On 25 Dec, 14:41, "tsp" gmail.com> wrote:

My favorite in the 1970s was 'Jesus Christ Superstar' I used to watch
it every Easter

Check this out how The New Mythology is for dopes:

Chapter 2, The New Age Mythology
FROM LAND OF IDOLS, POLITICAL MYTHOLOGY IN AMERICA, 1994. Michael
Parenti.

There are many roads to political quietism. In contrast to the
cynical
defeatism discussed in the previous chapter are the beliefs of the
1960s youth culture or counterculture that carried over to what is
called the "New Age'' approach of today; an amalgam of Eastern
mysticism, Western occultism, self-help psychology, and alternative
health practices. In place of political impotence, New Age
enthusiasts
teach a kind of personalized omnipotence, reducing social problems to
a matter of interior mind-set.

NEW CONSCIOUSNESS, OLD PROMISES

Some people indulge in New Age enthusiasms by reading and practicing
on their own and occasionally attending a workshop or lecture. Others
submit to the regimens of one or another cult. New Age books,
artifacts, and programs constitute a billion-dollar industry. A 1978
Gallup poll estimated that some ten million Americans were engaged in
some aspect of Eastern mysticism. Additional millions of adherents
embrace the more secular "self-help" approaches.

New Age consciousness has some things to its credit. Back when the
good life was defined as the immobile life (the less physical
exertion
expended, the better), New Age adherents were jogging and doing yoga
and aerobics. While soft-drink companies were pushing their sugar-
ridden products and the meat and dairy industries had us convinced
that daily servings of beef and milk were vital to our health, New
Age
nutritionists were promoting the benefits of a sugar-free, low-fat,
whole grain intake. While agribusiness thought nothing of spraying
crops with toxic pesticides and utilizing chemicalized food
processing, New Age proponents opted for organic and natural foods.

While the medical establishment monopolized what still passes for
health science, New Age adherents pursued less invasive and sometimes
beneficial alternative treatments. It was the established allopathic
medical practitioners who for centuries bled their patients, burned
and poisoned them with mercury, chained and tormented the mentally
ill, ordered homosexuals and recalcitrant women into insane asylums,
and spread a variety of fatal diseases in their filthy hospitals
while
remaining steadfastly ignorant of minimal sanitary standards. Today
many physicians remain just as ignorant of nutritional science,
preventive medicine, and alternative treatments.

At the same time, some New Age practitioners are themselves not above
promoting dubious claims. They offer workshops in self-realization,
dream harnessing, guided imagery, visualizations, primal screaming,
channeling, rolfing, polarity balancing, aura readings, tarot
readings, palmistry, psychic readings, gemstone healing, astrological
charting, rebirthing, levitation, spiritual counseling, and other
stratagems. The promised payoffs range from minor practicalities to
miraculous cures, from being able to keep a neater home to
transforming one's entire personality.

In the diverse array of enthusiasms that come under the New Age
rubric, two general orientations might be discerned. There are the
"inspirationists," who focus exclusively on benefits in the here and
now, and the "spiritualists," who tell us that the material world is
but a passing shadow compared to the mystic realm beyond, where
transcendent bliss awaits us. Many New Age theories are not new at
all, being borrowed from Yoga, Hinduism, Taoism, Zen Buddhism, and
other ancient disciplines, transmitted by gurus from India and Tibet
or, as it might be, from Brooklyn and California.

What I want to criticize are not New Age practices - some of which
strike me as possibly beneficial, others as grossly counterfeit -but
the way New Age notions discourage engagement with social problems
and
political realities.

HYPER-INDIVIDUALISM AND SELF-EMPOWERMENT

Both inspirationists and spiritualists believe that individuals have
great untapped powers within themselves that have been overlooked or
kept submerged. Inspirationist guru Leo Buscaglia tells us "You do
have magic. Get in touch with it.... It all starts with you. You make
the world." For the spiritualists, this internal power reservoir is
linked to a metaphysical realm. The goal is to experience "the larger
reality of the sacred wholeness that lies at the heart of being," to
become one with the cosmic One. Whether inspirationist or
spiritualist, the supreme guide for comprehending the world is to be
found in solipsistic experience. The approach is not much different
from psychotherapeutic methods that brush aside the victimizations of
the real world; what counts is how reality is perceived. As EST
founder Werner Erhard proclaimed, "Reality is make-believe."

