New Age Fundamentalism

At some level it should be just as OK to fantasize ones initial spiritual growth ... {similar to how we all fantasize as children ... quite fantastically actually} ... relative to a "New Age" ... that quite frankly hasn't technically even started yet {2012?} ... to the same degree one tolerates friends and families stuck in "old age" nescience.

That we each have left and right brain hemispheres and that 'oh so often, most extreme behavior on either side of the polarization {pragmatic / intuitive} is really just the collective balancing out of each others karmic tendencies.

Many so called Utopian ideologies are just as innocent as a child's imagination, or like a musician or Artists experimenting with "possibilities" that just do not work out ... that coming out of centuries of Dark Age-to-Reason and Rationale monopolies that it is OK for some to just wing it in whatever way they can get away with.

Like a war prisoner dreaming of freedom in any way they can imagine .. that such is not "existentially wrong" any more than being overly pragmatic at the expense of higher intuition often is.

That there needs to be more acceptance from both ends of the polar transition towards optimum balance. To where the newness and oldness of the age meet in the middle.

Simply because polarization is obviously already there, and every version under the "possible sun" of such polarized purpose is likely already being imagined ... that we just accept all versions as part of the collective growing pain process.

A rather large interactive mandala including immense variegated perspectives ... each one becoming self-expressive merely relative to previous notions ... each others "nemesis muse" ...

But only until the zero point field state of balance is reached by the collective in relation to all peripheral hints of probability ... literally growing at each others expense .. no one ever really teaching beyond being taught.

"Wonder is what Mystery would do if it was conscious" ...

"Wandering is for every other possibility"

Pippalayana Muni 

Jonathan Zap of zaporacle.com

I was so glad to even see the title of this article because I have been trying to point out things about New Age fundamentalism for years. See: http://www.zaporacle.com/dynamic-paradoxicalism-the-anti-ism-ism/

For example here's my take on YCYOR:

You Create Your Own Reality vs. Outer Reality Creates YouR

ecently I was traveling with someone, a very interesting, complex, and worthwhile character, but who also proved to be an absolutist, a New Age fundamentalist whose whole family was under the spell, benign or malign, of various channeled entities. He believed—though pragmatic and shrewd in most other ways—so absolutely in the you-create-your-own-reality principle—deemed the absolute of absolutes by various channeled entities—that his plan for financial independence was to, “Manifest money into my checking account.” This was meant absolutely literally, no deposit would have to be made by him or anyone.

The solipsistic assertion, you-create-your-own-reality, comes from channelers and the entities they claim to channel. It originated with Jane Roberts—channeler of “Seth”—in the early 1960s, and has since been picked up by other channelers and associated entities. For example, Seth says:“And, if you believe, in very simple terms, that people mean you well, and will treat you kindly, they will. And, if you believe that the world is against you, then so it will be in your experience”(hear an audio clip of Seth saying this: http://www.sethlearningcenter.org/)

As with most channeled material I have encountered, what is presented, usually with aphoristic authority, are dangerous half-truths. (See: The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts  http://www.zaporacle.com/the-siren-call-of-hungry-ghosts/) for more on why you should be wary about channeled material. I

n many social situations, what you expect of others will greatly affect how they treat you. But there are other cases where this doesn’t apply very well at all. Let’s say I am a Polish Jew when the Nazi army is invading Poland. Should I seek refuge in another country? No, that would be a fear-based surrender to negative thinking. Instead I should stay put and focus on how kindly I will be treated by the Nazis.

With fundamentalist consistency, other post-Roberts channelers insist on the same absolutism. For example, John Cali, the channeler of “Chief Joseph,” writes:“. . .the idea intrigued me, so I kept studying and reading everything I could get my hands on. Finally, it made sense. I accepted we are totally responsible for whatever manifests in our lives—all of it. It’s either that or we’re victims. I never liked being a victim”Notice that John’s thinking is the opposite of dynamic paradoxicalism: “It’s either that or we’re victims.” In other words, it is either one absolute or another, and this is the absolutism I prefer, therefore it applies in all cases. From this point of view, rape victims should be counseled that they invited or manifested the attack—however unconsciously—and need to look for the cause within. But there are such things as victims, an abused infant for example, but accepting that doesn’t mean the opposite absolutism, that we’re all victims, since there are many people who have discovered ways of being empowered in difficult circumstances.

The absolutist never acknowledges that there is a middle range of positions, as well as some cases that fall on either pole of the paradox.You-create-your-own-reality does not work as an absolutism, but it is a major reality formation vector. In many cases, you do create your own reality, as in the principle, “Psychology is destiny.” This principle applies most potently to our inner reality, and next most potently to our voluntary relationships and life circumstances—much more so if we live in a relatively free society. This principle also applies potently, but not absolutely, to the dreamtime. Since our dreams can involve visits or invasions by other autonomous entities, they may not be entirely our own creations. Also, it is an unproven assumption that even when we are alone in the dreamtime that the dream is entirely our own creation. I have noticed that the surreal complexity of dreams, with their double and triple entendres and layers of symbolism, does not seem to be at all dependent on the imaginative capacity of the dreamer. People whose waking personalities seem dull and unimaginative have dreams that seem like they could have been directed by David Lynch.

