its source.”50 In the state of God-consciousness a person creates his or her own reality.51
We have already heard George Leonard, Jean Houston, and Shirley MacLaine prophesy the coming of a New Age. And they are not alone. The hope—if not prophecy—is echoed by Marilyn Ferguson, Andrew Weil, Oscar Ichazo, and William Irwin Thompson. Ferguson closes her book The Brain Revolution (1973) with a triumph of optimism: “We are just beginning to realize that we can truly open the doors of perception and creep out of the cavern.”52 Her later book The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980) charts the progress and contributes to it. What a glorious New Age is dawning: a new world peopled by healthy, well-adjusted, perfectly happy, absolutely blissed-out beings—no disease, no war, no famine, no pollution, just transcendent joy. What more could one want?
Critics of this utopian euphoria want one thing: some reasonable, objective assurance that such a vision is more than an opium pipe dream. But during the moments the self is immersed in subjective certainty, no reasons are necessary, no objectivity is required. Wilber describes the self-certitude of one’s equality with all there is this way:
When you step off the ladder altogether, you are in free fall in Emptiness. Inside and outside, subject and object, lose all ultimate meaning. You are no longer “in here” looking at the world “out there.” You are not looking at the Kosmos, you are the Kosmos. The universe of One Taste announces itself, bright and obvious, radiant and clear, with nothing outside, nothing inside, an unending gesture of great perfection, spontaneously accomplished. The very Divine sparkles in every sight and sound, and you are simply that. The sun within your heart. Time and space dance as shimmering images on the face of radiant Emptiness, and the entire universe loses its weight. You can swallow the Milky Way in a single gulp, and put Gaia in the palm of your hand and bless it, and it is all the most ordinary thing in the world, and so you think nothing of it.53
Because of its absolute subjectivity, the I-am-God or I-am-the-Kosmos position remains beyond any criticism external to the subject.54 It is easy enough for an outsider to be convinced—and on solid evidence—that MacLaine is not the infinite I AM THAT I AM and that Wilber has not swallowed the universe. But how does one break in on god-consciousness itself?
I could legitimately say that I created the Statue of Liberty, chocolate chip cookies, the Beatles, terrorism, and the Vietnam War. . . . And if people reacted to world events, then I was creating them to react so I would have someone to interact with, thereby enabling myself to know me better.
Shirley MacLaine, It’s All in the Playing
Aldous Huxley suggests that such a breakthrough is possible. Not long before he died, he had second thoughts about the validity of the new consciousness. His wife, Laura, recorded on tape many of his final thoughts. Here is a transcript of his conversation two days before his death:
It [an inner discovery he had just made] shows . . . the almost boundless nature of the ego ambition. I dreamed, it must have been two nights ago, . . . that in some way I was in a position to make an absolute . . . cosmic gift to the world. . . . Some vast act of benevolence was going to be done, in which I should have the sort of star role. . . . In a way it was absolutely terrifying, showing that when one thinks one’s got beyond one self one hasn’t.55
Still, Huxley did not abandon his quest. He died while on a “trip.” For at his request his wife administered LSD to him and, after the manner of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, talked his spirit into rest on “the other side.”
The danger of self-deception—theists and naturalists alike would add the certainty of self-deception—is the great weakness of the new consciousness at this point. No theist or naturalist, no one at all, can deny the “experience” of perceiving oneself to be a god, a spirit, a devil, or a cockroach. Too many people give such reports. But so long as self alone is king, so long as imagination is presupposed to be reality, so long as seeing is being, the imagining, seeing self remains securely locked in its private universe—the only one there is. So long as the self likes what it imagines and is truly in control of what it imagines, others on the “outside” have nothing to offer.
The trouble is that sometimes the self is not king but prisoner. That’s a problem we will take up under proposition 3 below.
2. Worldview Question 2 (external reality): The cosmos, while unified in the self, is manifested in two more dimensions: the visible universe, accessible through ordinary consciousness, and the invisible universe (or Mind at Large), accessible through altered states of consciousness.
In the basic picture of the cosmos, then, the self (in the center) is surrounded first by the visible universe to which it has direct access through the five senses and which obeys the “laws of nature” discovered by natural science, and second by the invisible universe to which it has access through such “doors of perception” as drugs, meditation, trance, biofeedback, acupuncture, ritualized dance, certain kinds of music, and so forth.
Such a metaphysical schema leads Huxley to describe every human group as “a society of island universes.”56 Each self is a universe floating in a sea of universes, but because each island universe is somewhat like each other island universe, communication between them can take place. Moreover, because each universe is in its essence (that is, its self) the center of all universes, genuine comprehension is more than a mere possibility. Quoting C. D. Broad, who was himself relying on Henri Bergson, Huxley writes, “The function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.”57 But because such perception would overwhelm us and appear chaotic, the brain acts as a “reducing valve” to filter out what at the moment is not useful. As Huxley says, “According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large.” In other words, each self is potentially the universe; each Atman is potentially Brahman. What comes through the reducing valve, says Huxley, is “a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet.”58
The New Age worldview is Western to a large degree and never more so than in its insistence that the visible universe, the ordinary external world, is really there. It is no illusion. Moreover, it is an orderly universe. It obeys the laws of reality, and these laws can be known, communicated, and used. Most new consciousness proponents have a healthy respect for science. Ken Wilber, Aldous Huxley, Laurence LeShan, and William Irwin Thompson are prime examples.59 In short, the visible universe is subject to the uniformity of cause and effect. But the system is open to being reordered by the self (especially when it realizes its oneness with the One) that ultimately controls it and by beings from Mind at Large, which the self may enlist as agents for change.