Intuition is valued over reasoning. The New Age approach to knowledge
is quite different from the scientific method that seeks empirical
evidence, replication, and validation, and treats purely subjective
experiences as largely unreliable. In the New Age mode, the more
subjective and grounded in personal feeling a perception is, the more
true it must be. The very ineffable quality of an experience is taken
as evidence of its depth within oneself and its veracity and reality-
as with mystical revelation and other experiences of faith.

The sociologist Charles Horton Cooley once said that a separate
individual is an abstraction unknown to experience. Yet many New
Agers
place great value on a self-contained individuality. To need others
is
viewed as a sign of insufficiency, rather than a normal desire of
social beings. To be in need of no one is supposedly to be more
developed and liberated . Thus are the unfortunate necessities of
modern-day isolation transformed into virtuous accomplishments.

Not all New Age advocates are of this persuasion. Those who have been
called the "touchy-feelies" do not promote individual detachment;
just
the opposite. They congregate to touch, smile, laugh, and cry
together, always with lots of hugs. Here too, the emphasis is on
self-
affirmation.

New Age self-centeredness resembles the hyper-individualism of the
free-market society in which it flourishes. Under capitalism, self-
reliance is glorified (most persistently and most ironically by those
corporate interests that themselves depend on the government for all
sorts of services and supports). The corporate capitalist myth of
"rugged individualism" features an atomized person, attached to no
one
else (except possibly an isolated family molecule), producing and
consuming for himself or herself, owing nothing to society for
whatever he or she accomplishes.

Society becomes an amalgam of self-interested beings who enter into
market relations that reduce other people to instrumental values. In
their focus on the self, the yuppie and the yogi are not that far
apart.

In truth, no human accomplishment is an autonomous thing. The
athlete,
the artist, the business leader, the scientist, and other such
achievers, all draw upon the accumulated skills and material
resources
of those who preceded them and those who currently work with or for
them. Even the other-worldly guru is dependent on others who feed and
shelter him while he ventures into "higher realms." Peter Marin sums
it up:

Every privilege, every object, every "good" comes to us as the result
of ... the shared labor of others; the language we use and the
beliefs
we hold and the ways we experience ourselves. Each of these involves
a
world of others into which we are entered every moment of our lives.
Idly, for instance, we take coffee and sugar in the mornings, and
even
that simple act immerses us immediately in the larger world. both the
sugar and coffee . . . have been harvested by specific persons, most
probably in a country where the land belongs by right to others than
those who [now possess] it, where the wages paid those who work it
are
exploitive and low. No doubt, too, the political system underlying
the
distribution of land is maintained in large part by the policies
enacted and the armies acting in our name.... [T]he coffee . . . has
nothing to do with individual will and everything to do with
economics
and history.

What the New Age ideology leaves out is the common struggle for
collective empowerment and social betterment. It is one thing to
affirm our faith in the value of the individual and something else to
reduce all valued affirmations to individual experience, to see
reality only through the prism of self.

PERSONALIZED OMNIPOTENCE - WITH NO VICTIMS

Once we treat interior experience as all-important, it is but a short
step to claiming a personalized omnipotence. As New Agers frequently
say, "You create your own reality," or "You choose your own reality."
Everyone is supposedly the author of his or her fate. Self-help
inspirationist Buscaglia instructs us: "If you don't like the scene
you're in, if you're unhappy . . . change your scene. Paint a new
backdrop. Surround yourself with new actors. Write a new play - and
if
it's not a good play, get the hell off the stage and write another
one." Social reality becomes nothing more than a matter of mind-set
and self-will.

Such notions can be carried to chilling extremes by right-wing
ideologues. Thus Eileen Marie Gardner, special assistant in the US.
Department of Education during the Reagan administration, maintained
that even the handicapped and disabled make their own destiny:

They falsely assume that the lottery of life has penalized them at
random. This is not so. Nothing comes to an individual that he has
not, at some point in his development, summoned. Each of us is
responsible for his life situation.... There is no injustice in the
universe. As unfair as it may seem, a person's external circumstances
do fit his level of inner spiritual development.... Those of the
handicapped constituency who seek to have others bear their burdens
and eliminate their challenges are seeking to avoid the central
issues
of their lives.

