In monism, there is no such eschatology. Instead the metaphor is one of a wheel; life
is cyclical and based upon samsara and ruled by karma. The path to enlightenment may require a
person to be reincarnated or reborn many many times until they achieve nirvana
and are released from the personal, material, temporal, world.
When eastern thought and practices were brought to the west
and were popularised during the 1960s, the emphasis was on personal spiritual
development. Practices like meditation
and yoga helped to advance that goal.
When eastern spiritual practices met popular psychology it was a marriage
made in therapy heaven because it allowed people to not only focus on their
self-awareness, but to actually worship themselves; it raised
self-actualisation to cosmic heights.
And I think that for many advanced thinkers and
practitioners in the field, this just didn’t seem to satisfy a more
socially-orientated, larger goal. So we’ve
seen the emergence of a whole new emphasis in the New Age movement on a grander
narrative: spiritual evolution. Andrew Cohen is one of the leading proponents of what he
calls evolutionary enlightenment. What
differentiates this form of monistic spirituality from the ‘60s version is that
Cohen proposes that people bring about not only their own personal spiritual
transformation but that of all human consciousness and culture. There’s a good deal of reaching back to
philosophers of the past, whether explicitly as in the case of Tielhard de
Chardin or implicitly in the thinking of the neo-Platonists or Hegel.
Cohen explains that enlightenment is not "the possession of
the individual, but instead becomes the ground of relationship upon which a new
culture is created…the creation of this new consciousness and culture is
essential for the survival of the race and that is incumbent upon those
individuals who are at the leading edge of human development to take this next
step." This calls to my mind Hegel’s
philosophical system which explains the unfolding of the world’s spirit – or Geist
– through time.
There is no question that New Age is a large and growing movement, based on data gathered and analysed
by Pew Research, the University of California at Santa Barbara and Bradley
University. The number of active participants in the New Age is enormous
and growing (more than 40m Americans) making it the third largest religious
denomination in America.[1] So New Age principles and practices have already made huge headway into western culture. I think the problem, as Cohen and other New Age leaders see it, is that it can lead to some serious problems of narcissism.
I read Cohen’s blog from time to time and he constantly gives
a clarion call to participate in this evolutionary ‘impulse’ of consciousness
and culture change - he's very heavy on creativity and transformation, but quite light on anything like
virtue, justice, morality or the common good.
For theism, these ideas are of primary importance and have their basis
in a definite distinction between good and evil, whereas in eastern philosophy,
the spiritual basis is more relative.
Which can be a problem for a movement which wants to effect changes in a
culture. As a follower of the disgraced
guru Muktananda described after his death in 1983, "there is no absolute
assurance that enlightenment necessitates the moral virtue of a person. There is no guarantee against the weakness of
anger, lust and greed in the human soul.
The enlightened are on an equal footing with the ignorant in the
struggle against their own evil."[2]
So New Age spirituality now has a grand narrative: evolution. I think that the term is an attempt to give
this new paradigm the character of being both scientific and inevitable. But questions remain about what evolutionary
spirituality really means in practice and where this is meant to lead the human
race in future.
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