IN THE EIGHTIES EVERYONE
WAS CONVINCED
THAT THE NEW SPIRITUALITY WAS TAKING THE WORLD
BY STORM.
The
book THE AQUARIAN CONSPIRACY was a best seller and the mainstream media
who started out by sneering distorting and accusing suddenly jumped on
the band wagon with such a bang that the whole thing turned into a
Yuppie Circus.......
In a very real way the popular cultural aspect of the new
age movement from the early eighties to the end of 1989 was a sixties
revival. Its fate in North America and Europe was certainly similar.
What started out as a movement for the idealistic transformation of
western culture, fell victim to an excess of delusion, materialism, and
a negative Media Image. Just like the Sixties, it was essentially a
romantic spiritual revival, with an economic climate of surplus money,
and abundance to support it, and just as before, when the money supply
started to dry up, so did the pop-cultural side of the movement. The
same people who had been the Woodstock Generation and who had joined the
establishment and become materially successful felt empty and
unfulfilled in spite of their success. They started to remember that the
last time they felt really alive was when they were trying to change the
World.
The Sixties generation in the Eighties were ready to try
and spiritualize the ‘corporate culture’. Bring about a kinder gentler
capitalism, a Green capitalism that would be gentler and kinder to ‘the
planet’. Just like in the Sixties there was terrific cultural
excitement. The big metaphor in the Eighties was the “Hundredth Monkey”
the idea being that a “global spiritual critical mass” was immanent.
This spiritual critical mass was to magically alter the consciousness of
the majority of people on Earth and bring on the Newage everywhere.
Heres how Ken Keyes jr. tells the story of the Hundreth Monkey that
became the defining metaphor for the Newage movement in the eighties. "The
Japanese monkey, Macaca fuscata, had been observed in the wild for a
period of over 30 years. In 1952, on the island of Koshima, scientists
were providing monkeys with sweet potatoes dropped in the sand. The
monkeys liked the taste of the raw sweet potatoes, but they found the
dirt unpleasant. An 18-month-old female named Imo found she could solve
the problem by washing the potatoes in a nearby stream. She taught this
trick to her mother. Her playmates also learned this new way and they
taught their mothers too. This cultural innovation was gradually picked
up by various monkeys before the eyes of the scientists. Between 1952
and 1958 all the young monkeys learned to wash the sandy sweet potatoes
to make them more palatable. Only the adults who imitated their children
learned this social improvement. Other adults kept eating the dirty
sweet potatoes.
Then something startling took place. In the autumn of 1958, a certain
number of Koshima monkeys were washing sweet potatoes -- the exact
number is not known. Let us suppose that when the sun rose one morning
there were 99 monkeys on Koshima Island who had learned to wash their
sweet potatoes. Let's further suppose that later that morning, the
hundredth monkey learned to wash potatoes. THEN IT HAPPENED!
By that evening almost everyone in the tribe was washing sweet potatoes
before eating them. The added energy of this hundredth monkey somehow
created an ideological breakthrough!
But notice. A most surprising thing observed by these scientists was
that the habit of washing sweet potatoes then jumped over the sea --
Colonies of monkeys on other islands and the mainland troop of monkeys
at Takasakiyama began washing their sweet potatoes. Thus, when a certain
critical number achieves an awareness, this new awareness may be
communicated from mind to mind. Although the exact number may vary, this
Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon means that when only a limited number of
people know of a new way, it may remain the conscious property of these
people. But there is a point at which if only one more person tunes-in
to a new awareness, a field is strengthened so that this awareness is
picked up by almost everyone!"
(from
the book "The Hundredth Monkey" by Ken Keyes, jr. The book is not
copyrighted and the material may be reproduced in whole or in part.)
The hundredth monkey is not a bad metaphor; it probably
describes how cultures actually change. Think of how many people had to
be on the Internet before it actually arrived. Probably people just
hadn’t figured out how to make a critical spiritual mass of sufficient
potency and endurance to bring about the desired result. There is every
possibility that people may discover how to bring about this critical
spiritual mass at any time.
