New Age borrowed a great deal from classical Hinduism, Buddhism and Yoga, and the list of such adoptions would be too extensive for this format, but the process didn’t necessarily go only one way. It is my opinion that New Age actually contributed some important new aspects to the classical lore. It’s as if New Age treated all its sources according to the GPL license; it took everything it found interesting, but it also left the open-source contributions in the thoughtspace.

For instance, the New Age lore on Kundalini is much more extensive than anything I could find in the classical literature. In fact, the classical writings are often deliberately deceptive and written in some sort of code, where the “key” for proper understanding was orally transmitted from master to disciple. Also, the chakras and their connection with the higher bodies are much better understood and explained in New Age. The problem with the classical concepts of lineage is that very few people actually had the opportunity to experiment with the techniques and contribute to the lore; essentially, it’s like closed-source software, where small isolated communities of programmers work on problems, compared to the open-source community where many more brains can be thrown at a problem and contributions are pooled together. Of course, not all contributions are equally valid or even positive, but the same can be said of the classical Upanishads. Not all ideas were equally brilliant, or ever contributed to the solution of any kind. One of the greatest contributions of the Kundalini mailing list from the 1990s is that it pooled together all sorts of people who mostly unwillingly experimented with Kundalini experience, and you could see what worked and what didn’t. Sometimes it was worth more to see the consequences of a wrong approach, and seeing a lot of people go crazy on a pattern told you volumes about going crazy. To me, personally, the most valuable aspect of the entire thing was confirmation of the reality of the phenomenon, confirmation of the basic concepts I personally established by experimentation, and understanding what happens when you don’t do it the way I did. Also, I got several useful ideas about things I personally hadn’t thought of, but once I tried them they were quite intuitive. I, too, contributed my personal findings to the data pool.

The problem is the same as with the open source community – most contributions consist of hundreds ways of coding a notepad or a calculator. There are many different “projects” and micro-communities that don’t necessarily do things the most efficient way, but at least you have choice. There are people who merely copy other people’s work and present it as their own in order to bloat their ego. Essentially, you need a certain amount of skill in order to be able to safely navigate this mess, but you can say the same about the classic literature about spirituality. In any case, the New Age Kundalini community probably did more for extending the bleeding edge of human knowledge about yogic mysticism into the realms of unknown than any single conventional school of yoga that I know of. In fact, while the New Age community was busy really exploring spirituality and doing often messy experiments in vivo, the traditional schools of the time were mostly doing jack shit. They were merely rehashing old ideas, having mediocre results, and boasting their ancient authentic lineage. So, it’s something like Linux. When you hear about the way it was made, you are tempted to conclude that such a thing can’t possibly work and that a traditional operating system would be much more reliable. In reality, if you want your server to run reliably, run it on Linux. The fact that it is open source exposed all its flaws and made it possible for them to be fixed quickly and easily. The fixes and contributions were all made public and contributed to the overall reliability and quality of the system. The chaos and the bullshit that is often part of the creative process tends to cancel itself out because for the most part only the useful and good stuff is actually used, and the rest is summarily discarded.

The problem is, there’s usually quite a lot of theory that is never properly tested and is merely accepted; sometimes, wrong conclusions are propagated because they seem to work well in the limited range they were tested in, and sometimes things are accepted because they simply feel good, or because they were accepted from a trusted source. There are many problems, for sure. However, if one actually approaches things carefully, vetting sources for credibility and competence, and avoiding obvious confirmation bias, such an approach to things can be quite helpful. I do, however, admit that I made greatest progress when I worked alone and relied on my personal methods of testing things, because then I could feel comfortable exploring ideas that were so uncommon and “out there” that I couldn’t really rely on anyone’s feedback, and silence was the best company.

In the previous article I wrote down some thoughts about why the New Age wave collapsed, but then it became apparent to me that the more important question is how it came to be and what it actually is. I then tried to think of a sound-bite that would explain it in a single phrase, but that’s not easy because of the vast diversity of the phenomenon. However, as I thought more about it yesterday, typing a brief summary of the article-to-be into my laptop before checking out for the night, one idea stood out as the most important.

New Age is the bastard stepchild of Modernism. It is an attempt of finding a form of spirituality that will not be threatened by science.

You see, the basic idea of Modernism is that “the old age of religion and ignorance is over; now is the time of science and progress”. Mankind is to raise above the ignorance and superstition that held it chained to a rock for ages and is now taking its destiny into its own hands.

This attitude was overwhelming in the salons of the Western civilization, but it didn’t produce one universal outcome. The simplest way I can use to describe it is the contrast between Friedrich Nietzsche and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, where Nietzsche represents the main-stream of Modernism, and de Chardin represents the New Age.

I teach you the Superman! Mankind is something to be overcome. What have you done to overcome mankind?