Mind at Large is a sort of universe next door, alternatively called “expanded consciousness” or “alternative consciousness” (MacLaine), “a separate reality” (Castaneda), “clairvoyant reality” (LeShan), “other spaces” (Lilly), “supermind” (Rosenfeld), “Emptiness/Original Face” (Wilber), “Universal Mind” (Klimo), or “God-consciousness” (Chopra).60 This Mind at Large does not obey the laws of the visible universe. The conscious self can travel hundreds of miles across the surface of the earth and do so in the twinkling of an eye. Time and space are elastic; the universe can turn inside out, and time can flow backwards.61 Extraordinary power and energy can surge through a person and be transmitted to others. Physical healing can be effected, and if we are to include the black art users of psychic abilities, enemies can be struck dead, sent mad, or caused physical, emotional, or mental suffering.
MacLaine describes Mind at Large this way: “I was learning to recognize the invisible dimension where there are no measurements possible. In fact, it is the dimension of no-height, no-width, no-breadth, and no-mass, and as matter of further fact, no-time. It is the dimension of the spirit.”62 Mind at Large, however, is not totally chaotic. It only appears so to the self that operates as if the laws of the invisible universe were the same as those of the visible universe. But Mind at Large has its own rules, its own order, and it may take a person a long time to learn just what that order is.63
To discover that the self itself, in Lilly’s language, has made up the rules that govern the game of reality may take time.64 But when people discover this, they can go on to generate whatever order of reality and whatever universe they want. The sky is not the limit: “In the province of the mind, what is believed to be true is true or becomes true, within limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind, there are no limits.”65 Lilly’s Center of the Cyclone is his autobiography of inner space. To read it is to journey through the geography of Lilly’s mind as he opens various “doors of perception” and moves from space to space, from universe to universe.
Those who have never visited these spaces must rely on reports from those who have. Lilly records a number of them, and his book makes fascinating reading. Many others have visited such spaces as well, and their reports are similar in type though rarely in specific detail. I will take up the “feelings” associated with perceiving Mind at Large under proposition 3 below. Here the metaphysical aspect is the prime focus. What “things” appear in Mind at Large? And what characteristics do these “things” have? Huxley’s report is a classic because his testimony has set the pattern for many others. The first characteristic of Mind at Large is its color and luminosity:
Everything seen by those who visit the mind’s antipodes is brilliantly illuminated and seems to shine from within. All colors are intensified to a pitch far beyond anything seen in the normal state, and at the same time the mind’s capacity for recognizing fine distinctions of tone and hue is notably heightened.66
Whether the images in Mind at Large are otherwise ordinary objects such as chairs or desks or men and women or special beings such as ghosts or gods or spirits, luminosity is an almost universal characteristic. Lilly says, “I saw scintillating things in the air like champagne bubbles. The dirt on the floor looked like gold dust.”67 In eleven of sixteen separate accounts quoted by Ferguson, special mention is made of colors: “golden light,” “sparkling lights,” “intense white light,” “ultra unearthly colors.”68 Castaneda sees a man whose head is pure light and in the climactic event in Journey to Ixtlan converses with a luminous coyote and sees the “lines of the world.”69
These experiences of luminosity and color lend force to the feeling that what one is perceiving is more real than anything perceived in the visible universe. As Huxley puts it,
I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence. . . . Istigkeit—wasn’t that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? “Is-ness” . . . a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence.70
For Huxley, Mind at Large was not so much a separate reality as the ordinary reality seen as it really is. But this new perception is so different that it appears as an entirely new thing; it appears as a thing apart.71
A second distinctive characteristic of Mind at Large is that special beings seem to populate this realm. In addition to seeing what she takes to be herself and others in her past lives, MacLaine sees her Higher Self: a person in “the form of a very tall, overpoweringly confident, almost androgynous human being.”72 He becomes her guide and interpreter of her experience. Castaneda encounters “allies,” “helpers,” “guardians,” and “entities of the night.”73 Lilly frequently meets two “guardians,” who instruct him on how to make the most of his life.74 Similarly, in account after account, personal beings, or forces with a personal dimension, keep turning up—call them what you will: demons, devils, spirits, or angels. Furthermore, some new consciousness aficionados recount experiences of being changed into a bird or an animal or of being made capable of flight or rapid travel, even interplanetary travel.
Indeed, Mind at Large is a very strange place. Do its inhabitants really exist? Are they figments of the self’s imagination, projections of its unconscious fears and hopes? Does one really become a bird or fly? In the New Age worldview those questions are not important. Still, to theists and naturalists alike they are the obvious ones. I will, however, deal with them later under proposition 5.
3. Worldview Questions 5 (knowledge) and 6 (ethics): The core experience of the New Age is cosmic consciousness, in which ordinary categories of space, time, and morality tend to disappear.
This proposition is the epistemological flip side of the metaphysical coin discussed under proposition 2. In a sense proposition 3 does not much advance our understanding of the New Age. But it does add a needed depth.
Underlying the unity that propositions 2 and 3 share is the presupposition discussed in proposition 1: that seeing (or perceiving) is being; anything the self sees, perceives, conceives, imagines, or believes, exists. It exists because the self is in charge of everything that is: “I believe, therefore it is” or “I experience, therefore it is.” Philosophically, the new consciousness offers a radical and simple answer to the problem of distinguishing between appearance and reality. It flatly claims there is no distinction. Appearance is reality. There is no illusion.75
Of course, perception takes two forms, one for the visible universe, another for the invisible universe. The first is called ordinary consciousness, waking consciousness, or “straight thinking.” It is the way ordinary people have ordinarily seen workaday reality. Space is seen in three dimensions. No two bodies can occupy the same space at the same time. Time is linear: yesterday is gone; here we are now; tomorrow is on the way. Two disparate events cannot happen to the same person at the same time; while I can sit and think at the same time, I cannot sit and stand at the same time. In ordinary consciousness some actions appear good, others less good, others bad, still others downright evil. And, of course, we assume they actually are as we perceive them. With all this we are all familiar.
The second state of consciousness is not so familiar. In fact, most of us in the West have hardly dreamed of it. To make it even more complicated, this second state of consciousness is really composed of many different states of consciousness; some say three, some six, some eight.76 But before we consider any of its various subdivisions, we should grasp its general characteristics. Some of these characteristics are suggested by the various aliases for cosmic consciousness. They are legion: “timeless bliss” (R. C. Zaehner), “higher consciousness” (Weil), “peak experience” (Maslow), “nirvana” (Buddhists), “satori” (Japanese Zen), “Kosmic consciousness” (Wilber), “altered states of consciousness” or ASC (Masters and Houston), “cosmic vision” (Keen).
