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!!!*** SOCIOLOGY OF NEW AGE***!!! WHATS DRIVING IT -From sociologists point of view

Four major sociological explanations understand the New Age movement in terms of social forces. These explanations assume that sociological forces are the most important forces influencing social movements and therefore reduce the New Age movement to sociological forces. The first one sees the movement as a result of the political defeats and dashed expectations of the sixties. The second one sees the movement as a synthesis of mainstream and countercultural values. The third one sees the movement as “Yuppie” spirituality. The fourth one sees the movement as emerging planetary communities.

The first sociological explanation, that the New Age movement is a result of the failed politics of the sixties, is offered by the sociologist David Hess and the American religion scholar Carl Raschke. Raschke says that “when the [sixties] revolution failed, the response was not to extend one’s hopes into an uncertain future, but to find a mystical fruition for them in the realm of ‘consciousness.’” Hess says that many activists were disappointed by the lack of political reform in the sixties and seventies, and they turned inward. Hess says that “in many ways the emergence of the New Age Movement was a reaction to the defeats of the political aspirations of the 1960′s” especially the violence at the 1968 Democratic convention and McGovern’s defeat in 1972. Hess says that “The turning inward of reformist and even revolutionary aspirations after external political defeat calls to mind the similar development of romantic and utopian socialist movements that emerged in Europe in the wake of the failure of the French Revolution.” For Hess, the New Age movement would not have happened if the political system had changed.

This explanation is helpful in situating the beginning of the New Age movement in the mid-sixties to the early seventies and in highlighting the relationship between protest movements of that time and the New Age. The problem with this explanation is that it assumes the only reason people pursue spiritual and psychological matters is because they are suffering from some setback in the outer political sphere. Thus, it assumes that if the leftist politics had triumphed, there would have been no need for turning inward. Unfortunately, such a reductionistic explanation is typical of many sociologically inclined academics who dismiss genuine spirituality.

Many movement activists of the sixties did grow dissatisfied with political activism and joined what we now call the New Age movement. But instead of arguing that this shift from politics is a failure of will, one should see this more as a witness to the inadequacies of our cultural paradigm. The movement activists turned from political activism to spirituality because they found something more satisfying there. Two of the most prominent political activists of the sixties, Rennie Davis and Jerry Rubin – both members of the Chicago Seven – illustrate this point. Rennie Davis was on his way to Paris to celebrate the end of the Vietnam War when a series of “coincidences” diverted him to India. Through meditation with the guru Maharaj Ji, Davis found an inner radiance and bliss that activism never gave him.(3) Jerry Rubin writes in his autobiography that much of what he calls his immature political activism during the sixties was a result of his psychological problems, and he needed to change inwardly in order to act effectively in politics. Rubin said that his style of political activism was bad for his physical and psychological health, his friendships and his spiritual awareness. What is now called the New Age movement helped him to develop these sides of himself that our culture had taught him to neglect. Rubin thinks that activists would be more effective once they integrate these sides of their personality into their political activism.

Similarly, thousands of other activists grew dissatisfied with the simplistic sixties explanation that the Establishment was the problem; these people began to see the problem was as much inside their heads as it was inside the Establishment. Furthermore, these activists realized that changing themselves was a lot harder than agitating for others to change. Thus Carlos Castaneda, who introduced shamanism to the New Age movement, comments, “I came from Latin America where the intellectuals were always talking about political and social revolution and where a lot of bombs were thrown. But revolution hasn't changed much. It takes little daring to bomb a building, but in order to give up cigarettes or to stop being anxious or to stop internal chattering, you have to remake yourself. This is where real reform begins.” Therefore, Hess is overly simplistic in thinking the New Age is just a reaction to the failed political hopes of the sixties.

Moreover, this explanation says nothing to the millions of people in business and academia throughout the eighties and nineties who have found conventional success unsatisfying and find something more through the New Age movement.

The second sociological explanation sees the movement as a combination of mainstream and countercultural values. This explanation is given by the sociologist Loring Danforth, who studied New Age firewalking. Danforth argues that “alternative religious movements arose in the 1970s in response to the dramatic conflict that existed between mainstream American culture and the counterculture or youth culture that emerged in the 1960s.” The people who became what we now call New Agers questioned the mainstream’s values, but also found they could not live by counterculture values. They ended up integrating these two sets of values through alternative religions or the New Age movement. Danforth bases her explanation on Steven Tipton’s earlier work on alternative religious movements. Tipton characterizes the mainstream as utilitarianism because it values individualism, technical reason and an orientation to the future. On the other hand, Tipton also says that the counterculture values self-expression, feelings, and going with the flow.

