New Age, Christianity and Clarity

The biggest wrong to have come out of the New Age has been the idea that everyone makes their reality and is responsible for everything that happens to them. Like many other false ideas, this one is easy to stand on its head. All one needs to do is effectively infringe upon the next person - through any number of ways, either spiritual or conventional - and the person who believes himself in charge of his reality will have to say that he brought it upon himself.

Instead, the reality of any given person's life is a composite of all sorts of factors, some internal, some brought about by other people, and some not of human origin (such as nature and climate). Real enlightenment will see all of these factors and work with them. The idea that nobody can either help or injure the next person is very easy to play with. You can - curse the person, pray to God regarding that person, motivate your congregation to beat up on the person, use arguments to affect the social climate or economic agents against the person - and the result will be you having a major role in shaping of that person's reality. For which reality he will then have to blame himself without quantifying your impact on him.

In the same way, false ideas in Christianity can likewise be stood on their heads. The claim that all authority is there by will of God can be stood on its head by oneself becoming the authority; and then the believer in such statements will have to decide that you are in charge because God wants you there. By this thinking Stalin and Mao were there by will of God. This kind of thinking gives God the blame for malfeasance of every villain in history. In real-world terms, this leads to sociopathic leadership habits, in which anyone who is in power, regardless of how he got there, is made to be divinely ordained authority; and this incentivizes nothing but villainy on the part of leaders, bosses, husbands and parents.

Where both New Age and Christianity are superior to materialist fundamentalism is that both recognize the reality of spiritual, religious and occult phenomena. However much is wrong in the explanations that both offer as well as in the implications thereof. One shouldn't have to buy into things that are false and easily refutable in order to make sense of spiritual experience. There should be an integrative worldview that is consistent with scientific fact and accepting of the reality of spiritual experience at the same time.

The attempt to study mystical phenomena scientifically has been described as leading to magic and occultism; but really it leads to this: Clarity. It leads to knowing what is actually happening at the level of the mind. The best application of this clarity is seeing through all the conmanship that is associated with these phenomena and being able to pinpoint exactly who is doing what. And this can be of profound merit to everyone, especially the people who are at receiving end of psychic phenomena as well as those who seek to understand the same.