Extreme spiritual cultural and political movements have
occurred in the twentieth century west. Most of them appear to fail
abysmally. There were omnipresent drugs too in the Eighties. Different
drugs. In the Sixties of course the drugs of choice were L.S.D. Peyote,
Mescaline Hashish and Marijuana. In the Eighties it was Cocaine Crack
and Heroin with a lot of people using Ecstasy to facilitate bogus
spiritual experiences like Channeling and magical trances. This was long
before Raves became a typical Saturday night out.
At the core of the Newage movement in the Eighties people were into
being healthy and pure. Trying to ‘walk the talk’ and work at real
‘transformation’ trying to ‘make a difference’ trying to change the
‘nature of personal reality’. Getting ready to be that ‘hundredth
monkey’ and change the world for the better.
Revolutions, both imaginative and actual, have shaped this last century
as they have done no other. All real revolutions begin as revolutions in
consciousness, and as the clash of competing visions of the future,
which represent different understandings of the truth of human nature
and its real destiny. The Newage movement understood in its widest sense
is still the best long term contender to bring about a Global culture
capable of embracing all people in a common spiritual vision. It is
still young raw and inexperienced in the ways of real politic but it is
learning always learning.
There were real social and cultural gains made in the
Eighties too, just like in the Sixties. Everyone in this Western
Civilization owes a debt of deep gratitude to the Newage movement.
Something of real and lasting value was accomplished in the Eighties and
Nineties namely the awakening of millions of people to the spiritual. No
small feat in the face of a hostile mainstream media, powerful organized
religions and a veritable army of cynical materialists pouring out their
bitter vials of ridicule. The depth and far reaching effects of this
widespread awakening to the spiritual has yet to be fully felt.
The old world order has deluded itself into thinking that
it can enforce some kind of new world order and is now making noisy war
threats. This imperialistic old world order has temporarily managed to
paralyze the mass media in North America and undermine the United
Nations.
The Newage movement bides its time all over the world in the sure
knowledge that the old order is daily bringing about its absolute
destruction. Out of the ashes of that destruction will surely rise, a
new kind of Global community.
The new age movement has always had its own language,
which at the beginning of the eighties only really made sense to the
underground that had originated it. One of the interesting peculiarities
of this movement is that although its name or label goes in and out of
use, its language continues to proliferate, and all of its beliefs and
goals continue to permeate Western culture. As pop-cultural languages
go, it contains a terminology which stops at nothing short of total
planetary transformation.
The Harmonic Convergence of AUGUST 17, 1987 celebrated by millions of people at time-synchronized
locations all over the world and was covered by the international media.
The purpose of the event was to generate a circle of transformative
light and peace all around the world and to announce the dawning of a
new age punctuated by the end of the Mayan calendar.
It was Jose Arguelles who defined the time period that became known as
the Harmonic Convergence: “the point at which the counter-spin of
history finally comes to a momentary halt and the still imperceptible
spin of post-history commences.” He also pointed out that it was the
fulfillment of the prophecy of Quetzalcoatl, known as the Thirteen
Heavens and Nine Hells. The prophecy stated that following the ninth
hell, humanity would know and experience an unprecedented New Age of
Peace. The Hell cycle ended on August 16, 1987; the Harmonic
Convergence began on August 17. Thus began the projected twenty-five
year culmination of the 5,125 year Great Cycle of History, as well as
the 26,000-year cycle of evolution, both slated to end in 2012.
GODS AND GODDESSES ALL:
All through the Eighties the Goddess appeared everywhere
as an expression of Anthropic feminism and Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis,
and merged with neopaganism, Greek mythology, Jung Archetypes and
spiritualized feminism. The Newage movement became the playground of
many very bright women who could command audiences of hundreds and
thousands of people at three to five hundred dollars apiece for a
weekend seminar. The was a real bedrock shift in Western civilization at
that point a shift that in all likelihood is here to stay. Never again
will it be possible to ignore the Feminine side of spirituality. And for
those still inclined to believe in a Deity it can just as easily be
masculine as feminine, or both.
Even though the Goddess was dancing in the light, a lot of the more
intelligent and energetic Newage women were still very unhappy with
their abysmal love lives. What had happened to the men? Newage men
prided themselves on being able to let the feminine side of their being
‘come through’, as opposed to ‘come out’ and be truly wholistic
sensitive, receptive, emotionally available, the kind of man that a
woman in love could really talk to, but obviously the women wanted to do
more than just talk. These were highly independent self- possessed women
with few fears who wanted to experience the white-hot blast of male
fire. It was scarce. Most of the men they were meeting at the seminars
were acting like their sisters half the time and their therapist the
rest of the time. These poor men had been brainwashed by psychologism,
politically correct feminism, and Carl Jung’s anima-animus theory.