Two of these labels seem more apt than the others, one for theoretical, the other for historical reasons. Theoretically, altered states of consciousness carries the most universally accepted understanding of the phenomenon. The states of consciousness involved are, indeed, not ordinary. The other apt label, cosmic consciousness, is often used because it is one of the oldest in modern writing on the subject. It was introduced in 1901 by Canadian psychiatrist R. M. Bucke and was given popularity by its inclusion in William James’s classic study of mysticism:
The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is a consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe. Along with the consciousness of the cosmos there occurs an intellectual enlightenment which alone would place the individual on a new plane of existence—would make him a member of a new species. . . . With these come what may be called a sense of immortality, a consciousness of eternal life, not a conviction that he shall have this but the consciousness that he has it already.77
The label cosmic consciousness comes bearing a metaphysical explanation of the experience, one widely accepted among proponents of the new consciousness worldview. The point is this: when the self perceives itself to be at one with the cosmos, it is at one with it. Self-realization, then, is the realization that the self and the cosmos not only are of a piece but are the same piece. In other words, cosmic consciousness is experiencing Atman as Brahman.
Central to cosmic consciousness is the unitary experience: first, the experience of perceiving the wholeness of the cosmos; second, the experience of becoming one with the whole cosmos; and finally, the experience of going beyond even that oneness with the cosmos to recognize that the self is the generator of all reality and in that sense is both the cosmos and the cosmos maker.78 “Know that you are God; know that you are the universe,” says MacLaine.79
Still, other “things” appear under the states of cosmic consciousness. Even after reading countless records of these experiences, I can do no better than to quote Ferguson’s exhaustive list of characteristics:
Loss of ego boundaries and the sudden identification with all of life (a melting into the universe); lights; altered color perception; thrills; electrical sensations; sense of expanding like a bubble or bounding upward; banishment of fear, particularly fear of death; roaring sound; wind; feeling of being separated from physical self; bliss; sharp awareness of patterns; a sense of liberation; a blending of the senses (synesthesia), as when colors are heard and sights produce auditory sensations; an oceanic feeling; a belief that one has awakened; that the experience is the only reality and that ordinary consciousness is but its poor shadow; and a sense of transcending time and space.80
Ferguson goes on to quote a number of interesting accounts of cosmic consciousness, each one illustrating many, if not all, of these characteristics.
On one aspect of proposition 3, however, there is disagreement. Not all proponents of the new consciousness will agree that the category of morality disappears. Theoretically, it must, for cosmic consciousness implies the unity of all reality and that must be a unity beyond moral as well as metaphysical distinctions, as shown in the analysis of Eastern pantheistic monism in the preceding chapter. MacLaine, for example, argues vigorously for the disappearance of the distinction between good and evil as she finds herself in heated arguments with Vassy, one of her lovers, who retains an emotional attachment to Russian Orthodoxy.81 Bucke, Thompson, and Wilber would take exception to this, but MacLaine, Lilly, and Huxley agree.82 Chopra adds: “When God-consciousness dawns, . . . there is no longer a battle between good and evil.”83 Still, like Hesse’s Siddhartha and all people who remain perceivably people, MacLaine, Huxley, Chopra, and Lilly speak as if it were better to be enlightened—that is, cosmically conscious or God-conscious—than unenlightened, better to love than to hate and better to help usher in the New Age than merely to watch the old one collapse.
Finally, we must note that not every altered state of consciousness is euphoric. Naive proponents of the new consciousness worldview often lose sight of this grim fact, but accounts of bad trips are readily available. Huxley himself knew the terrors of a “bummer”:
Confronted by a chair which looked like the Last Judgment—or, to be more accurate, like a Last Judgment which, after a long time and with considerable difficulty, I recognized as a chair—I found myself all at once on the brink of panic. This, I suddenly felt, was going too far. Too far, even though the going was into more intense beauty, deeper significance. The fear, as I analyze it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear.84
Huxley, though, was convinced that only those who have had “a recent case of jaundice, or who suffer from periodical depressions or a chronic anxiety” need fear the mescaline experience.85 Few today would agree.
Lilly’s various bouts with the “demonic” along with Castaneda’s experiences document the lows of “hell.”86 Even the ever-optimistic MacLaine wrestled with visions she did not like, at least at first.87 To avoid the regions of inner hell, Huxley, Lilly, and Castaneda (as well as many others) strongly urge the presence of a guide during early attempts to experience cosmic consciousness.88 This is the New Age counterpart to one of the major functions performed by a guru or a Perfect Master in more fully Eastern forms of mysticism.
There is, of course, a blatant contradiction here. If seeing is being and imagination is reality, then an experienced hell is simply reality. Or to put it another way, if the self is king, it is in control of creation and can create as it wishes. If one experiences hell, one can destroy it and create heaven. God should need a guide?
But like devotees of the East, New Age proponents may respond that while it is true that the self is “god,” the self does not always realize it. It is a sleeping god and needs to awaken, or it is a “fallen” god and needs to arise.89 Our task, then, as human beings is to reverse this “fall.” Such a view fits well with the evolutionary motif of the New Age, but it does not resolve the basic contradiction. If the self is really god, how could it not be manifest as god? Still, there is no more contradiction here than in the Eastern version of pantheistic monism, and that has multitudes of adherents.
4. Worldview Question 4 (death): Physical death is not the end of the self; under the experience of cosmic consciousness, the fear of death is removed.