These "central issues" include Down's syndrome, multiple sclerosis,
paralysis, spina bifida, and other incapacitating afflictions.

Gardner's obscurantist notions bear a strong resemblance to the yogic
view that congenital disabilities are deserved, for they reflect the
karmic development of one's soul. In other words, if you were born
with cystic fibrosis, it is a punishment for the sins of past lives.
The same holds for one's class condition. As a disillusioned Hindu
devotee puts it: "Our spiritual leader taught us that if you are born
a poor peasant in a Third World country, destined to live out your
life in hopeless poverty, it is because you acted badly in past
lives.
Conversely, if you are born to wealth or accumulate it, it is because
you have earned this good fortune through previous good actions. It
is
yours to enjoy guilt-free."

One critic interviewed therapists and EST devotees who maintained
that individual will is all-powerful and determines ones fate, that
those who are poor and hungry must have wished it on themselves, that
suffering is merely the result of imperfect consciousness, that those
who live well amidst so much deprivation have a higher consciousness,
that someone who had been raped and murdered in some way willed it,
that the victims of the Holocaust brought themselves to their awful
fate, and that whatever one thinks to be true is true, for truth is
identical to belief.

When injustice is recognized, it is given an individualized genesis.
Social, political, and ecological problems "are part and parcel of
our
way of viewing ourselves and the world. . . . Nothing short of an
inner revolution in the way we experience the world will truly help
solve them." It follows that "you cannot hope to improve the world
until you first set 'yourself aright." Once that is accomplished, you
may find nothing 'wrong with the world. A brochure for a New Age
workshop entitled "A Course in Miracles," tells us that "love" is
what
"happens when we stop trying to change the world, and change our
minds
instead about how we see it. . . . We are not victims of the world,
and when we understand this we learn to forgive others, enabling us
to
forgive ourselves."

If there are no victims, there are no victimizers. We are all equally
responsible for the world's ills, both the powerful and the
powerless,
the oppressor and the oppressed, the rapist and the raped, the child
abuser and the abused child, the exploiter and the exploited, the
warmonger and the war victim, the polluter and the sickened, the
greedy few and the needy many. Commenting admiringly on how South
African Bishop Tutu preached "humility and forgiveness" in the face
of
tyranny, one writer concluded, "If we truly want peace, shouldn't we
stop passing judgment on others and look into our own hearts, so that
we, too, don't become part of another collective evil? ... Who are we
to say that those dead [Nazi SS) soldiers at Bitberg were guilty? It
is too easy to project our own aggression onto an evil 'other."' We
must not ignore "the thinly veiled hatred within our own hearts."
Resentment and anger are the problem, not the social injustices that
might cause them.

For the New Ager, a calm mind is essential for spiritual progress.
Unselfish personal actions may be advocated as a way of healing and
nurturing the self (which makes them anything but unselfish), but
political action against unjust policies is thought to encourage
antagonisms and personal negativity. In The Greening of America, a
book that lamentably became a best-seller in the early 1970s,
inspirationist Charles Reich tells us, "Nobody wants inadequate
housing and medical care - only the machine. Nobody wants war except
the machine.... There is no need, then, to fight any group of people
in America." Reich further assures us, "All that is needed to bring
about change is to capture [the machine's] controls-and they are held
by nobody." Messy questions about state power and class privilege,
economic exploitation, and inequitable life chances are reduced to
life-styles. "The way to destroy the power of the corporate state is
to live differently now. The grand strategy is this: resist the
state,
when you must; avoid it, when you can; but listen to music, dance,
seek out nature, laugh, be happy, be beautiful..."

One New Age devotee criticized the environmental movement for
"broadcasting a doom, gloom and guilt message" and "projecting waves
of doom and disapproval" that have caused the movement to be
"disregarded for so long." But luckily "the tide is beginning to
turn.
It is being realized that the way to bring healing change is to love
and nurture ourselves and others; to have fun, to enjoy delicious
food, to cultivate prolific gardens [and] make beautiful clothes."
To
be sure, there is nothing wrong and much good in loving and nurturing
ourselves with fun and food. What is wrong is the notion that those
activities will rectify the terrible realities of the ecological
crisis. Such nostrums seem more like a way of wishing away that
crisis.