You-create-your-own-reality absolutists may invoke quantum mechanics to justify their fundamentalism. Indeed, the wave-particle duality—a photon being a particle or a wave depending on which you expect it to be—does raise questions about reality as observer dependent. Again, I feel that this principle is a potent reality-forming vector; I just don’t think it is the only vector. There may be other humans collapsing the wave function based on different intentions than ours, and there is also the gigantic inertia and momentum of the collective human psyche affecting our world.

There is a New Age tendency to use quantum mechanics as a magic wand, or an endless supply of fairy dust, that can be used to justify any proposition, no matter how fantastic. The abuse of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which was created to have very specific application on the subatomic plane, is used by some relativists and New Agers to mean, “Everything is uncertain,” which for them means, “Anything goes.”Quantum mechanics does have profound implications, but we can’t be cavalier about applying them to the human reality. Quantum mechanics applies to the subatomic domain, and it is comprehensible in the language of mathematics, not English, so we need to be careful about applying our personal mythology of what quantum mechanics means to the human domain.

Another way to justify you create your own reality is to radically redefine the “you” in the principle. If the “you” refers to the personal ego and its wants and desires (which is how most people implicitly use it), then you have the weakest and most repugnant version of the principle. If “you” is redefined as the Self, or expanded to an ultimate degree so that it means a cosmic awareness underlying and connecting everything, then you have the strongest and most valid case of the principle.Jung defined the “Self” as the totality of all the psychic structures. It is the Self, not the ego that would have access to True Will—a will that derives from essence and that is in accord with the will of the cosmos. If the “you” is the Self creating from True Will, then the principle becomes far more robust.In many instances, you-create-your-own-reality is the most useful side of the paradox, especially when applied to psychology, individual and collective, and the circumstances created by same psychological factors. Someone who is caught in a neurotic reality tunnel and has a history of abusive relationships as a result of their own unconscious choices would be well advised to move past victim-of-circumstance self-pity to see how they have largely created their own reality. But the you-create-your-own-reality absolutists don’t stop there, they apply this principle to victims of tsunami and famine, they apply it overconfidently to cases where huge macro physical events affect an entire population. In some given case, this could still have a possible validity. For example, statistical analysis shows that a significantly greater number of people than average make last minute cancellations on plane flights that later crash. Some given person might have watched the water moving away from the shore and instead of accessing some primal intuition to run to higher ground, as many animals did, allowed some inner intention toward oblivion to keep them on the beach. Another way of stretching the principle to cover cases like this is to resort to past lives, and to claim, based on no direct evidence, that everyone hit by a tsunami or erupting volcano, etc, had past life karma that made such circumstances right for them, or unconsciously intended by them. Although this can’t be proven or disproven, it starts to get morally repugnant, as an affluent New Ager can thereby feel that people experiencing macro catastrophic events are still in charge of their own destinies. From their POV, an infant dying of AIDS is creating their own reality, however unconsciously, as surely as some affluent person repeating a neurotic tendency in romantic relationships.

Although you-create-your-own-reality absolutists never admit this, their principle requires an act of faith as much as any religious fundamentalism. They never acknowledge how much their principle is divorced from empirical experience. Why hasn’t some sufficiently positive thinking you-create-your-own-reality person, for example, created a world without any environmental pollution? If everyone is creating their own reality, why does the rotation and orbit of the earth have such predictable clockwork accuracy? Wouldn’t some true believing schizophrenic who knew absolutely that the earth’s orbit was based on his whims have an influence? Wouldn’t people who wanted a particular day or night to last a bit longer throw off the Newtonian clockwork? Does the you-create-your-own-reality principle apply only to benign, politically correct intentions like world peace—which shows no signs of happening, despite all sorts of individual and mass prayers and intentions? Wouldn’t the principle apply with equal validity to malevolent individuals? Suppose my intention is to bring a black hole into the solar system or to abuse and manipulate someone else’s reality? Since we are part of a human collective, what happens when our application of the you-create-your-own-reality principle is inconsistent with other members of the community? How does that get worked out? Even on the individual scale, the principle seems to work in some cases, but not others. There are all sorts of medical miracles where someone does seem to create their own reality in direct contradiction of medical prognosis. But this effect seems to go only so far; we don’t, for example, have any documented case of a transsexual, who absolutely believed he was another gender, waking up one day to find a new set of genitals that matched his beliefs, intentions, etc Somewhere I remember reading about someone who observed many faith healings, and saw many crutches thrown away, but never a wooden leg. Philip K. Dick said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

On the other side of this paradox, outside reality creates you. An example of this point of view is environmental determinism. Environmental determinists believe that that physical environmental factors determine human behaviors, social structures and culture. I dislike this position as an absolute as well, but the environmental determinist has a much more impressive array of evidence to support their position. Environmental determinism is the position of a book like Guns, Germs and Steel, which makes a case for climate and microbiological factors as keys to explain why technological civilization would arise in some parts of the world, but not others. Marxism is another case of environmental determinism, where the economic structure of a society is said to determine everything else. A potent example of cultural determinism is language. All of us speak and think in one or more languages that long predated us. Our minds were booted up in a domain of English users, and this language, determined outside of us, drastically affects our sense of time and our perception of all manner of inner and outer realities. If I create my own reality than I must have created English as well, since this is too gigantic a factor in my life to have possibly been determined outside of me.

