Fantastic Planet put together an excellent post in response to my one about the New Age group centered around a 35,000 year old “enlightened master” being channeled through a Northwestern grandma.

Anyway, FP makes a bunch of really good points. First, I’d originally said that people were drawn to shitty New Age stuff because it was an alternative to mainstream thought. FP turned that around expertly to reveal a much more accurate picture of what’s going on:

Tim thinks that people who fall for sentimentality are doing so as a rebellion against what they media’s feeding them, but I think it’s the exact opposite. The media tends to equate alternative enlightenment with reincarnated Atlantean beings and UFOs and superpowers. In other words, in the media (be it T.V., News, movies, etc.), you’re either in a “normal” religion (Mainstream Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc.) or you’re a crazy freak into some wiiiiiigggy Heaven’s Gate stuff. So, those who want to look for an alternative to the mainstream look to what the media *tells them* is the alternative. Since said folks are suggestible via sentimentalism and want to be more powerful and enlightened, they fall victim to the cheese. After all, according to the media, alternatives to mainstream spirituality are *supposed* to be cheesy.

You know what I have to say to that? BINGO-BANGO-BONGO! That’s it exactly. It’s your classic case of straw man arguing. You go out and misrepresent your opponent or the alternatives, so that when people seek to escape your orbit, they just end up getting drawn back into it through the back door. This has always been my problem with religions like Wicca and Satanism. People act like they are their own thing, like they have this enormous rich cultural tradition. But what they really are is a reaction against Christianity, and the ethos involved in that. Even if you invert Christianity, it’s still Christianity ultimately. This is also why I think it’s so funny when Christians get all spooked out by Wiccans and Satanists - since some of them are actually better truer Christians than people who call themselves that.

Anyway, I think this is exactly the case with New Age shit. And I don’t mean to categorize all of it as “shit,” but we all know that 90% or higher assuredly is. It’s this thing that is supposed to be a reaction against the materialist authoritative values our culture is based on. But then you have all these fucking New Age pieces of crap who all they do is sell people trinkets and enforce rigid hierarchical authoritative structures in their organizations. They reinforce a culture of acquisitiveness, where you gain wisdom and experience not by living your life fully and bravely, but by mediating it through objects and the desire to gain magical powers. You might be running in an opposite direction through the laboratory rat-maze, but you’re still in it, and you’re still playing by its rules.

Do I think you can’t gain anything personally or spiritually through New Age stuff? Quite the opposite actually. I’m of the opinion that you can use any kind of story-system that you want to live your life, as long as you’re playful with it, you don’t let it (or anyone using it) control you, and you realize that you can and should rewrite the story at any moment as needed. Whether your game is New Age, comic books, movies, psychology, religion, current events, sports - it’s all the damned same. They are all tools for us to use to get where we’re going. One of my favorite religious concepts comes from Hinduism, bhakti yoga. The principle of bhakti is that the divine can and does take on any and every form available. Bhakti is a path of devotion where you choose the form that god appears most powerfully to you in, and you put all your love towards that. What I’m saying is that love doesn’t have anything to do with buying a bunch of cheesy stuff, despite whatever Valentine’s Day says to the contrary.