Again, I mention this characteristic separately because the notion of death is so central a concern to all of us. We are not just our physical body, says the New Age. Human beings are a unity beyond the body. States of cosmic consciousness confirm this over and over, so much so that Stanislav Grof has experimented with LSD, giving it to patients before they die so that they can experience cosmic unity as they breathe their last breath.90
Perhaps the most well-known student of death, however, is psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whose On Death and Dying (1969) has attained a deserved acclaim. In the 1970s Kübler-Ross studied near-death out-of-body experiences and acquired her own spirit guides, who assured her that death is just a transition to another stage of life.91 Interest in near-death experiences was fueled by the very popular Life After Life, written by medical doctor Raymond J. Moody Jr.92
Another witness to death as transition to another state is provided by past-life recall, such as that MacLaine recounts at considerable length in her books, especially Dancing in the Light. Through acupuncture that triggers past-life recall and by consulting channelers such as Kevin Ryerson—through whom speak the voices of Tom McPherson (who says he was once a pickpocket in the Elizabethan age) and John of Zebedee (who identifies himself as the author of Revelation and the Gospel of John)—MacLaine says she has either learned about or “seen” herself in former incarnations. She claims, for example, to have lived thousands of lives before, having been a harem dancer, “a Spanish infant wearing diamond earrings, and in a church, . . . a monk meditating in a cave, . . . a ballet dancer in Russia, . . . an Inca youth in Peru.” She was also “involved with voodoo” and, as “princess of the elephants” in India, once saved a village from destruction and taught her people a higher level of morality.93 In It’s All in the Playing she has a vision of cremation vases which her Higher Self tells her contain “both child and grandfather.” She had been both.94
The ultimate basis for the belief that death is just a transition to another form of life is, however, the notion that “consciousness” is more than one’s physical manifestation. If one is the all or the maker of the all, and if this is “known” intuitively, then a person surely has no need to fear death. Past-life recall and most near-death accounts, so the New Age holds, justify this lack of fear. There is, however, negative evidence from out-of-body experiences that is not considered by New Age proponents, and the idea of reincarnation has been weighed and found wanting as well.95
5. Worldview Questions 1 (prime reality) and 2 (external reality): Three distinct attitudes are taken to the metaphysical question of the nature of reality under the general framework of the New Age: (1) the occult version, in which the beings and things perceived in states of altered consciousness exist apart from the self that is conscious, (2) the psychedelic version, in which these things and beings are projections of the conscious self, and (3) the conceptual relativist version, in which the cosmic consciousness is the conscious activity of a mind using one of many nonordinary models for reality, none of which is any “truer” than any other.
This proposition of the new consciousness worldview takes up the question that has been screaming to be answered from the very beginning: What do all these strange experiences mean? Are they real? I’ve never had one, some say. So am I missing something?
One thing must be clear: there is no use denying that people have the experiences reported. Experience is private. None of us has each other’s experience. If a person reports a strange experience, he or she may be lying, misremembering, embellishing, but we will never be able to critique the account. Even if it appears to us to be intrinsically self-contradictory, we can deny its existence only on an a priori basis—that such and such a state of affairs is inherently impossible. If a person holds to his or her report, say, under cross-examination, then at least for that person the experience remains what it was or is remembered to have been. Monitoring a person’s brain with an electrical recording device is of no help whatsoever. It can tell us that electrical activity is or is not going on; it cannot tell us anything about the nature of the existence of the things the self is conscious of.
We can also agree, I believe, that states of altered consciousness have many general details in common—light, timelessness, “magic” beings, and so forth. So while each self has a private universe or a set of them when her consciousness is altered, each private universe is at least analogous to others. Huxley’s description—“every human group is a society of island universes”—is apt.96
The upshot is that we have a host of witnesses to what appears to be a universe next door, a separate reality. The maps of this reality are not well drawn, but if we were to enter it ourselves, I think we would know where we had been—at least when we returned, and assuming we remembered. So the question: where is this separate reality?
Three answers are given. The first is the oldest, but ultimately not acceptable to many modern New Agers. Ultimately deriving from animism, this view is that cosmic consciousness lets you see, react to, receive power from and perhaps begin to control spiritual beings that reside in a sort of fifth dimension parallel to our normal four (three of space and one of time). This dimension exists as truly and as “really” as the other four. Altered states of consciousness allow us to perceive that dimension.
This first answer I call the occult version because it is the intellectual framework for most, if not all, mediums, witches, warlocks, sorcerers, shamans, witch doctors, and so forth. The assumption of the ever present and increasingly popular occultists is that by certain means—trances, crystal balls, tarot cards, Ouija boards, and other objects with occult powers—a person can consult “the other side” and enlist its aid. But let the beginner beware, say the occultists. Without initiation into the rites and system of the occult, those who toy with incantation and even Ouija boards may bring down on themselves the wrath of the spirit world. When that happens, all hell may break loose.
This occult version has modern-minded adherents. Huxley’s understanding is clearly occult. He talks about doors of perception opening on Mind at Large and describes how he saw this Mind at Large in its multicolored, multidimensional nature. Moreover, he closes Heaven and Hell with these words:
My own guess is that modern spiritualism and ancient tradition are both correct. There is a posthumous state of the kind described in Sir Oliver Lodge’s book Raymond but there is also a heaven of blissful visionary experience; there is also a hell of the same kind of appalling visionary experience suffered here by schizophrenics and some who take mescaline; and there is also an experience, beyond time, of union with the divine Ground.97
As noted earlier, Huxley and his wife Laura applied their knowledge of the Tibetan Book of the Dead at his death, as she “talked” him into peace on the other side. MacLaine also seems to accept this occult dimension in her theories of new consciousness.
Lilly is more attracted to the alternative explanations discussed below, but he considers the occult version a serious option:
In my own far-out experiences in the isolation tank with LSD and in my close brushes with death I have come upon the two guides. . . . They may be entities in other spaces, other universes than our consensus reality. . . . They may be representatives of an esoteric hidden school. . . . They may be members of a civilization a hundred thousand years or so ahead of ours. They may be a tuning in on two networks of communication of a civilization way beyond ours, which is radiating information throughout the galaxy.98
So the occult version of the new consciousness is an important alternative. If it is correct, however, it stands in contradiction to the notion that the self is both universe and universe maker. It means that there are beings other than the self; there are other centers of consciousness that make claim on one’s own self. Viewed as less of a challenge, however, the occult version may yet hold that the self is king to the extent that it can—by whatever means—wrest control from the powerful beings that inhabit the separate universe. Occult bondage is nonetheless a frequent problem. Those who would control may themselves become controlled, locked in the jaws of a demonic trap whose strength is as the strength of ten because its heart is evil.
