New Age Harmonies
The following article appeared in the December 7, 1987 issue of
TIME Magazine. Entitled "NEW AGE HARMONIES", it outlines many of the
beliefs of New Age movement and helps to define what this movement's
beliefs really are.
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New Age Harmonies
by Otto Friedrich
reported by
Mary Cronin / New York
Michael Riley / Los Angeles
Dennis Wyss / San Francisco
... So here we are in the New Age, a combination of spirituality
and superstition, fad and farce, about which the only thing certain is
that it is not new. Nobody seems to know exactly where the term came
from, but it has been around for several decades or more, and many
elements of the New Age, like faith healing, fortune-telling and
transmigration of souls, go back for centuries. (Ages, in general,
are an uncertain affair.
The Age of Aquarius, celebrated in the
musical Hair, may have started in the 1960s or at the turn of the
century or may not yet have begun. Once under way, such astrological
ages are supposed to last 2,000 years.)
Though it is hard to say exactly how many Americans believe in
which parts of the New Age, the movement as a whole is growing
steadily.
Bantam Books says it's New Age titles have increased
tenfold in the past decade. The number of New Age bookstores has
doubled in the past five years, to about 2,500. New Age radio is
spreading, with such stations as WBMW in Washington and KTWV-FM in Los
Angeles offering dreamy light jazz that one listener described as
"like I tapped into a radio station on Mars". The Grammys now include
a special prize for New Age music (latest winner: Swiss Harpist
Andreas Vollenweider).
Fledgling magazines with names like New Age,
Body Mind Spirit and Brain/Mind Bulletin are full of odd ads: "Healing
yourself with crystals", "American Indian magic can work for you",
"How to use a green candle to gain money", "The power of the pendulum
can be in your hands", Use numerology to win the lottery". And,
perhaps inevitably, "New health through colon rejuvenation".
If some of those have a slightly greedy tone, the reason is that
New Age fantasies often intersect with mainstream materialism, the
very thing that many New Age believers profess to scorn. A surprising
number of successful stockbrokers consult astrological charts; a
yuppie investment banker who earns $100,000 a year talks of her
previous life as a monk.
Some millionaires have their own private
gurus who pay house calls to provide comfort and advice. Big
corporations too are paying attention. "The principle here is to look
at the mind, body, heart and spirit", says a corporate spokesperson,
who asks that her employer be identified only as a "major
petrochemical company". This company provides it's employees with
regular workshops in stress management; it has hired a faith healer to
"read auras" for ailing employees and run her hands over their "fields
of energy". Even the U.S. Army has commissioned a West Coast firm to
explore the military potentials of meditation and extrasensory
perception.
... For all it's popularity, the New Age is hard to define. It
includes a whole cornucopia of beliefs, fads, rituals; some subscribe
to some parts, some to others. Only on special occasions, like the
highly publicized "harmonic convergence" in August, do believers in I
Ching or crystals gather together with believers in astral travel,
shamans, Lemurians and tarot readers, for a communal chanting of "OM",
the Hindu invocation that often precedes meditation. Led on by the
urgings of Jose Arguelles, a Colorado art historian who claimed that
ancient Mayan calendars foretold the end of the world unless the
faithful gathered to provide harmony, some 20,000 New Agers assembled
at "sacred sites" from Central Park to Mount Shasta to - uh - provide
harmony.
All in all, the New Age does express a cloudy sort of religion,
claiming vague connections with both Christianity and the major faiths
of the East (New Agers like to say the Jesus spent 18 years in India
absorbing Hinduism and the teachings of Buddha), plus an occasional
dab of pantheism and sorcery. The underlying faith is a lack of faith
in the orthodoxies of rationalism, high technology, routine living,
spiritual law-and-order. Somehow, the New Agers believe, there must
be some secret and mysterious shortcut or alternative path to
happiness and health. And nobody ever really dies.
Like other believers, many New Agers attach great importance to
artifacts, relics and sacred objects, all of which can be profitably
offered for sale: Tibetan bells, exotic herbal teas, Viking runes,
solar energizers, colored candles for "chromotherapy", and a Himalayan
mountain of occult books, pamphlets, instructions and tape recordings.
Some of these magical products are quite imaginative. A bearded
Colorado sage who calls himself Gurudas sells "gem elixirs", which he
creates by putting stones in bowls of water and leaving them in the
sun for several hours, claiming that this allows the water to absorb
energy from the sun and the stone.
Most New Agers prefer the stones themselves, specifically
crystals of all sorts. These are not only thought to have mysterious
healing powers but are considered programmable, like a computer, if
one just concentrates hard enough. (The most powerful crystals are
buried deep under New England, some New Agers believe, because New
England was once connected to Atlantis, the famous "lost continent".)