Environmental determinism may be valid in some cases, but is a deeply flawed proposition if accepted as an absolutism. Environmental determinism is an extraverted, fundamentalist/materialist point of view. It does not sufficiently take the human psyche into account. Nazism was not merely a response to economic and climatic conditions, but an eruption of the collective unconscious.According to dynamic paradoxicalism, some things are best understood as realities created by psyche, others by outside causation, and still others by a confluence of the two factors.

A unified way of including both sides of this duality is to say that, yes, you create your own reality, but this you is not necessarily you as an individual, but rather the universal mind, the source out of which your psyche manifests.

I know that was a long excerpt, but it's so relevant to this pillar of New Age fundamentalism I hope it's welcome.  

See my take on oneness vs. eachness here:

http://www.zaporacle.com/lessons-for-an-enity-incarnating-as-a-mammal/

Thanks again for posting this.

Some collective trends of everyone being overly into the distinction of individualization ... hence the polar trend to "become one"

Some trends of over thinking humanism {think tanks} ... old age remnants from the age of reason and rationale for their own sake ... hence the polar trend to "just not think about it so much"

That for long others have been creating our reality for us ... that to simply no longer be a sheeple and just follow the mere inertial dictates of trends to add ones own creative potential into the collective reality ...

That extremes at one end obviously insight extremes at the other end in all of these three points. Most atheism comes from exposure to bad theism.

So, so many belief systems are based on polar exposure to other versions. Like the over indulgence in sexual freedom to make up for the over bearing puritanical ethic ... hopefully as these polarities work themselves out we collectively reach, however conscious, sub conscious, unconscious, and integral balance of actual workability beyond the conflict.

"Wonder is what Mystery would do if it was conscious" ...

"Wandering is for every other possibility"

Pippalayana Muni 

Hi Adam,

You wrote, “By saying "everything is one" we push aside good and evil because we would rather imagine a universe in which good and evil are an illusion, and so when people talk about "Bad" experiences or "evil" in the world, we think to ourselves, "that person is lost in illusion," or we slyly say, "Well, it's just a matter of getting outside of judgment and seeing the world through eyes of unconditional love."

When I read this, I thought immediately of several lines from “The Envoy of Mr Cogito,” one of my favorite poems by Polish writer Zbigniew Herbert. In it, he says, “and let your helpless Anger be like the sea/ whenever your hear the voice of the insulted and beaten…and do not forgive truly it is not in your power/ to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn.” I am truly in awe of some of the poetry that was written in Eastern Europe since World War II. These writers--among them Milosz, Celan, and Herbert--give form to my intuitions as to how spiritual vision can be tempered and integrated with a weight of historical knowledge.

They often seem to be saying: Civilization does not automatically progress. True change does not come through politics. No technological solution can be expected to appear on the horizon.

There is often a very visceral sense of the reality of evil, of bureaucratic corruption, and of the power of the lie. At the same time, there is no easy recourse to stern moralistic finger wagging. Something altogether more mysterious is often going on--the veil between the worlds has ripped, and a wave of supernatural force has begun to transfigure common objects. Reading the best of Eastern European writers from this period, it is difficult for me not to view myself and my contemporaries as naive, and I look to them for clues as to how I might be possible to “begin beyond the end.”

The Envoy of Mr Cogito

Go where those others went to the dark boundary

for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize

go upright among those who are on their knees

among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust

you were saved not in order to live

you have little time you must give testimony

be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous

in the final account only this is important

and let your helpless Anger be like the sea

whenever your hear the voice of the insulted and beaten

let you sister Scorn not leave you

for the informers executioners cowards - they will win

they will go to your funeral with relief will throw a lump of earth

the woodborer will write your smoothed-over biography

and do not forgive truly it is not in your power

to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn

beware however of unnecessary pride

keep looking at your clown's face in the mirror

repeat: I was called - weren't there better ones than I

beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring

the bird with an unknown name the winter oak

light on a wall the splendour of the sky

they don't need your warm breath

they are there to say: no one will console you

be vigilant - when the light on the mountains gives the sign- arise and go

as long as blood turns in the breast your dark star

repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends

because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain

repeat great words repeat them stubbornly

like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand 

and they will reward you with what they have at hand

with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap

go because only in this way you will be admitted to the company of cold skulls

to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland

the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes

 Be faithful Go

Yeah, the New Age has flattened the vision of many...but I find problematic how many people is using the label "new age" to discard what they don't like or understand (lack of first-hand experience) of other teachings/spiritual paths..with the end result of the term 'New age" totally devoid of content/meaning...

"The SACRED (whatever that means) is surely related (somehow) to the BEAUTIFUL (whatever that means)..."
Gregory Bateson