The second answer I call the psychedelic version because it is relatively recent and points to the origin of reality in the psyche of the person who experiences it. The psychedelic version is much more consistent with proposition 1 than is the occult version, for the psychedelic version merely says that the reality perceived under altered states of consciousness is spun out by the self. This reality, in other words, is self-generated. One does not so much open doors of perception as create a new reality to perceive.
We have seen this view described in various ways above, but Lilly’s description of his own bad trip is instructive. Early in his work with drugs, Lilly became so confident that he could handle his inner experience that he took LSD without the careful controls of an external and trustworthy guide. As a result, he had a delayed reaction, collapsed in an elevator, and almost died. He attributes this collapse to a failure to control his aggressive instincts. On LSD, he turned against himself and, after the manner of Freud’s death wish, almost wished himself out of existence. Lilly’s death would never have been ruled a suicide by doctors, but as far as Lilly was concerned it was indeed his own internal programming that put him in this fix. For Lilly both heaven and hell are inner constructs. Whether one sees himself as the freaked-out edges of the universe (hell) or as “one of the boys in the engine room pumping creation from the void” (heaven), it is one’s self that is the creator of the vision.
The third answer to the question of the nature of reality involves conceptual relativism. Essentially this is the view that there is a radical disjunction between objective reality (reality as it really is) and perceived reality (the way we understand that reality by virtue of our symbol system). That is, reality is what it is; the symbols we use to describe it are arbitrary. In the following chapter we will see this as a major part of the postmodern perspective. But it must be treated here too.
An example of conceptual relativism is in order. In our Western society we generally conceive of time as “a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal rate, out of a future, through a present, into a past.”99 Hopi Indians have no such general notion, for their language has “no reference to ‘time,’ either explicit or implicit.”100 It is not that reality is really different but that our Western language system with its overlay of cultural conceptions does not allow us to see otherwise. This has led Benjamin Whorf to the hypothesis in linguistics that is now associated with his name: “The structure of the language one habitually uses influences the manner in which one understands his environment. The picture of the universe shifts from tongue to tongue.”101
How does conceptual relativism work out in a practical situation? Robert Masters gives an illustration: “There are peoples who live in close surroundings, like a dense forest, and who therefore believe it’s impossible to see beyond a few thousand yards. And if you take them out into the open, they still can only see that far. But if you persuade them that there’s more to see, why then the scales fall away and great vistas are opened.” So Masters concludes, “All perception is a kind of symbolic system. . . . There is no direct awareness of reality at all.”102
In modern philosophy Ernst Cassirer describes this skeptical view of language and its implication as “the complete dissolution of any alleged truth content of language, and the realization that this content is nothing but a sort of phantasmagoria of the spirit.”103 In such a system concepts are creations of thought and “instead of giving us the true forms of objects, show us rather the forms of thought itself.” As a result “knowledge, as well as myth, language, and art, has been reduced to a kind of fiction—to a fiction that recommends itself by its usefulness, but must not be measured by any strict standard of truth, if it is not to melt away into nothingness.”104 On the other hand, while objective truth may be unattainable, this idea has a more positive counterpart: each symbol system “produces and posits a world of its own.”105 To have a new world, one need have only a new symbol system.
At this point the relevance of our excursion into philosophy and language analysis should be obvious. The conceptual relativist version of the new consciousness worldview simply claims that altered states of consciousness allow people to substitute one symbol system for another symbol system, that is, one vision of reality for another.
The Western world’s symbol system has dominated our vision for centuries. It has claimed to be not only a symbol system but the symbol system—the one leading to objective truth, the truth of correspondence. What a proposition asserts is or is not true, does or does not correspond to reality. Theism and naturalism have insisted that there is no other way to think. So cosmic consciousness—the seeing of the world in a different symbol system—has had a hard time coming. But with theism and naturalism losing their grip, other conceptual orders are now possible.
Many of the proponents of the conceptual relativist version of the new consciousness are well aware of its philosophic roots and its counterpart in modern theories of physics. Laurence LeShan’s “general theory of the paranormal” is a specific version of conceptual relativism. When mediums perform the mediumistic task, says LeShan, they assume the following basic mystical worldview: “1. That there is a better way of gaining information than through the senses. 2. That there is a fundamental unity to all things. 3. That time is an illusion. 4. That all evil is mere appearance.”106 At other times when they are ordinary inhabitants of the visible universe, they accept more commonsense notions of reality. LeShan quotes liberally from modern scientists, especially physicists who call on the notion of complementarity to explain why an electron appears to behave sometimes like a particle and at other times like a wave, depending on the instrument they are using to “observe” it.107 All the time, the assumption is, it remains the same as it was. But what that is, no one knows. We know only that it appears in some of our equations as one thing and in other formulations as another. Wilber’s elaborate schema picturing the whole of reality in four quadrants, each with its own type of language, is a recent variant.108
But Erwin Schrödinger raises an important consequence of assuming that symbol systems can be so easily put on and cast off. He points out that that means no true model of reality exists: “We can think it, but however we think it, it is wrong.”109 The only category left to help us distinguish between the value of two symbol systems is the purely practical issue: does it get you what you want?
As there are no true models of reality in science, according to some versions of the notion of complementarity, so there are no true models of reality for humanity in general.110 And just as the value of a scientific model is measured by its practicality, so pragmatic value is the measure of the worth of a particular altered state of consciousness or a particular theory about it. On this there is a chorus of agreement among new consciousness theorists and practitioners alike.111 LeShan states the view succinctly: “If the application of a theory produces results in the predicted direction, its fruitfulness has been demonstrated.”112 So much for the theories of cosmic consciousness. Weil applies the pragmatic test to the experience itself: “It would seem obvious that the only meaningful criterion for the genuineness of any spiritual experience . . . is the effect it has on a person’s life.”113 Readers who detect in this elements of postmodernism, especially of the sort represented by Richard Rorty, are not far off the target, as we will see in the following chapter.