All beings so far have created something beyond themselves. Do you want to be the ebb of that great tide, and revert back to the beast rather than overcome mankind? What is the ape to a man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just so shall a man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame. You have evolved from worm to man, but much within you is still worm. Once you were apes, yet even now man is more of an ape than any of the apes.

Even the wisest among you is only a confusion and hybrid of plant and phantom. But do I ask you to become phantoms or plants?

Behold, I teach you the Superman! The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Superman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beg of you my brothers, remain true to the earth, and believe not those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poisoners are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying ones and poisoned ones themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so away with them!

Once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy; but God died, and those blasphemers died along with him. Now to blaspheme against the earth is the greatest sin, and to rank love for the Unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth!

Once the soul looked contemptuously upon the body, and then that contempt was the supreme thing: — the soul wished the body lean, monstrous, and famished. Thus it thought to escape from the body and the earth. But that soul was itself lean, monstrous, and famished; and cruelty was the delight of this soul! So my brothers, tell me: What does your body say about your soul? Is not your soul poverty and filth and wretched contentment?

(Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra)

This is quintesential Modernism: all spirituality is bullshit that was invented to distract mankind from its impotence in the face of the material world that is harsh, brutal, merciless and great. Now, mankind has power over the world, it has knowledge, it has science, it is the driver and no longer a mere passenger. All blind leaders, such as religion and culture, that served mankind as a comforter serves a child, need to be abandoned now in face of a breast full of milk that is science and technology. Mankind is not only free, it now has the true guidance of knowledge and awareness of its surroundings.

However, there were dissenting voices, that agreed with the general sentiment of such statements, but interpreted the available evidence differently. Interestingly, the greatest and most sophisticated alternative to Nietzsche’s interpretation came from the Catholic Church in form of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who would probably have been burned at the stake in different times for heresy. Be firmly seated now, for I am to quote things that might shock you by the very fact that they come from a singular source.

“Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.”

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”

“Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.”

“Do not forget that the value and interest of life is not so much to do conspicuous things…as to do ordinary things with the perception of their enormous value.”

“Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen.”

“By means of all created things, without excaption, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, when in fact we live steeped in its burning layers”

“God is not remote from us. He is at the point of my pen, my (pick) shovel, my paint brush, my sewing needle – and my heart and thoughts.”

“The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.”

“There is neither spirit nor matter in the world; the stuff of the universe is spirit-matter. No other substance but this could produce the human molecule. I know very well that this idea of spirit-matter is regarded as a hybrid monster, a verbal exorcism of a duality which remains unresolved in its terms. But I remain convinced that the objections made to it arise from the mere fact that few people can make up their minds to abandon an old point of view and take the risk of a new idea. … Biologists or philosophers cannot conceive a biosphere or noosphere because they are unwilling to abandon a certain narrow conception of individuality. Nevertheless, the step must be taken. For in fact, pure spirituality is as unconceivable as pure materiality. Just as, in a sense, there is no geometrical point, but as many structurally different points as there are methods of deriving them from different figures, so every spirit derives its reality and nature from a particular type of universal synthesis.”

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

As you can see, I quoted probably the single most influential source of all New Age. To quote Wikipedia, “His posthumously published book, The Phenomenon of Man, sets forth a sweeping account of the unfolding of thecosmos and the evolution of matter to humanity, to ultimately a reunion with Christ. In the book, Chardin abandoned literal interpretations of creation in the Book of Genesis in favor of allegorical and theological interpretations. The unfolding of the material cosmos, is described from primordial particles to the development of life, human beings and the noosphere, and finally to his vision of the Omega Point in the future, which is “pulling” all creation towards it. He was a leading proponent of orthogenesis, the idea that evolution occurs in a directional, goal-driven way, argued in terms that today go under the banner of convergent evolution.”

So, essentially, unlike Nietzsche who thought that the goal of evolution is the next better animal called Superman, unlike the contemporary evolutionary biologists who think that evolution doesn’t really have a goal and is simply a feedback loop that favors the organisms that are better suited for the environment, de Chardin re-introduced Augustine, who thought that God attracts us towards him, through space and time, from the point of omniscience beyond space and time, where the final form of creation was known from the start, and the initial conditions were set in the beginning of time as to produce it, and we are now traversing the spacetime from Alpha-point to Omega-point. Essentially, what de Chardin states is that we were already shown Superman in the form of Christ, and we are in the process of collective transformation of mankind as a singular unit, towards the Omega-point, in which Christ becomes the reality that is collectively achieved.

Knowing all that, the conclusion that seems to impose itself is that all of New Age seems to be the process of having de Chardin rehashed and recycled by inferior minds.