Newage women started to let themselves get picked up by
male chauvinist louts who they definitely couldn’t talk to but who at
least were interested in only one thing.
Not that the women were intending to establish permanent relationships
with these uncomplicated testosterone-bound sexists. No, they were just
keeping themselves in a potent womanly way until that predetermined
karmic moment came, when their twin-flame/soul mate showed up. Perhaps
he’d be at the next seminar weekend.
The Newage men weren’t happy either, something had gone
terribly wrong, here they were being everything that their girlfriends
and wives were telling them to be and it still wasn’t working. If
anything it was worse than ever. At least when they were being sexist
slobs and not listening, they could tell themselves that this was the
source of their woman troubles. Well only after their therapist or
spiritual teacher pointed it out.
And so the Men’s Movement was born, a thing feared and’ loathed by the
secular feminists as an obvious ruse on the part of men to reassert the
old Patriarchy. Lots of women in the secular women’s movement were
outraged that men would even dare to think of such a thing, well
obviously that made it all the more necessary. And just because some
women had visions of jackboots and torture was no reason why a group of
sincere men shouldn’t get together and bond to the primordial beat of
the drum.
Actually the men’s movement was the assertion of a new and authentic
Patriarchy.
It represented a very real break, through for a lot of men who had lost
their way and manhood, in that entire feminist muddle. There were men
who were discovering their manhood for the very first time, men who had
been ’women’s men’ discovering the meaning of sexuality-free male
intimacy.
Many of the baby boomer generation of men had grown up without Fathers
the death toll in world war two and also because of the divorce rate
that began to escalate in the fifties and sixties .The Vietnam War and
peace activism further alienated these men from what they perceived as
the hawkish values of their fathers generation.
For this generation of men the ‘absent father’ turned into ‘the absent
self’ they knew that something was deeply wrong but even after years of
development, therapy, and a lot of reading in the new consciousness they
still couldn’t come up with an accurate diagnosis of their mysterious
problem. And they had been in dialogue at a very deep level with the
women in their lives for years and they still felt blocked, undermined,
there was terrible and deep-rooted rage, sorrow, anguish and emptiness,
a sense of having failed in some irredeemable way. Nihilism takes many
forms.
Their women could not help them with this at all, couldn’t even begin to
understand or grapple with it. Later it came out that the male emotional
body at a deep structural level is formed in a very different way from
the female emotional body, but at the time, it would have been denounced
as sexist to even think this. It still is, by some of the secular
feminists, but by now very large numbers of men know better. And more
than anyone else it was Robert Bly the outstanding American poet and
author of the famous Iron John who led the way in the men’s liberation
movement.
Even though the Newage movement has drawn deeply upon the past it is
always, implicitly, about the future and what kind of world we were are
emerging into next.
In the eighties the mass media attention given to Marilyn Ferguson’s
book really let the Unicorn out of the magical forest and onto everyone
book shelf. The book was hailed as a great success, yet it appears that
it is one of those books that everyone owns but relatively few have
really read, similar in this regard to Stephen Hawkins A Brief History
Of Time. Yet Ferguson’s Book had an extraordinary impact and effect upon
the leaders and innovators in the Newage movement it acted like a
manifesto naming the simple truth with the title itself. Millions of
people had entered a new reality in the sixties and seventies but they
didn’t really know the magnitude of the thing until the Newage
networking really started.
There are always three forces at work at any time in a
culture: Tradition, Futurism and the Reality of the situation .Many of
the adaptations that were observable in western society during the
seventies and eighties, such as new management techniques and
communication methods were the direct result of Government sponsored
social programmes like unemployment insurance and welfare. A people no
longer terrified at the prospect of unemployment must be motivated at
work by something other than fear.
People had resented the dehumanized, fear- driven atmosphere of the
highly organized and profit driven work place since the beginning of the
industrial revolution.