The practical consequence of the conceptual relativist view of the new consciousness is that it frees a person to believe anything that will bring the desired results. So where do you want to go? What do you want to do? When Lilly accepted the naturalist’s notion of the universe, he took a journey to hell. When he accepted the notion that there were civilizations beyond ours, he was “precipitated into such spaces.”114 Believing was being. No vision of reality is more real than another. Schizophrenia is one way of seeing things; normality is another, says R. D. Laing. “But who is to say which is the madness, especially considering the results of normality have been so disastrous in the West.”115
Moreover, it may be that some of our normal distinctions and ways of perceiving bring us personal as well as social and environmental problems: “Suppose someone gets a feeling, and then he makes some distinction about that feeling. Say he calls it anxiety to distinguish it from other feelings. Then that first feeling is followed by a second which he distinguishes as shame.”116 In a spiraling cycle he feels both more anxious and more depressed. Laing concludes, “Now, in a sense it’s his distinctions that are making him unhappy. Sometimes I think a great deal of people’s suffering wouldn’t exist if they didn’t have names for it.”117 The solution is obvious: Get rid of distinctions or symbol systems which have them. Imagine a worldview in which you could not tell the difference between pain and pleasure, for example. The consequences of doing this might be severe, but why not figure out a way of adopting such a worldview when one is ill in one’s ordinary state of consciousness? Different worldviews have different values at different times. Why not employ them as needed? Play the sexton—different chimes for different times.
6. Worldview Question 5 (knowledge): Human beings can understand reality because in a state of God-consciousness they directly perceive it. Nonetheless, when New Age teachers present this view to others, they often cite the authority of ancient scriptures and other religious teachers.
As we have seen above, a person in the state of God-consciousness knows reality directly. That knowledge is not mediated by rational argument or any external authority: “I experience (whatever), therefore it is.” No such conscious argument lies behind the experience itself; rather, the conscious present experience is the source and authority for the knowledge. This authority is like that for recognizing your best friend when he or she appears in your field of vision.
The teachings of the Bible, the Mahabharata, the Koran and all the other spiritual books that I had tried to understand flooded back to me. The Kingdom of heaven is within you. Know thyself and that will set you free; to thine own self be true; to know self is to know all; know that you are God; know that you are the universe.
Shirley MacLaine, Dancing in the Light
Most people, however, do not have a direct knowledge of their own divinity; they have to be convinced. As we have seen, New Age proponents suggest various methods of meditation to achieve this direct knowledge. But many of them also cite the external authority of other New Age proponents and especially texts that Christians or other religious believers call scripture. Among the most cited religious authorities are the Buddha and Jesus. Credence for New Age teachings is thereby enhanced. For Christians especially, if Jesus said it or if it’s in the Bible, then it must be true. Virtue by association, one might say.
Deepak Chopra provides a clear example. In The Third Jesus, Chopra turns from promoting alternative medicine to teaching his religious views directly.118 There are three Jesuses, he says. The first Jesus is the man who lived in Palestine centuries ago. About him we today know almost nothing. He was “swept away by history.” The second Jesus is the Jesus largely invented by the church to “fulfill their agenda”; this is the theological Jesus, the Jesus of the creeds, the Jesus preached in sermons. He is so far from the historical Jesus that he can be dismissed as mostly fabrication. The third Jesus is the “one who taught his followers to reach God-consciousness.” He had reached this state and spent his life teaching others how to do so. He “asked his followers to see themselves as souls rather than as fallible individuals whose desires conflicted with one another.”119
How does Chopra know his Jesus is the real Jesus? Nowhere is it more apparent that Chopra’s knowledge is based on the authority of his own God-consciousness. How does he know that the historical Jesus is not a well- attested figure? How does he know which Scripture texts accurately portray Jesus and which don’t? Not only does he cite no biblical scholarship, he seems not to know that it exists.120 The historical Jesus is dismissed with a wave of the hand. The Jesus of the church is rejected as a fabrication. But who today is more likely to know about Jesus: those who pay attention to the data of history—texts written a few years after his death—or those who, with no other authority than their own intuition or imagination, reduce a profoundly detailed figure to a mere ghostly absence? Only if Chopra really is the God of his own God-consciousness can he have the authority to proclaim a third Jesus.
When Chopra does turn to ancient sources, he quotes Gnostic texts as if they were more authoritative than biblical texts, claiming, for example, that the Gospel of Thomas comes from the same period of time. It doesn’t. The latest New Testament book is probably the Gospel of John (ca. AD 90); the Gospel of Thomas and other Gnostic texts date from the middle of the second century.
The biblical texts Chopra quotes are lifted from their original theistic context and dropped into the context of an ancient Gnostic or modern New Age worldview. When Jesus says that “the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21 KJV), Chopra says this means that the kingdom of God is solely individual and immaterial, which he finds conflicts with the book of Revelation. Later he cites John 5:39-40 (NRSV): “You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life.” Here, Chopra says, “Jesus is reinforcing his message that the Kingdom of God is within.”121 Not so. Jesus is telling his critics that because they use the Scripture as their authority, they should recognize him as one who has come from the Father.
Even John 3:16-17 (NRSV) gets twisted beyond recognition: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” Chopra comments: “Jesus bolsters his divine identity in the strongest, most eloquent terms. Higher consciousness saves a person from the illusion of death, and this gift comes from a loving God.”122 No, higher consciousness does not save us; Jesus himself does that.
