Believe it or not, I’ve been a closet New Age Flake for many years.
I have at least two hundred books spanning the range of New Age spirituality.
However, my education and career are in the hard, logical science of engineering. So I approach any New Age material with tremendous skepticism. I find that maybe 90% of the “New Age” material is total bunk, pure nonsense.
Yet there is a small percentage that is really quite profound. This is a complex topic that I could easily write twenty pages on and have only scratched the surface.
Instead, for brevity sake (and to avoid boring everyone) I’ll just offer a couple examples:
A Course In Miraclesis unquestionably the most profound “channeled” material I’ve ever encountered. However, the Course can be challenging to understand and work with because it presents spiritual concepts in the most condensed, raw form that I’ve ever encountered, compared to the traditional highly stylized, metaphorical forms (dumbed-down and storied-up for human consumption). Yet, when I did the prayer work to understand just a few paragraphs of “The Course” I found it changed my life completely. It is an extremely profound book. http://www.acim.org/
You ask “What does The Course teach you?” I offer you one (of countless) examples. A co-worker walks into your cube. That co-worker is in a bad mood due to some unknown personal event. However, you sense it because that co-worker is difficult to work with. Do you respond with anger? The proper spiritual response is Love and a Miracle. Through Love (and spiritual preparation) you can act as a spiritual conduit through which God performs a true Miracle. The form of that Miracle depends on the situation, but might involve God dropping the EXACT perfect sentence into your head, that when spoken to that upset person, immediately transforms them (both spiritually and emotionally). It may also result in that person convulsing in tears of release, and embrace you out-of-spiritual-closeness right in your cube! And ten years later, that person will remember that shared experience, that miracle you shared, even it only took 10 seconds to transpire.
The Course In Miracles teaches such things. The rate at which you learn them depends upon you. It can take minutes, or decades.
New Age material certainly can be categorized based on the target level of spiritual understanding of the reader, and the reader’s motivation. When the search for spiritual truth has a strong selfish component, we have New Age materials such as the currently popular category of “consciousness-conditioning.”
The concept of visualizing money coming into your life is a classic example of Creative Visualization used to facilitate consciousness-conditioning. Yet, this is really about selfish use of spiritual principles to “fix” our minds so we get more THINGS, be it money or health or whatever. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It is an valid phase of spiritual development.
So WHAT about the New Age materials that are on the other extreme, the totally selfless side of the spiritual spectrum? In my opinion, that’s where it really gets interesting.
For example, you have the entire category some call “Mystical Christianity” that is related to the larger (not uniquely Christian) idea of a spiritual conversion process, with consistent (from person to person) spiritual transitions each with characteristics common to each respective phase.
Evelyn Underhill’s classic text, Mysticism: A Study in Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousnessis unquestionably the best treatise on the mystical process.
However, you don’t experience the mystical process from reading Underhill’s book. Her book is an intellectual attempt to describe that process. I would hardly claim to have transitioned even the first phases of the mystical process. Trust me that I wouldn’t be chasing money in the stock market had I made it even part way along the mystical path!
There are countless works that are obviously inspired out of those fully engaged in the mystical path. An classic example is the mystical work, The Cloud of Unknowing
I have such deep respect for those who fully engaged in the mystical process, I’m offended by the many (not anyone on this Forum) in this world who speak of the mystical process as if it is a mild process akin to a day spa, or whatever.
To those who ask “What the hell is the Mystical Process?” I answer this:
I lack the experience to give full answer, but I can at least give answer that will imply the DEPTH of the transformation, and the total sacrifice involved.
You begin by throwing yourself upon the ground and begging upon your life to God, that NOTHING in your life is of interest or value (including your life itself) relative to your single and TOTAL desire for complete union with the Creator. And you beg that God would fill you and consume you as an inferno burns a thing so completely that nothing remains, no personality, no separate thought, nothing except a glowing jewel of the Consciousness of God.
And you also begin by looking into your bathroom mirror and asking “Does the appearance of my hair matter to me? It cannot matter to me, so I will cut all of my hair off NOW”
And then you do ask God to help you do that with everything in your life, with everything that is your personality, everything you have any connection with that is not God, with all your worldy attachments. That is the beginning of the Mystical Path!
An earthly marriage is obviously not compatible with full engagement in such a mystical process. This is why Jesus was not married. The mystical experience IS marriage to the Creator. However, being married (earthly sense) should never prevent anyone from going full steam ahead along the mystical path!
