What essentially is our contemporary ‘New Age’ culture? It is a commodified and commercialised ‘spirituality’ that has replaced the spiritual powers and charismata of (Gnosis) with the ‘charisma’ of scientific and/or esoteric symbols - whether the symbols of quantum physics or the I-Ching, of ‘tachyons’ or Tarot cards. The gods it worships are impersonal cosmic energies. Its sacraments are healing ‘technologies’. Its religions are ‘therapies’. Its ‘word’ is the marketing of holistic health products and services. Its festivals are trade fairs of ‘Mind, Body and Spirit’. It replaces the unction of the spirit with aromatherapy, sacraments with the rites and rituals of different healing practices, the baptism of water with colonic irrigation, the innate vitality of spirit with vitamin supplements, the speech or logos of the psyche with arid scientific theories of psychology. Just like orthodox medicine it identifies the psychic and spiritual inwardness of the human body or soma with the flesh or sarx - its outermost physical skin. It promises to raise individuals to a ‘higher’ spiritual level, in tune with ‘higher vibrations’ - instead of helping them descend into the rumbling depths of their being. It seeks to ‘cleanse’ them of toxins and empty them of ‘negative’ emotions - whilst fearing the fullness of this depth - the pleroma. Its slogan is self-actualisation - a contradiction in terms - for what is ‘self’ if not the autonomous self-actualisation of a primordial field of potentiality, one that can never be fully actualised in any identity or ‘self...~ Peter Wilburg
Posted on: Sat, 01 Nov 2014 19:49:00 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015