Or again, take John 14:6-7: “Jesus answered, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.’” This declaration of the exclusivity of the Christian faith stands in direct contradiction to Chopra’s main teaching that each of us is capable of God-consciousness and of creating our own reality. Still, he says, “If we sift out the element of Church doctrine, Jesus is saying, ‘If you have been seeking, seek no further. This is how the spirit looks when it has been realized.’ In other words, he brings God-consciousness down-to-earth by being its living exemplar.”123 No, in the context of the Gospel of John, Jesus is not an exemplar of God-consciousness. He is the one and only eternal Son of God. We ourselves are not God. To think we are God or that we can become God or a god is the primal sin of pride.
7. Worldview Question 7 (history): History as a record of events that actually occurred in the past is of little interest, but cosmic history which ends with the deification of humanity, especially the individual human self, is seen as a great vision and a great hope.
New Age proponents do not hesitate to consider accounts of experience from throughout human history. But they are more interested in the “experience” induced by these events than with the significance of these events themselves. How were these events perceived? That is the important matter. Experience is all.
The overall pattern of human history—the impact of events on human experience—is, however, of considerable interest. There is, first of all, the general evolutionary history of cosmic formation—Big Bang, galactic and planetary formation, the formation of the earth. Then comes the emergence of organic life, its evolution into humanity’s present state, its teetering on the edge of a transition to cosmic consciousness. Cosmic history’s future is finally foreseen as the arrival of the New Man, the New Woman, and the universal New idyllic Age.
8. Worldview Question 8 (core commitments): New Agers are committed to realizing their own individual unity with the cosmos, creating and re-creating it in their own image.
As is the case with other worldviews, not all who name themselves New Agers (or allow themselves to be named that by others) would claim to have realized that their self is the kingpin of the cosmos. By no means would all of them imitate Shirley MacLaine as she runs up a California beach shouting, “I am God. I am God.” But behind the specific beliefs and practices of fully New Age practitioners is the hope that they—each one of them—are in the center of reality even though they have not yet achieved a fully cosmic consciousness. Their implicit, if not explicit, commitment is to realize this goal.
This is a very tall order and there are many reasons why New Age optimism may overstep whatever cosmic and human reality is now or comes to be.
CRACKS IN THE NEW CONSCIOUSNESS
Is the New Age worldview a step beyond nihilism? Does it deliver what it promises—a new life, a new person, a new age? One thing is clear: it hasn’t yet, and the mañana argument is not reassuring. We have had visionaries before, and they and their followers have not done much to save either the world or themselves. Tomorrow is always on the way. As Alexander Pope said, “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.”124
We have little assurance now that with cosmic consciousness will come the new society. Far greater is the case for pessimism, for the new consciousness worldview is shot through with inner inconsistencies, and it does not even begin to solve the dilemmas posed by naturalistic nihilism or Eastern mysticism. It simply ignores them.
The first major difficulty with the New Age worldview is shared with naturalism and pantheistic monism. The notion of a closed universe—the absence of a transcendent God—poses the problem. William Irwin Thompson says, “God is to the universe what grammar is to language.”125 God is just the structure of the universe. We have already seen how such a situation makes ethics impossible, for either there is no value at all in the external universe (pure naturalism), or God is inseparable from all its activities, and at the level of the cosmos distinctions between good and evil disappear.
New Age proponents have not solved this problem at all. To be sure, many assume that the survival of the human race is a prime value, and they insist that unless humanity evolves, unless people become radically transformed, humanity will disappear. But few discuss ethical issues, and some admit that in the New Age categories of good and evil disappear, just as do categories of time and space, illusion and reality. Even those who opt for moral distinctions are careful not to be fastidious. If human survival means submission to the new elite, then the finer ethical distinctions may be too costly. To survive people may have to abandon traditional notions of freedom and dignity.126
The reason ethical questions receive little attention is clear from proposition 1. If the self is king, why worry about ethics? The monarch can do no wrong. If the self is satisfied, that is sufficient. Such a conception allows for the grossest cruelty. The New Age worldview falls prey to all the pitfalls of solipsism and egoism. Yet virtually no proponent of the system pays any attention to that problem. Why? Because, I presume, they buy the consequences and are unconcerned. Let go and let be. Be here now. There is simply no place for ethical distinctions.
Wilber, however, does argue for an ethical intuition—that is, those who are more evolved toward higher consciousness are better. He makes ethical judgments that find some human beings of less value than some animals. It would be better to kill Al Capone, Wilber says, than a dozen apes: “Nothing is sacrosanct about a human holon [unit].”127
A second major difficulty in the new consciousness worldview comes with what it borrows from animism: a host of demigods, demons, and guardians who inhabit the separate reality or the inner spaces of the mind. Call them projections of the psyche or spirits of another order of reality: either way, they haunt the New Age and must be placated with rituals or controlled by incantation. The New Age has reopened a door closed since Christianity drove out the demons from the woods, desacralized the natural world, and generally took a dim view of excessive interest in the affairs of Satan’s kingdom of fallen angels. Now they are back, knocking on university dorm-room doors, sneaking around psychology laboratories, and chilling the spines of Ouija players. Modern folk have fled from Grandfather’s clockwork universe to Great-great-grandfather’s chamber of gothic horrors.
Theism, like animism, affirms the existence of spirits, for the Old and New Testaments alike attest to the reality of the spirit world. There are both angels under the command of God and demons (or fallen angels) under their own command or at the beck and call of the master fallen angel, Satan. But biblical teaching about this spirit world is sketchy, and what there is is often cast in the form of sidelong allusions to pagan religious practices and of warnings not to toy with the realm of spirits.
It may seem strange that Christian theism does not have a well-developed angelology. If there exist dynamic, powerful beings whose nature is beneficent, why should we not contact them, employ them as guides, and harness their power for our human ends? The major reason is simple: God alone is to be our source of power, wisdom, and knowledge. How easy it would be for us to worship the angels and forget God!
This is precisely what happened in the early years of the Christian church. The Gnostics, borrowing perhaps from Chaldean astrological lore, taught that God is too exalted, too far away to be personally interested in mere human beings. But other beings exist—“principalities” and “powers”—who are higher than humans but lower than God. We must, so the argument goes, learn to placate the more unfriendly of these beings and to call on the more friendly for help. Vestiges of this idea remain in some popular expressions of Roman Catholic piety if not in the Church’s official teaching on saints. Beseech Mary, for she is human and knows our need; she will in turn ask God to help us: Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis. The challenge to this has been that it tends both to overexalt departed saints and to denigrate God.