Sure, you have Vivekananda and his “one God, many paths“ approach. You have Yogananda and his concept of raising the “vibratory level” of human body/soul unit in order to be able to approach God and attain higher levels of consciousness, and his religious syncretism where all religions and their teachers are placed in a single lineage, trying to force it all to make sense within a singular system. You have Osho and Richard Bach and Paulo Coelho and zillion others, but essentially, what one gets from it all is that the purpose of the Universe is to help you learn and evolve, that nothing is really bad or evil, that if something feels better it must be more true, and you therefore get an echo-chamber of confirmation bias where everything that confirms the feel-good ideas is integrated and everything that questions the whole concept or those involved is rejected as “negativity”, where negativity seems to become the replacement-word for evil in the worldview without evil.

Being the bastard stepchild of Modernism, the New Age shares its basic idea that what we do matters, that it is important, that some things are better than others and that we are on an evolution-vector. However, as Modernism gave way to the post-modernist despondency, which sees no difference between cultures, races or ideas, and where one’s emotions are the supreme judge of value and even permissibility of anything, the feedback loop of “I have the right to feel good”, and “everything that doesn’t feel good violates my rights and is evil”, quickly brings the entire thing to the point of structural collapse, because truth was relativized and warped and raped so much, it no longer means anything outside of “the thing that makes me feel good”. The entire community “followed their bliss” into an autistic echo-chamber that isolated itself from all diverging opinions so much that it fails to make sense to anyone who is not already heavily invested in the system. Having started as a Modernistic evolutionary system that makes clear judgments about right and wrong, better and worse, superior and inferior, and defines greatest good in terms that make sense and make demands upon the individual, the transformation into a post-modernistic state, where everything goes as long as it feels good to the individual, where “heart-centered” female spirituality of emotions dominates the narrative and is explained as God-based and an achievement in itself, and every idea that compromises the “I feel love” emotional state is perceived as disruptive, negative and, essentially, evil, degraded the whole movement. By creating a framework that is perfectly unappealing to the best minds, it committed intellectual and spiritual suicide and is now a decadent backwater of the stupid, narcissistic and cowardly.

I was wondering why the New Age spirituality wave collapsed quite rapidly in the early-2000s.

Sure, part of it must have been the fact that it over-promised and under-delivered. What it promised was rapid spiritual evolution, ascension, positive transformation of life on Earth into a more spiritual octave. What it delivered was, basically, some ego-pampering, feel-good emotions that wore out after a while, and the basic New Age philosophy contained so many easily exposable weak points that the exponential growth of the Internet made most of it sound silly. But surely that couldn’t have been all, because I didn’t need Wikipedia and Google to find it silly even in the mid-1990s. Some of the theories that circulated included “spiritual people having 12-strand DNA instead of ordinary 2-strand”, and you need only the basic understanding of biochemistry to know that this is total horseshit. Also, if you listened to the New Age bullshitters, you’d think that everybody is full of alien implants, being abducted by aliens or at least having their dreams invaded by aliens, and that Jesus was an alien starfleet commander whose real name is Sananda Kumara and what not. I mean, it’s such horrid crap that it attracted only two main population groups: people who are total fucking idiots, gullible and uncritical to the point of serious mental illness, and people who had genuine spiritual experiences and reasons to believe in strange shit, and who somehow got stuck in this shitpile. To be sure, I was never popular in the New Age circles. In fact, I was very critical of things they considered certain beyond any possible doubt, and my approach of exhausting all reasonable explanations before trying all sorts of crazy shit seems to be the opposite of the New Age approach, which is to try all the crazy shit first and perceive reasonable explanations as some kind of a ballast weight that prevents you in your ascent to great spiritual heights. I don’t know, I’m the kind of guy who sees a rainbow and thinks of Newton and the angle at which sunlight hits those water droplets in the air; I don’t think of unicorn farts. I don’t think being crazy is a sign of spirituality. Spirituality is a difficult and treacherous enough subject without getting lost in bullshitful nonsense.

One of the most dangerous things I encountered in the New Age circles was insistence that they were using “cosmic energy” in their healing and spiritual practices, which went completely against my experience. In my experience, the entire concept of “channeling energy” is impossible. You always use your personal spiritual energy for all kinds of interventions, if it’s in fact something that actually works and has consequences. If it’s make-believe, you can pretend it’s unicorn tears for all the effect that it has. The stuff I did was always very taxing and I needed at least a full day to recover the depleted energy reserves. It’s not fun and games, by any means, and, having consulted other authentic spiritual people, it seems to be as taxing to them as it is to me. They usually pretend it’s nothing or it’s cosmic energy or channeling from this or that fictional source, but they do it because they want to lessen the sense of obligation and guilt in the recipient. This, however, is a horrible strategy, because it has a twofold result: the recipient doesn’t take the intervention as seriously as he should, and the force-wielder is chronically drained and can actually be profoundly spiritually harmed by the practice, to the point that requires another force-wielder’s love in order to recover. I pulled the term “force-wielder” from my ass just now because it strikes me as the most appropriate description of what’s going on; shaktipat-master or something similar is used, but it doesn’t really fit. You have a spiritually powerful being, whose soul is simply bigger, stronger, and wields greater influence over spiritual energies of a lesser magnitude. This being can influence others, but this comes at an expense to the wielder, it has negative karmic consequences if the recipient is undeserving or ungrateful, and the greater the power differential between the two, the less benefit there actually is to the receiver, and at a greater cost to the force-wielder.

