Why I’m not “New Age” anymore

Once upon a time, I was enamored of everything New Age, completely fascinated by all its “alternative” therapies. I thought we were entering a Brave New World of freedom from the “old paradigms” of health and healing.

The other day, I went to an “Expo” of New Age modalities. There was booth after booth after booth, each offering its own form of healing or “personal growth”. I couldn’t get out of there soon enough – I practically ran out the door.

I’m sure that all these practitioners were very sincere. And many of them probably “help” people in some fashion.

One element that almost all these “healers” had in common was that they start with some form of diagnosis: your chakras are out of balance, your soul needs to be retrieved, you have too many minerals in your hair, you’re ignorant of your past lives, your electrons need to be tuned up, etc., etc.

Then, of course, each of these booths offered some kind of treatment that was appropriate to their particular diagnosis. You can get your charkas balanced, your meridians humming, your akashic records expunged. You can use crystals, pendula, activators, tuners and potions of every sort.

What virtually all of these modalities have in common, hype notwithstanding, is that they promote “healing from without”. Many of them would argue with this. They are promoting inner healing with these crystals, etc., they would declare. I’m unmoved by these declarations. If you need these rocks to trigger your healing, then it is not inner healing. Wearing crystals in a bag around your neck may be less invasive than drugs or surgery, but I’m sorry, there’s still some mumbo-jumbo going on here. The drugs, for all their running roughshod over our natural healing mechanisms, may still largely be operating from placebo effect – and so too, I suspect, for the negative-air-ion-charged jojoba oil. The thing all of them have in common is the message they send to our conscious and unconscious mind that 1) you need healing and 2) you can’t do it by yourself.

Oh, and one more message is imbedded in most of New Age thinking: some people are more in tune with this New Age than others. I like to think of this as the track and field model of personal growth – some souls are just more athletic than others, have more personal or spiritual prowess. It is fundamentally a competitive model. Some people are just further down the road. Maybe all of us can be placed somewhere on this continuum of realization – and these folks are farther ahead. We may call them old souls, healers, more evolved or – the real kicker – enlightened. And mostly here, “enlightened” typically does not mean that we take ourselves lightly – no, in most cases we are taking ourselves or these other “enlightened ones” kind of serious.

And what if we don’t need healing? What if the symptoms we are currently experiencing are part of our path as much as our “peak experiences”? What if the message we most need to integrate is not that the New Age cavalry are on their way, but that we are just perfect right now and that our symptoms will shift exactly when they are meant to – and that there is just nothing we can do to slow this down or speed it up. What we can do is to add on one more layer of mystification: not only do we have X wrong with us, but now we need Y to make us better.

And, worst of all, we are left comparing ourselves with others. It’s you over there and me over here. And we are not only essentially separate, but more than separate, we are competing with each other – one of us is closer to the goal line than the other.

Now, how, when these various symptoms genuinely make us feel like crap, can I possibly say that they are just right? Because most of them emanate from already believing that there is something wrong with us or with our life or with life period. The real source of our suffering is dualism – the belief that there are good feelings or bad ones (symptoms), that we are better sometimes than others, that some people are more healthy or enlightened than others. Our current symptoms are just right because they are the game – they are what keeps us busy here, what we get to, little by little, see through.

If there is actually something like enlightenment, I bet it has to do with seeing through all this mystification. The more enlightened we become, the more we genuinely take our “self” lightly. We may celebrate the idea that each of us has our own unique path up the mountain. But, if each is unique, then comparing those paths becomes utter nonsense. There is no valid way to say that one soul is “further up”. In fact, there is no meaning to saying that you or I are “further up” than we were before.

Our whole path is but one unbroken thread. To value one part of the thread more than another puts the whole business in a knot. If I am to fully value or accept myself at this particular point in my story, I’ve got to love the whole story, because that’s what got me here. So a “realized” being, if there is such a thing, has simply realized that – for all our separate fingerprints – we are all equally valid, equally whole, and, in fact, inextricably woven into each other. Thinking of me as self and you as other is just the big comical game of this life. When we really see through this separation mystification, we almost always wink, smile, chuckle, belly laugh or absolutely roll on the floor with hilarity. What an amazing relief! What a big, sly, tricky joke this whole drama has been. What’s not to laugh?

If to become enlightened means to get over the notion that I am separate from you, then there is no me left to be enlightened. Enlightenment is just one wonderful wave of relief sweeping through all of creation, a rising tide that truly does lift all boats and is happening to tickle my little dock of the bay – giving me a momentary or longer glimpse that your boat and mine are made of the same fundamental stuff, that life has just cast us in different molds to make it more fun and interesting to get it that the stuff under our surfaces is both the same and totally connected.