For most New Agers, involvement in worldly affairs is little more
than
a distraction from self-development. The yogi Swami Sivananda
advises,
"Reform yourself. Society will reform itself. Get worldliness out of
your heart. The world will take care of itself. Remove the world out
of your mind. The world will be peaceful. That is the only
solution. . . . If each man [sic] tries to work out his own
salvation,
there will be nobody to create the problems."

The New Age nexus is largely a class-bound indulgence. One study
shows
that most cult followers are college educated Caucasians from upper-
or middle-class homes . Drastically underrepresented are
impoverished
farm laborers, unemployed factory workers, besieged inner-city
dwellers, battered women, and other victims, who have a need for
empowerment and protection that has little to do with the rarified
refinements of self-absorbed consciousness. How do we empower
ourselves without also acting on the social conditions that limit our
life chances and our ability to be empowered? "The personal is
political" means that political realities have a dimension in our
personal lives. But it does not mean that the political can be
reduced
to the personal.

Most New Age leaders manifest a level of thought and information
regarding gender, racial, and politico-economic struggles that is not
very profound, being ingested mostly from conventional mainstream
news
sources. What Jeffrey Masson says about many psychotherapists would
hold for most New Age leaders. In their world view, "there is no
class
analysis, and no [concern about] poverty, inequality, hunger, or
traumas such as war, rape and child abuse."

New Agers claim, but do not demonstrate, that improvement of self
will
lead to improvement of the world. Without denying the desirability of
self-improvement, we might ask, does there exist a two-step process:
first, I reform myself, then the world around me? Do devotees ever
feel sufficiently enlightened, energized, and self-empowered to do
battle with the injustices of the larger world? Most New Age
enthusiasms do not bestow a more developed ethical commitment. The
goal is self-gain not moral advancement. A New Age ideology that says
only you, not the world, needs fixing is not likely to produce
dedicated reformers. One personal growth practitioner noted, "People
have taken EST, and now they want a business plan"; now they seek
classes in "prosperity training and creative financing techniques."
They become careerists within the system, not crusaders against it.

What we call the "self" and "inner consciousness" are not finished
entities, rather they are intimately linked to social experience.
Individual realization needs community and communion with others. To
be sure, we all have a subjective, intrapsychic environment that
sometimes needs tending to. But we should not overlook how the
process
of democratic struggle itself can help bring about inner growth, as
we become participants in worldly affairs.

"GOD IN ACTION": MONEY AND POWER

New Age gurus advocate spiritual regeneration while themselves
manifesting a notable fascination for material acquisition. Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi, one of the gurus who came here from India to do good and
ended up doing well, had this to say when interviewed in the
Washington Post:

Q: You're a multimillion dollar corporation. You have property all
over.
A: But that is not yet enough. Want more and more.... Here I sit with
all the possibilities. I need as much money as possible.

Q: Why don't you raise money and distribute it to needy people? Would
this not be a more effective way to bring about change?

A: No, no, it's not the money that can make one happy.

Q: How can Third World people think about their consciousness when
they're hungry?

A: If they use their brain properly ... the infinitivity of nature
will make them capable of not only earning their ordinary bread but
very first-class bread.

Phil Laut of Theta Seminars (a western Massachusetts association
calling itself a collection of "divine beings in the self-improvement
business") conducted a "Money Seminar" in which he proffered these
revelations: "What actually creates money is the mind. . . . Money in
the material universe is like God in the spiritual. Money is God in
action." Nor is there not enough to go around. That sort of thinking
divides people. "If you resent rich people, you'll never become
rich. , One student at this seminar, an ironworker, injected a dash
of reality: "At my job I inhale cast-iron dust, so naturally I
associate work with suffering.I have to suffer in order to make
money." Did he not therefore have the right to resent his rich and
exploitative employers? Laut responded, "So you feel . . . 'the more
money I have the more I have to suffer.' How can you increase your
income with an attitude like that?" The worker was describing an
occupational victimization-which the enlightened teacher reduced to a
subjective attitude within the victim.