Danforth’s theory that the New Age movement integrates mainstream and countercultural values is very perceptive. The New Agers do want to find a way to be part of the mainstream social structure while still exploring alternative ideas and practices. But, the best way to understand these mainstream values is to see them in terms of the Enlightenment because the values of the Enlightenment are the cultural mainstream. Thus Tipton’s utilitarianism is a secularized Enlightenment philosophy; in fact, a direct line of influence can be traced from the most important Enlightenment thinkers to the utilitarian value system of contemporary society. For example, the best way to understand the countercultural values of the hippies is to see them as Romantic values revived; the values of the counterculture – feelings, self-expression, and “going with the flow” – were the most important values of the Romantics. Moreover, the Romantics espoused these values in reaction to the Enlightenment just as the counterculture espoused them in opposition to the establishment of their day. Danforth is right in noting that the New Age integrates mainstream and countercultural values, but the best way to understand these values, and thus the New Age synthesis, is to understand the larger context of Western cultural history.

The third sociological explanation claims that the New Age is Yuppie spirituality. This explanation sees the qualities of the Yuppies – particularly their self-centered individualism, their concern for establishment success and their hedonism – and notices the same qualities in popular segments of the New Age movement such as “est” or Anthony Robbins training. For this reason, it maintains that the New Age movement is just narcissistic spirituality catering to shallow people.

This explanation is inadequate for many reasons. First, it primarily concentrates on one stream of the movement, the business and success stream, ignoring the many other streams of the movement. Second, the New Age movement cannot be categorized merely as a Yuppie phenomenon because its base of support is much broader than just the Yuppies as its members come from a wider range of social classes and age groups. As one sociologist studying the movement, David Hess, declares: “In visiting health fairs, meditation centers, spiritualist churches, and so on, I have been struck by the numbers of attendees, too old or too young to be baby boomers, just as I have been impressed by the diversity of the ethnic, class, and occupational backgrounds of the people whom I observed or with whom I spoke.”(8) Finally, this explanation does not accurately portray the beginning of the movement. While the Yuppies are an eighties phenomenon, the New Age started in the late sixties or early seventies.

A significant part of the New Age movement is related to the Yuppies, but this relationship actually reveals the Enlightenment heritage of the New Age movement. An important part of the Enlightenment was its concern for making money. Even today we remember Benjamin Franklin’s admonition of “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” The movement started out amongst White upper-middle class people, but it has expanded beyond that since then.

The last sociological explanation sees the New Age as planetary communities. This explanation is offered by religion scholar Mary Bednarowski who defines the New Age as “intentional spiritual communities [which] espouse explicitly the idea of an emerging planetary culture based on human transformation.”(10) This definition follows David Spangler’s concept of the New Age as “an emerging planetary culture.”

There are many problems with this definition. The first is that it overemphasizes these so-called planetary communities. These communities, such as Findhorn, Lindisfarne and Auroville, have often been high on self-promotion but low on actually delivering anything substantive to the movement. Moreover, especially after the seventies, these communities were only a very small part of the movement, and so they cannot be considered the dominant feature of the New Age movement. Thirdly, this call for a global culture is not really new in our history. This idea, under the name of cosmopolitanism, was a significant part of Enlightenment, and thus it is really part of the New Age movement’s inheritance from the Enlightenment. Lastly, Spangler says these planetary communities are a result of a larger spiritual force, which for him, is the real explanation of the New Age movement. Spangler says that the “new age is an act of planetary incarnation, the birth of a planetary mind and soul . . . In this way, the new age is the emergence of a new revelation, a new covenant between God and the wholeness of planetary life. It is the mystical birth of a new being, a new expression of divinity, whose life is our life – all our lives.”

"AWAKE -STAY AWAKE-AWAKEN- GET INTO GOOD GOVERNANCE- GGG"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzvzgj7Samc&list=RDpzvzgj7Samc#t=80