As for the “cosmic energy” or “divine energy”, it sure sounds better and more poetic than what’s actually going on, and which would sound more like a kind wealthy person paying for someone’s debts and saying it was Santa Claus. The problem is, the recipient then figures he’s on good terms with Santa and gets into more trouble, since getting out of it appeared to be simple and free. The wealthy person can laugh it away and appear to have suffered no ill effects, but if this repeats long enough, eventually he or she ends up seriously drained and hurt, and the worst part is, at this point the force-wielder already painted himself into a corner, because his narrative was that it’s all God doing things, it’s a cosmic divine energy; he’s only a channel.

No, he’s not “only” a channel. He or she is a presence of God in the world. Being a Divine presence is expensive, it requires constant investment of effort and diligence, and praising God while dismissing the “conduit” actually turns the actual situation upside-down. The force-wielder is able to manifest God because, well, he or she is simply a spiritual being of higher magnitude. You can say that God is everywhere but God is everywhere in a form useless to anyone but those great souls who are able to feel God directly, and then perform spiritual transfusion of this higher spiritual energy into the lesser beings. This effect is expensive, taxing and temporary, and in the long-term, the force-wielder feels the negative consequences of the lack of recognition, feels used, exploited and unloved. The aggravating circumstance of all this in the New Age circles is when everybody and their dog are claiming to be doing some form of divine energy channeling, so the apparent value of the process goes to the basement, and 99.99% of the practitioners are total charlatans. As a result, those few who are actually wielding force are perceived not as Gods, but as run-of-the-mill bullshitters. And don’t get me wrong, in all that steaming pile that was New Age there were some very genuine spiritual powerhouses, who didn’t necessarily know what they were doing and how it’s all working, but they could do real things that have real consequences. From what I can see, the greatest evil of the New Age movement is that it exploited those people’s empathy and their genuine desire to spiritually uplift people at their own expense, and left them exhausted, drained and abused in all ways, essentially replacing them with some other toy after it stopped being interesting.

I’m not saying that those force-wielders who ended up wrecked didn’t participate in the entire process that was inherently harmful to both sides. They were often misguided, deluded and sometimes actually ignored the warning signs, because they didn’t like what the reality was telling them. What reality was telling them is that this shit isn’t working, and it’s not because they are doing something wrong on a good path, it’s not working because the entire approach of taking from the spiritually wealthy in order to give to the spiritually poor has the same chance of working as socialism, which is to say, none. The irony is, socialist rationalizations about what “should” be happening, and pretending that the state budget that pays for it all is some kind of an inexhaustible cosmic resource that is supposed to be tapped into for free, that it’s not blood, sweat and tears of actual living people that is being used to finance the whole thing, it all sounds exactly the same. We want free goodies, and we want it to be paid by pixie dust and divine cosmic energy because we are assholes.

Why the New Age collapsed? Well, it consisted of two main groups, those who were actually the genuine spiritual people (all five of them), and the stupid, unworthy parasites who were in it for the promise of free goodies. When Internet and social media provided a cheap and accessible source of ego-stimulation from buying shiny new gadgets and having your worthless shit liked on Facefuck, they simply followed this abundant new source of getting liked for free and being just as valuable as anyone else without having to actually do anything. In the meantime, they left the genuine New Age gurus drained and fucked over, wondering what the hell actually happened.

The reason why I’m untouched by all that is simple: I’m quite good at figuring out patterns, and I woke up and smelled the coffee early on. The desire to be of help to others and be a bodhisattva is a tempting side-road, and it would actually make some sense if those whom we wish to help actually needed us or benefitted from our efforts, but the sad truth is, the only one who actually needs great souls are other great souls. What small souls say they need is great souls, but what they actually need is a lot of small souls exactly their size, who will like them on Facebook. The only use they have for great souls is to screw them over and show them they aren’t either all that great or all that necessary. Essentially, great souls want the small souls to become great, and small souls want to shit and piss on the great souls, to humiliate them, exploit them for resources and show them there’s nothing so great that they couldn’t make it small.

An instruction manual for great souls: if you want small souls to become great, put your trust in the greatest, most efficient way for becoming a great soul, the one that created the likes of you. It’s called natural evolution. It’s an efficient vehicle, and you don’t need to get out and push in order for it to work. If you think you need to get out and push, you’re not being compassionate, you’re being an idiot.