A cult participant described a common problem within New Age
organizations: the discrepancy in riches between leader and
followers.
"I know of several people who have several children who were living
on
less that $300 a month, and in some cases $7 a week. That disturbed
me
when I saw [the guru] with a fleet of Mercedes and Cadillacs and
several homes. How does the holy leader, who supposedly lives only
to
impart spiritual teachings, explain his or her opulent life-style?
One
guru contrasted himself favorably with the Indian ascetics who remove
themselves from worldly temptations in order to progress spiritually.
How much more advanced was he who could live uncorrupted amidst so
much wealth-all of which supposedly gravitated to him because of his
elevated spiritual state. The truth was, wealth came to him because
his followers worked long hours at the guru's enterprises and lived
in
poverty so they could donate the better part of their earnings and
life savings toward the further enrichment of their holy leader.

Many (but not all) New Age businesses operate like other corporate
enterprises. The Whole Foods Market in Berkeley, California, is a
case
in point. It offers organic foods and a community bulletin board. Its
CEO described his enterprise as "driven by a vision of creating a
better world" with management and labor working together "with
openness, trust, community, shared purpose, joy, and love. But not
much love was shown to a worker who was fired for being an outspoken
union supporter, nor to the other employees who went out on strike.
Whole Foods was the only nonunionized supermarket in Berkeley, paying
workers an average of $1 to $5 less per hour than the town's other
supermarkets and offering inferior benefits. While its CEO claimed
that the store was owned mostly by its workers, closer examination
revealed that he and other upper-level executives possessed the vast
majority of stock. Furthermore, Whole Foods Inc., the country's
largest natural foods retailer, is partly financed by venture capital
from firms whose portfolios include corporate polluters and contracts
with the defense industry, the Air Force, and the CIA.

As the guru is elevated, the followers are infantilized and
diminished. Many persons (but not all) emerge from cults feeling
embittered and exploited by the experience. They relate how their
self-
confidence was undermined, how they learned to distrust their own
judgment, how they gave their money, labor, and uncritical obedience
to the self-enriching leader, and how they were separated from former
friends, given new names, identities, and belief systems. As one ex-
votary put it, "It's classic
brainwashing. They make them so they cannot fit in with other parts
of
society."

Some New Agers believe "there are changes taking place internally in
the whole nature of government and corporations" because more of
their
members are moving into positions of power. There is no evidence to
support this view. To the extent, if any, that corporations and
government show regard for the public interest, it can be credited
to
the organized pressure of democratic forces and not to any new
enlightenment manifested by those at the centers of wealth and
power.

At least one erstwhile national leader now promotes a sort of New Age
spiritualism. In 1992, the former president of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav
Havel - who was raised by governesses and chauffeurs in a fervently
anti-communist, wealthy family and who has reclaimed for his private
ownership a publicly owned building and other holdings that once
belonged to his family-called for a new breed of political leader,
who
would rely less on "rational, cognitive thinking' " and show
"humility
in the face of the mysterious order of Being" and "trust in his own
subjectivity as his principal link with the subjectivity of the
world." We should have a "sense of transcendental responsibility,
archetypal wisdom," and the ability "to get to the heart of reality
through personal experience." Havel lists the ecological dangers
facing the world but denounces the idea of rational, collective
social
efforts to solve them. He denounces democracy's "traditional
mechanisms" for being linked to "the cult of objectivity and
statistical average. He thinks he is being visionary when in fact he
is putting forth an elitist subjectivism and antidemocratic
obscurantism.

By propagating an apolitical Weltanschauung, New Age enthusiasms
have done little to thwart the retrogressive forces that accumulate
wealth and military power, destroy the environment, obliterate
indigenous cultures, build authoritarian organizations, and oppress
millions of people throughout much of the world. One might recall the
counterculture that arose in Germany during the 1920s. German youth,
mainly the offspring of affluent middle-class urban professionals,
took to the countryside to rediscover nature, revived ancient
festivals, and remained determinedly apolitical. Emphasis was on
personal experience. These Wandervogel talked of an "Inward Way" to
enlightenment. Change people, then society would change. Having
ignored political realities for so long, they added little strength
to
the anti-Nazi movement. If anything, "they gave Hitler space."

