A while back I attended a music festival on a warm summer night in Vancouver. A young guy in flowing garb introduced the show. He told the crowd how a few days earlier he discovered a stone walkway on his way to the beach. The universe in its benevolence had blessed him with this footpath at precisely the right moment he needed it, he said.
The music was great, and the fellow was undoubtedly sincere and well meaning. But there are a few obvious problems with his intro, starting with the prosaic fact that this walkway was built for people in general, rather than one humble being to serendipitously discover in the future. And what of the builders themselves? Were they paid civic workers, or unpaid community volunteers? If the “universe” as whole is responsible for infrastructure, it seems gauche to bring up mundane matters of budgetary economics.
You could say these two mindsets — one metaphysical, one pragmatic — aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. But the first mindset highlights one of the most problematic aspects of the contemporary New Age scene. The focus on “me” often undercuts a collective “we.” The focus on my “now” diminishes your “thou.”
In the 2005 book Pronoia is the antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You With Blessings, author Rob Brezsny takes a similar approach. “On this day, like almost every other, you have awoken inside a temperature-controlled shelter. You have a home! Your bed and pillow are soft and you’re covered by comfortable blankets. The electricity is turned on, as usual. Somehow, in ways you’re barely aware of, a massive power plant at an unknown distance from your home is transforming fuel into currents of electricity that reach you through mostly hidden conduits in the exact amounts you need, and all you have to do to control the flow is flick small switches with your fingers.”
The author continues on about the magic of flushing toilets and reliable bathroom products. (“You trust that unidentified scientists somehow tested them to be sure they’re safe to use.”)
There’s a big piece missing in Brezsny’s shout-out to First World lifestyles, which are enjoyed by only a fraction of the planet’s population. The main reason most North Americans live in relative abundance involves straightforward geography. We live in a continental fortress bracketed by two oceans, smack dab in the temperate zone, with plenty of fresh water and arable land. There’s also the fact that the economies of postwar industrialized democracies have long drawn upon cheap labour and resources from underdeveloped nations, with compliant dictators frequently installed through bloody coups backed by western intelligence agencies.
Thanks for the cheap track shoes, universe!
Greg Barker, former director of the Religious Experience Research Centre at the University of Wales, argues for the importance of spiritual experience while cautioning against the slippery slope of solipsism. During a conversation at the university, I suggested there is at least one major point on which New Age thinkers and contemporary scientists are in agreement: all things are interconnected in patterns of mutual dependence. “This is mirrored in very popular new age films like The Secret and What the Bleep Do We Know,” he replied. “But there is a polarization as soon as you say we’re interconnected and therefore the power of my thinking can alter my life.
That kind of talking gets unscientific very quickly.”
“The whole idea that our thoughts determine our attitudes is pretty sound. I think most people would agree with that. But where we get a lot of the wacko stuff is when people promise you a package of well, if you think these thoughts, than you can actually make money,” he added.
Much of today’s heavily commodified spirituality feeds that bottomless excavation pit of western consumerism: me, me, me. To each their own. (It’s no accident that executives from a Vancouver-based yogawear outfift have publicly touted the me-first philosophy of Ayn
Rand, who conceptually divided the world into “producers” and “parasites.”) But as Barker suggests, as soon as someone on a lecture circuit starts talking about psychically manifesting money, it’s likely there’s a spiritual Ponzi scheme at work.
As with anything with a dollar attached, it’s buyer beware. Or as the American philosopher Robert Anton Wilson once observed, “there’s a seeker born every minute.’
www.geoffolson.com