... There is no unanimity of New Age belief in anything, but
many New Agers do believe in unidentified flying objects, crewed by
oddly shaped extraterrestrials who have long visited the earth from
more advanced planets, spreading the wisdom that created, among other
things, Stonehenge and the pyramids of Egypt. Government officials
keep announcing that there are no such things as UFOs, but the
National Science Foundation reported last year that 43% of the
citizenry believe it "likely" that some of the UFOs reported "are
really space vehicles from other civilizations". (And where DID those
airstrip-like markings in the Peruvian Andes come from?)
... Come to a rocky meadow on California's Mount Shasta, where a
New Zealander named Neville Rowe tells the encircling crowd of 200
(admission: $10) that he speaks with the voice of Soli, an "off-planet
being" who has never actually lived on earth. Dressed in a white-
peaked cap, purple shirt and purple shoes, Rowe clutches a bottle of
Evian water as the voice emerges from him in a rather peculiar British
accent. "You are here to express who you are", says Soli. "You are
here to search for yourself. The highest recognition you can make is
that I am what I am. All that is, is. You are God. You are, each
and every one, part of the Second Coming".
Somebody wants to argue. What about murderers? Are they God
too?
"Your truth is your truth", says Soli, while his helpers start
trying to sell video-tapes of his latest incarnation. "My truth is my
truth".
... Probably the most celebrated of all current channelers is
J.Z. Knight, a handsome ex-housewife in Yelm, Wash., who has performed
for thousands at a price of $150 each per session. She speaks for
Ramtha, a 35,000-year-old warrior who reports that he once lived on
Atlantis.
He has even dictated a book, "I Am Ramtha", published in
Portland, Ore., by Beyond Words Publishing and illustrated with
photographs of Knight going into a trance on The Merv Griffin Show.
Sample words of Ramthan wisdom: "Who be I? I am a notorious entity.
I have that which is called a reputation. Know you what that is?
Controversial, and I do what I say I do. What I am here to do is not
to change people's minds, only to engage them and allow the
wonderments for those that desire them to come to pass. I have been
you, and I have become the other side of what you are..."
The sayings of Ramtha have brought Knight substantial rewards,
including a luxurious mansion complete with spa, swimming pools and
Arabian horses. A spokesman deprecates talk of her wealth, however,
by noting that she pays a staff of 14 and that the tax collectors are
insatiable.
Jo Ann Karl is a tall blond who says she was an up-and-coming
business executive until she discovered the supernatural seven years
ago. She was on a business trip in the Midwest when she first felt
herself drifting through space outside her body. She tried to ignore
the experience, but it kept recurring. Now she gets $15 a customer
for channeling the archangel Gabriel and a spirit named Ashtar.
"The lesson I learned in one of my past lives was about taking
risks", says Karl. "I was married to St. Peter. We traveled widely
with Jesus, teaching with him. After he was crucified, we continued
to teach and travel for several more years, until we were caught by
the Romans. Peter was crucified, and I was thrown to the lions, after
being raped and pilloried. Now I understand why I've always been
afraid of big animals".
Karl's spirit guides had been advising her to go to the Incan
empire's sacred Lake Titicaca in Bolivia (the Andes seem to be a
favorite way station for UFOs). "They sort of told us we would meet
them", she says. "I won't believe it until I see them and talk to
them and feel the panel on the spaceship. But maybe it is time for
people to know they have help". And so, starry-eyed and full of hope,
Karl headed southward, and she did catch a distant glimpse of what she
took to be a spaceship. "It looked like a whole lot of orange light",
she says. "A blast of light spherical in shape. It was big and far
away."
... One of the most go-getting New Age entrepreneurs is Chris
Majer, 36, president of SportsMind, Inc., based in Seattle. As the
corporate name indicates, Majer originally worked mainly on athletic
training, though his current clients include not only AT&T but also
the U.S. Army.
Majer started his military efforts in 1982 with an
eight-week , $50,000 training program at Fort Hood in Texas.
Traditional calisthenics were replaced by a holistic stretching-warm-
up-aerobics-cool-down routine. Soldiers practiced visualizing their
combat tasks. The results in training test scores were apparently so
good that the Army expanded SportsMind's assignment into a yearlong,
$350,000 program to help train Green Berets. "They wanted the most
far-ranging human-performance program we could deliver", Majer says.
The Green Berets were taught meditation techniques so that they
could spend long hours hidden in enemy territory. "They have to be
comfortable at a deep level with who they are", Majer says, "not make
mental mistakes or they'll give away their position and get killed.
People say all this New Age stuff is a bunch of hoo-hoo, but it gets
results".
While the idea of New Age Green Berets meditating in the jungle
can inspire laughter, it can also inspire a certain concern about the
political and social implications of the whole movement. Is it some
kind of neoleftist response to the Age of Reagan, or is it an
ultrarightist extension of Reaganism? The answer depends somewhat on
the answerer's politics. ...
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