The new
spirituality that we’ve been considering has its own “gospel” – a gospel very
different to that of the Christian faith. It’s worth knowing something about so
we can recognize it when it appears.
As we have
seen, the central claim of the new spirituality is that everything is god. We,
along with the plants and rocks and lakes, are all manifestations of a universal
essence, energy or life force that we can call ‘god’, and what we need to do,
we are told, is discover and experience our godhead.
The “good
news” that New Age spirituality brings to people is, “You are god, but you are
not living like god. Choose to be the god you are and you will achieve a
better, healthier, and happier life.”(Robert Webber, The Divine Embrace, 113).
Webber explains this more fully as follows: “If all is God and God is
all, then we must seek the mystery that lies at the very ground of nature and
being. We must affirm all of nature and actualize the God who lies within the
self. It goes something like this: You are just living a material life taking
care of your material needs – food, clothing, housing, material enjoyment.
That’s not the real you. The real you is the spiritual consciousness that lies
hidden and buried in the material appearance. Go deep into yourself. Find the
mystery that is beneath you. Allow this mystery to put you in touch with the
sacred reality of the one so that you
may be released into your spiritual self, the real you. You will then be free
from the material attachments of life and find meaning in a transcendent
communion with God, the sacred and underlying energy of the self” (Ibid., 113).
Against
that background we can better understand how advocates of the new spirituality
understand sin. The term, as they use it, is not an offence against a personal
God or breaking an absolute law. Sin is “the refusal to get in touch with our
divine unconsciousness and acknowledge the oneness of all things. They see sin
as the separation of life into pieces, into opposites that are antagonistic,
one against another.” And it is this refusal that to accept the oneness of all
things and the life force that lies behind everything that “produces anxiety,
hate, greed, lust, violence and all that tears life apart” (Ibid., 114).
Not
surprisingly, salvation in the new spirituality is “the result of turning one’s
life back to the one, to the unity of
all things, to the energy and life force that animates reality. Having
transcended all opposites, those with this belief system fuse with the divine
and find peace in union with the one”
(Ibid., 114).
The process
whereby this happens is what is called “spirituality”. That’s what makes this
term so confusing today. Christians use it to refer to life in union with God
through Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. But followers of the new
spirituality use it to refer to the techniques and activities used to connect
with ultimate reality. “The spiritual disciplines of prayer, meditation, and
openness to the energies about us … bring them to this mystical experience of
the other” (Ibid.,
114-5). The ultimate goal is “to achieve the dissolution of the material
existence, to end material reality so that all ultimately disappears into the
energy, the life force that underlies all our perceptions of materiality” (Ibid., 115).
As exotic
as this may sound, such thinking is alive and well. Next week we will look at
what makes it so appealing to our postmodern generation.