The sixties had reduced people’s blind faith in and obedience to
authority figures and people wanted to be more like their real selves in
the work place. Other sociological factors were changing the work place,
such as the increased numbers of university educated women and the
readiness of the sixties generation of men to accept women as their
equals.
This is only part of the picture, but it was into this sociologically
changing situation that the Newage movement entered through amongst
other things Ferguson’s Aquarian Conspiracy. The timing of the book was
perfect, because its audience was ready. It was already apparent to
leaders and executives in Health, Education Corporate Culture, and every
other area of western life that new methods and approaches were required
simply on the basis that the momentum of Progress—the god of the
west-was moving to Asia and the new Europe. But such is the inert power
of tradition in crisis that even when the answer to its problems is
readily available it is still unable to respond with sufficient speed.
Precisely because it is in crisis it is suffering from a loss of
confidence in its ability to change and regresses into ‘traditional
values’.
That's Your Opinion
During the eighties the Newage movement
turned into a massive commercial enterprise. The Newage publishing and
music industry boomed. The ecologically responsible Body Shop had a
magnificent success. Organic pesticide free food began to appear in the
Supermarkets. Green products and services expanded rapidly. The Movie
“Ghost” was an all time box office success, and led the way in a whole
new genre of film. Vast numbers of people were reading Newage books and
Magazines, like never before. Astrologers Psychics Tarot readers and
Spiritual Consultants were busy everywhere. Psychic Fairs all over the
western world were drawing huge crowds. Inevitably gross exploitation
began.
The Fundamentalist right wing in Regan’s and Bushes America were afraid
and envious of the Newage movement. It didn’t take long for the right
wing media to demonize the Newage movement. Of course the Christian
rightwing have been demonizing non Christian spirituality ever since it
became a serious problem for them in the sixties.
Old organized religions just hate to loose believers to alternative and
more appealing forms of spirituality. Educated atheism they can live
with because they know they have next to no chance of making a
conversion. But when they see atheists’ secular humanists and lapsed,
Christians and Jews discover the Sacred through the Newage movement it
makes them apoplectic. The rightwing media fought back, they dubbed the
Newage movement a “yuppie fashion”.
They also beat that old war drum of theirs, “cults” “cults” “cults”,
disingenuously trying to distract people from the fact, that traditional
organized religions are merely the successful cults of history.
Many of the original new spirituality pioneers felt that their
decades-long struggle for greater public spiritual depth and reality was
being hijacked, and it was.
The crystal sellers and Channellers were out in droves, so were the
’prosperity consciousness’ crew who were basically selling the psychic
back waves of greed and runaway consumerism coming from Bush-Regan’s
America and the hyper-inflation in junk bonds and real estate.
Prosperity consciousness is “voodoo economics” with a vengeance. The
basic idea of ‘prosperity consciousness’ is that you can simply
reprogram yourself from a mentality of poverty to a mentality of wealth.
There is no examination of the systemic political and economic causes of
wealth and poverty, no questioning of the ethical or spiritual
appropriateness of greed and consumerism. In short ‘prosperity
consciousness’ seeks to lend spiritual legitimacy to parasite
capitalism. All of this culminated in the (S&L) Savings and Loan
scandal. In the process of bailing out the S&L collapse the American
government burdened the tax payers of America with massive debt.
Shirley Maclaine was hailed by the mass media as the High Priestess of
the Newage movement. By all appearances she accepted the title. Then a
mostly hostile Media went to work using standard negative propaganda
methods. First the Media pretended to be shocked and horrified that a
Hollywood Star of Shirley Maclaine’s standing would so much as entertain
something as “flakey and out there” as the Newage movement. The Media
usually forgetting to mention, that Hollywood has always been the home,
of Astrologers Psychics Gurus and eccentrics of all varieties. In fact
it is fair to say that Hollywood remains one of the weirdest places in
the world. The ten o’clock news the newspapers magazines and tabloids
continuously reported what Maclaine said, what crazy thing she was doing
today. The propaganda pitch was that whatever Shirley Maclaine said or
did in no matter what context, reflected on this frightening crazy
ridiculous thing called the Newage movement.
This was a disaster of the first magnitude. Maclaine was as ill informed
as she was famous. Her first best seller “Out on a Limb” put the new age
movement exactly there. At a time when the bloom was off the rose of her
leading lady career, she was hungry for fame and played the thing for
all it was worth.