Saints and angels play quite a different role in the Bible. The word saint simply means church member or Christian, and angels are solely at the command of God. They are not given to human beings for their own manipulation. God’s infinite love is manifest in many finite ways, but he alone is our helper. Though he sometimes employs angels to do his bidding, he needs no intermediaries. He himself became human, and he knows us inside out.
So the Bible contains no model—no counterpart to the Lord’s Prayer—for enlisting angels in our plans. But it does contain warnings against enlisting the aid of spirits or “other gods.” One of the earliest and clearest is in Deuteronomy:
When you enter the land the LORD your God is giving you, do not learn to imitate the detestable ways of the nations there. Let no one be found among you who sacrifices their son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead. Anyone who does these things is detestable to the LORD; because of these same detestable practices the LORD your God will drive out those nations before you. You must be blameless before the LORD your God.
The nations you will dispossess listen to those who practice sorcery or divination. But as for you, the LORD your God has not permitted you to do so. (Deuteronomy 18:9-14)
This instruction was given just before Israel entered the Promised Land. Canaan is full of false religion, full of occult practices. So watch out. Have nothing to do with this. Yahweh is God—the one God. Israel needs no other. There is no other. To think so—or to cover all bets by seeking the services of diviners, soothsayers, sorcerers, wizards, charmers, mediums, or whatever—is blasphemy. God is God, and Israel is his people.
The New Testament likewise forbids divination and recounts many instances of demon possession.128 One of the most instructive is the account of Jesus’ casting the demons from the Gerasene demoniac (Mark 5:1-20). From this account it is clear that many demons had possessed the man; they were not a projection of his psychosis, since when they left him they entered a herd of swine; demons are personal beings who can use language and communicate with people; and they have the very worst in mind for humanity. It is also clear—and this is most important—that Jesus had complete control over them. It is in this that Christians have hope.
Many modern men and women who have become involved in the occult have found freedom in Christ. The apostle Paul himself assures us:
If God is for us, who can be against us? . . . Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? . . . I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:31, 35, 38-39; see also Colossians 2:15)
No natural force, no spiritual being, absolutely nothing can overcome God. God is our refuge, not because we, like some superstar magician, can command him to help us, but because he wants to. “God is love,” says the apostle John. “In him there is no darkness at all” (1 John 4:8; 1:5). So the demonic can be overcome and will be overcome.
While spirit activity has been constant in areas where Christianity has barely penetrated, it has been little reported in the West from the time of Jesus. Christ is said to have driven the spirits from field and stream, and when Christianity permeates a society the spirit world seems to disappear or go into hiding. It is only in the last few decades that the spirits of the woods and rivers, the air and the darkness have been invited back by those who have rejected the claims of Christianity and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Perhaps it will be a case of sowing to the wind and reaping the whirlwind.
A third major difficulty with the new consciousness is its understanding of the nature of reality and the nature of truth. Some of the most sophisticated new consciousness proponents, like Ken Wilber, are not occultists in the usual sense. They do not cast I Ching or consult tarot cards. Rather they accept the languages of all systems of reality—the languages of sorcery and science, of witchcraft and philosophy, of drug experience and waking reality, of psychosis and normality—and they understand them all to be equally valid descriptions of reality.129 In this version of New Age thought there is no truth of correspondence in the Mind at Large or higher levels of consciousness, only a pattern of inner coherence. So there is no critique of anyone’s ideas or of anyone’s experience. Each system is equally valid; it must only pass the test of experience, and experience is private.
Taken to its logical conclusion, this notion is a form of epistemological nihilism.130 For we can never know what really is. We can know only what we experience. The flip side is that the self is kingpin—God, if you will—and reality is what any god takes it to be or makes it to be.
We are caught in an impasse. The issue is primary: either the self is God and the New Age is a readout of the implications of that, or the self is not God and thus is subject to the existence of things other than itself.
To the self that opts for its own godhead, there is no argument. The naturalist’s charge that this is megalomania or the theist’s accusation that it is blasphemy is beside the point. Theoretically such a self accepts as real only what it decides to accept. It would be theoretically futile (but perhaps not practically so) to try to shock out of their delusion those who suppose themselves to be a god. Pouring a pot of hot tea on their head should produce no particular response. Still, it might be worth a try!
Perhaps (but how can we know?) this is the situation of psychotics who have totally withdrawn from conversation with others. Are they making their own universe? What is their subjective state? Only if they waken may we find out, and then memory is often dim if present at all. Their reports may be quite useless. If they waken, they waken into our universe of discourse. But perhaps this universe is our made-up universe, and we ourselves are alone in a corner of a hospital ward unwittingly dreaming we are reading this book, which actually we have made up by our unconscious reality-projecting machinery.
Most people do not go that route. To do so is to recede down corridors of infinite regress. Nausea lies that way, and most of us prefer a less queasy stomach. So we opt for the existence of not only our own self but the selves of others, and thus we require a system that will bring not only unity to our world but knowledge as well. We want to know who and what else inhabits our world.
But if we are not the unity-giver (God), who or what is? If we answer that the cosmos is the unity-giver, we end in naturalistic nihilism. If we say it is God who is the one and all, we end in pantheistic nihilism. So we need, says Samuel McCracken in his brilliant essay on the mindset of the drug world, “a certain simpleminded set of working assumptions: that there is a reality out there, that we can perceive it, that no matter how difficult the perception, the reality is finally an external fact.”131 We also need a basis for thinking that these needs can be met. Where do we go for that? Not postmodernism, as we will see next.
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION
1. How would you summarize the main objectives of the New Age movement?
2. How does New Age blend elements of Eastern and Western thought?
3. What are possible strengths and weaknesses of the conceptual relativist view of reality?
4. Why do you think New Age elements have appealed to so many people in the West?