the timboucher experience

In keeping with this whole “crossing streams” thing, I wanted to try and pull the “New Age Movement” (NAM) into the discussion. Mainly because I feel like whatever it is that all of us are doing here on our websites is an especially important counter-point to the New Age stuff - or at least its more bullshit aspects.

In a lot of ways, I think what we’re doing is the next generation of the counter-cultural stuff that New Age originally started out as, before it got totally coopted by commercial establishments. People talk a lot about how the NAM basically had its roots in the hippy/drug culture of the 60’s and 70’s - psychedelic exploration, love and peace, eastern religions, shit like that. Somehow whatever progress the hippies made in this direction of consciousness-expansion got all turned around and mixed up until by the end, people were just sitting there sticking crystals up their butts, visualizing angelic unicorns that would take them over the rainbow bridge to Atlantis.

I suspect the roots of this decline of authenticity in the New Age Movement has two main sources. First off is excessive drug use. Now, I’m not categorically against drug use. I actually enjoy it, and there’s still a lot of stuff I want to experiment with. But I tend to shy away from people like Timothy Leary or Robert Anton Wilson who sometimes seem to suggest that everyone ought to just go totally bonkers and do the world’s biggest amount of drugs. And then everybody will be happy and pigs will fly and fairies will dance on the end of our penises. I know both of those guys said a lot more than that, but it’s still a major factor to their and other thought which came from that time period. The other half of that branch, of course, is people like Ram Dass who decided to “turn on” with meditation instead. Obviously, this side of it had a bigger impact on the New Age movement. But the underlying current is still there: the whole tinkering with consciousness bit. Like I said, I’m not against it, but there are good and bad ways to do it. If you’re not ritually, symbolically or philosophically prepared for what you’re going to experience either with meditation or drug use, then you lay open to all kinds of dangers and spiritual exploitation. There’s definitely a good reason why entheogenic drug use in non-Western cultures was/is reserved for a sacramental setting.

But besides all that, the other reason I think the NAM got so tarnished was that the powers-that-be caught wind that people were building a psycho-spiritual raft to escape on. What they did was simply start churning cheaper faster rafts, which is why New Age stuff is now so shitty and cheesy. Instead of intensive spiritual disciplines, everything suddenly became McDonald’s Happy Meals where the cheap plastic prize was some kind of self-serving psychic or energy power - which just so happened to be fake. Since that time, alternative thought and spirituality have been intentionally polluted with nonsense, so that smart, capable people are forced to throw the baby out with the bath water.

A good case in point is the syndicated radio show, Coast to Coast AM. This is a great show, don’t get me wrong, but it unfortunately perpetuates this game. One day, they’ll have a great guest talking about the realistic dangers of vaccination and how the CDC, AMA and other health organizations are all self-serving and corrupt. This isn’t conspiracy theory here. This is just factual reporting. But then the next day, you’ll have some wingnut who claims to be channeling an Atlantean god-king from 35,000 years ago, and makes a tidy profit running their little media-cult. The point is that the outlandish aspects of it automatically discredit a lot of stuff that’s actually quite real.

The other thing we need to look at is that, in a lot of ways, conspiracy theory was actually the dark twin of the New Age movement. Aside from some UFO stuff of the 40’s and 50’s, I’d probably posit the real public “birth” of conspiracy theorism at JFK’s assassination, followed by MLK and RFK. So both New Age and conspiracy theory got seeded around the same time and among the counter-culture. From there, they grew up separately, went to different colleges, got married and had families of their own. While New Age stuff kept alive the sort of dreamy-happy side of excessive drug use, conspiracy theory kept alive the stark raving paranoia of a generation of bad trips. New Agers seized on the “Look at the pretty colors!” style of consciousness expansion, while Conspiracists turned to the “Everybody’s laughing at me,” model. Consequently New Age stuff got really floaty and spiritual, while conspiracy theory got much more pragmatic and physical. New Agers looked for angels and Atlanteans, while conspiracy theorists tried to uncover assassins and ulterior motives.

The two groups have always maintained points of critical contact though - especially through the UFO phenomena. Of course New Age approaches to that generally involved the formation of bizarre cults, and the belief in aliens as spiritual messengers, that sorta screwy shit. While conspiracy theorists focused more on whacky stuff like abductions and the involvement of the military/industrial complex. And then, of course, there are the conspiracy theorists who claim that the New Age movement was engineered by the government. Whichever way you tend to lean, it’s really all the same symbols though, but slotted into drastically different story-systems.

Then came the internet. And the separated-at-birth twins of New Ageism and Conspiracy Theorism were reunited at long last. While there was much celebration at this long-coming reunion, there’s also been endless squabbling from all sides. And somehow, out of all this, comes people like us. People who are navigating the wreckage of the collision/reunion. Scions who are gathering together the shards of whatever it was that exploded out of our mothers and fathers culturally and spiritually a generation ago. And fusing together the fragments into some new sword which will take back the kingdom.

The question is, I guess, what will the “New” New Age look like? What will Conspiracy Theory 2.0 turn out to be? Will it drift into squishy commercialism, or surrender to the soul-crushing materialist paranoia of the past? Or will something new and liberating rise out of the ashes? Something which goes by names like gnostics, and occult investigators and civilization-collapsers and conspiracy theorists, all of whom are “breathing together in the realm of god”. Let’s hope so.

• A couple things before I force myself to go to sleep
• New Age Embarrassment?
• Youthful Creativity
• What are you trying to do, show off?
• Top-Selling Occult & New Age Books