Other secret cults emerged in Germany. Anti-Semitic, nationalistic,
and atavistic, they glorified the primitive volk spirit and "pure"
ancient Teutonic culture . The Nazis were soon to exploit this
marriage of occultism and nationalism. Hitler talked of the
Volkgemeinschaft, one people bonded in mystical community under the
leadership of the fuehrer. The Hitler youth movement copied the folk
mythology, arcane symbols, and nationalistic racism of the earlier
cults, adding a strong dose of Nazi discipline . In addition,
Protestant youth groups, or "Bible circles" abounded in Germany. By
1931, more than 70 percent of Bible circle devotees were pro-Nazi.

A moving spirit of New Age thinking is the famous psychiatrist Carl
Jung. Jungian symbols and archetypes abound in New Age writings. Jung
himself was an anti-Semite and Nazi admirer who talked of "the Jewish
problem" and the differences "between Germanic and Jewish
psychology."
He thought well of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and saw
Adolph Hitler as "the truly mystic medicine man ... a spiritual
vessel, a 'demi-deity.' " When the president of the German Medical
Society for Psychotherapy resigned because of the Nazi takeover in
1933, Jung filled the post and became editor of its official journal.
In that capacity, he associated with Nazi sympathizers and Nazi
psychiatrists like M. H. Goering, nephew of one of Nazi Germany's
leaders Hermann Goering. Jung's journal carried occasional articles
that quoted Hitler favorably, praised Nazism, and propagated racism,
including a selection by Jung himself that talked of the deficiencies
of the Jewish race and the moral superiority of the "Aryan
unconscious." He hailed Nazism for energizing the deeper recesses of
the Germanic soul. Not surprisingly, his work was quoted favorably by
Nazi authors.

Jung offered racist apologies for colonialism: "The savage
inhabitants
of a country have to be mastered. . . . .[The master] must be
ruthless. He must sacrifice everything soft and fine for the sake of
mastering savages." Jung believed that the modern-day African and
other non-Europeans had a more primitive mental development than the
European and were childlike in their impulses and thoughts, or lack
of
thoughts. Referring to the primitive traces of his own unconscious
Jung wrote, "I have been led by dreams, like any primitive. I am
ashamed to say so, but I am as primitive as any nigger, because I do
not know!" After the defeat of Nazism, Jung began to heap criticisms
on Hitler in an attempt to prove himself clean of collaboration. But
he continued to spin theories about the biologically less-developed
nature of the African's mind.

Jung was immersed in mythology, spirituality, "archetypal memories,"
the wisdom of the "collective unconscious," alchemy, Teutonic
mythology, and other occult phenomena-many of which interested the
Nazis also. New Age ideology cannot be equated with Nazism just
because it draws upon the work of a Nazi collaborator. But it is
worth
Noting how Jung's obscurantism serves both, as myth is transformed in
accordance with the demands of its historic audiences.

An alienating social matrix becomes fertile land for aberrant
enthusiasms. Real grievances cause people to embrace hokey healers or
fascist leaders. These false solutions do not make the original
complaints any less real. The ancient Greeks understood that when we
are divorced from the polis, deprived of engagement in the community
by exile or by a tyrant, or confined totally to the privatized realm,
we are denied our full humanity. Native American Indians and other
indigenous peoples know that to inflict upon our natural environment
a misdirected accumulation process for the enrichment of the few also
removes us from our full humanity. Real self-empowerment should
combine personal awakening with political concerns. We must show that
greed and self-enrichment for the few should not be - and really
cannot be the way to a happy society for all. Blending private and
public concerns is the best method of ridding ourselves of poverty,
including the poverty of compassion and personal feeling that plagues
too many of our citizens. All this is easier said than done. Whatever
self-help is gleaned from New Age thought, it would seem that the
political quietism it fosters does not bring us toward any real
liberation - neither social nor personal.

FROM LAND OF IDOLS, POLITICAL MYTHOLOGY IN AMERICA, 1994. Michael
Parenti.