She was getting a lot of her information from Channellers, and in this
way, legitimizing the flaky and mentally lazy psychics who were
pretending to represent the new spirituality.
As too many people now know Channellers go into deep trances and allow
disincarnate entities to speak through them; this is called “deep trance
channelling”. In this kind of Channelling the psychic wakes up
afterwards and finds out what the ‘disincarnate’ said from witnesses or
a tape recorder. Other types of psychic Channellers, retain a passive
awareness of what the ‘disincarnate’ is doing and saying while in
possession of their body.
This regressive psychic fringe element opened the Newage movement to
charges of Necromancy. The rightwing fundamentalists were absolutely
delighted. Necromancy: intercourse with the dead has been denounced
as evil and dangerous since the earliest times in the
Greco-Christian west.
H.P. Blavatsky cofounder of the Theosophical Society (Circa. 1875.) and
arguably the founder of the Newage movement repeatedly denounced
Necromancy throughout the entire body of her extensive writings and
lectures. Necromancy has nothing to do with
the Newage movement and never did.
But of course it’s not quite that simple. The “Higher Self” of an
individual can also speak through them when in a kind of trance that
neutralizes the confusion and dissonance coming from the “lower-self”.
This was the case with the world famous and extremely rare Edgar Casey.
But what Casey was doing was definitely not necromancy.
All the new channellers started out wanting to be sleeping prophets like
Edgar Cayce or Jane Roberts with her Seth entity. The media didn’t know
the difference between any of this and actually informed spiritual
consciousness. Nor did they care to find out. Why would they? The
hostile mass media made it their business to dig up every deluded if not
demented and often outright stupid psychic wannabe and brand them spokes
persons for the Newage movement.
Intellectual tolerance and open mindedness is not just a rule amongst
new consciousness people it is de rigueur. But this wonderful open
mindedness really worked against the movement in the eighties no one on
the “inside” wanted to criticize the newbie’s or be perceived as being a
negative dream killer. The Newage movement, like Shakespeare and the
Bible, became the happy hunting grounds of the insane. The widely held
rationalization for allowing this ridiculous free- for- all was that all
of these crazy people had to ”go through their process too” and that
they would learn in time, no doubt many of them have. But they were
allowed to damage the Newage movement by giving it a false and
misleading image in the media and public consciousness. A lot of these
unfortunate self indulgent people remain mere “spiritual consumers’” to
this day.
Because the well- read thoughtful new—consciousness people had always
exercised freedom of thought and healthy open mindedness didn’t mean
that they had no critical faculties working, quite the opposite. The new
spirituality underground before the eighties had a very high average
intelligence quotient. Many people had graduated from College and
University with degrees in Philosophy, History, Comparative Religion,
Sociology, Psychology, the Humanities, and Fine Arts.
Throughout the sixties and seventies a lot of the discussion revolved
around the real differences between metaphysics and science, comparative
religious mythologies, the nature of the mind and perception as it
relates to parapsychology.
Mathematical and statistical theories for and against Astrology were
being explored and written about. The role of auto suggestion and self
hypnosis in the variety of meditation techniques was being evaluated and
investigated.
Many highly well informed and educated disciples of spiritual traditions
had also read deeply into Carl Jung’s psychological theories and were
examining the questionable validity of Jung in the light of legitimate
spiritual philosophies like the work H.P.Blavatsky, G.I Gurdjief, P.D.
Ouspensky, Shri Aurobindo and others.
But the whole new wave of people known as the “Shirley Maclaine Newagers”
mistook that open mindedness for “anything goes’: Any appeal to critical
objectivity, conceptual discrimination or logical analysis was brushed
aside with one of the popular buzz phrases which was: “that’s your
opinion’. You could be standing in a rainstorm with one of these people,
comment on how wet it was, and receives this reply: ” Its only raining
for you, why can’t you get it that the sun is really shining?” And this
delivered with heavy handed seriousness.
"You are God and you create your own reality”
was being used by megalomaniacs’ solipsists and plain lunatics to
justify the denial of everyone else’s reality.
COPYRIGHT ©
A. BLAIR-EWART.
To be continued:
