DE-CRYSTALLIZING THE NEW AGE

A prophet of personal and planetary transformation

joins other pioneers to look at where we are and where we're headed.

One morning, I was awakened at 6 a.m. by the ringing of my phone. "Good morning!" said a perky voice after I had managed to fumble the receiver to my ear.

"I am a reporter with Time magazine in New York City. Is this David Spangler?"

"Yes," I replied.

"Well, I'm doing an article on the New Age, and I need some help. So many things call themselves New Age, I'm having a hard time describing just what it is. Could you give me a short definition? My editor said you were the one I should call."

Me? Her editor recommended me? After years of lecturing on the New Age, was this my 15 minutes of fame? "Why, yes," I said. I then tried to condense such topics as social transformation, paradigm shifts, holism, the 'Gaia Hypothesis, everyday spirituality, co-creation, and other ideas that made up most of my lectures at the time into a short, pithy definition. I tried several times, in fact, hoping that while I wasn't being brief, I was at least being comprehensive.

When I finally wound down, there was silence on the other end.

Then she asked, "But what about crystals?"

"Crystals?" I replied, uncomprehendingly. "Yes, you didn't say anything about crystals." "Crystals?" I repeated. "What about crystals?"

"Well," she sounded surprised, as if I had suddenly turned into the village idiot in front of her, "I can't write about the New Age without discussing crystals. All New Agers believe in using crystals for various magical purposes. That's what my editor says."

"No," I replied, taken aback. "That's not true. I don't use crystals." Of course, at that moment, my gaze was attracted to the large multifaceted crystal hanging over the bedroom window. My wife had put it there years earlier because it was beautiful, and when the sun shone through it, it created lovely rainbows on the walls around the room. Now, instead of being a decoration, it had suddenly become a magical icon, proof of my New Age status. I felt an impulse to take it down.

"Oh, well then, I'm sorry," she said. "In that case, you can't help me. If I'm to write on the New Age, my editor says I have to include crystals. Thank you for your time." And with that, she hung up.

Why is it that crystals have become the symbol of the New Age? If we must have a symbol for the New Age, a much better image would be the cell. The cell is a fluid organization, a highly complex and structured system that is still flexible and dynamic.

Anyway, whichever symbol you like, welcome to the New Age! As the Time reporter discovered, the term "New Age" is used to encompass a multitude of activities and beliefs, not all of them consistent with or even supportive of each other. No wonder many people are confused about just what it is.

What are we to make of something that, depending on the person with whom you are talking or the sources you are reading, is said to include everything from occult rituals to new science, UFO abductees to holistic medicine, channeling to sustainable communities, Armageddon to alternatives, Hierarchies of Masters to hucksters of crystals?

At times, it seems to me the New Age movement is like a huge refugee camp where the only thing everyone has in common is what they are fleeing (the ordinary, the familiar, the boring, the mainstream) rather than what they are heading towards.

Basically, the New Age movement reminds me of one of those vast cosmic clouds of interstellar dust and hot gas that form the birthplace of stars. In it, we see forces of exploration, inspiration, revelation, inflation, illusion, selflessness, egoism, fear, hope, and vision all swirling together in a great cauldron of discovery and emergence. If a new planetary imagination, culture, or spirituality is to emerge starlike to be a beacon enabling humanity to take a greater step in its unfolding, it will happen from this kind of cauldron.

When I think of the New Age, I am often reminded of a metaphor. Over the past few years, millions of people around the world have become involved with the growing planetary computer network called the Internet.

As a result, cyberspace or hyperspace or virtual space - it goes by various names - has become a very real place to these people. It is a place of the imagination, a mental construct supported by an electronic network of millions of computers, modems, and phone wires. The New Age is like that. It also is a place of the imagination or - as my friend, the poet David Whyte, put it once - a "community of the imagination."

It is more than a movement. It is an imaginal landscape, a mental construct supported by a loose, amorphous network of centers, workshops, seminars, retreats, teachers, books, magazines, and stores. You can plug into it like you plug into cyberspace for a quick dip or for an extended stay. You can visit it for some information or inspiration, or you can make it a place to live and work.

To begin with, I differentiate between the New Age and the New Age movement. The latter is a modern confluence of ideas, events, groups, and activities that align themselves in some fashion, however trivially and minimally, with the ideas of personal and planetary transformation and provide various ways of seeking to attain it. It also contains elements that could care less about transformation but see within the demographics of this movement a new marketplace.

(In 1995, total sales of New Age-oriented books, tapes, videos, CDs, and mail-order products, plus the estimated income from retreats and seminars, were in excess of 4500 million dollars. As a commercial enterprise, the New Age movement has arrived, and it is no trivial matter!) The New Age, on the other hand, is an idea that is timeless. It is much larger than the movement that bears its name. It has a history that goes back at least three thousand years, and in some ways it represents an intuition of the human heart and soul that a world defined by the unity between spirit and matter, nature and humanity, the sacred and the incarnate is not only possible but an imperative.

I should say right now that I dislike the term "New Ager." I find it misleading. We would not talk about someone being a "Space Ager" or an "Information Ager." We are all part of the Space Age or the Information Age. It is a description of a characteristic of the time in which we live. Similarly, the New Age describes the fact that we are living in a time of great transformation, a time when there is a need and a calling for people to draw upon their deepest resources of imagination, courage, intelligence, compassion, wisdom, and skill to envision and to craft out of the creative and destructive flux of our time new ways for us to live with each other and with the earth that bring harmony to both.

The idea of the New Age recognizes that we are all world-builders in the ways we perceive, imagine, and relate to others and to the environment around us; it also recognizes that there is something innate in us that wants to build world that are pleasing to live in and that draw out the best and highest in us. supporting us as creative and imaginative beings. The New Age movement may represent very specific ways in which a certain small percentage of humanity is implementing this imaginative and creative expression, but the New Age impulse - the initiative to transform the present by imagining and building a better world - is something we are all involved in at one time or another in our lives. In this light, we may not all be "New Agers," but we are all participants in the creation of a New Age.

When I put puzzles together with my kids, we always try to find the corner pieces to help us define the boundaries of the picture. In the puzzle of the New Age, I think of these four corners as a planetary perspective, ecological awareness, new paradigms of science and technology, and new insights into personal empowerment and responsibility. The center of the puzzle, though, is an engagement with the spiritual and sacred dimension of life: the dimension of the soul within ourselves and within the cosmos.

The New Age may be thought of as the Age of the Soul, not as something distinct and separate from the body and personality but as a unifying, synergetic principle, an activity of connection, imagination, and co-creativity between ourselves, the cosmos, and the sacred. I sometimes think of the New Age as an excuse. It is an excuse to imagine how our world might evolve, how it might be different, how it might be better. It is an excuse to dream new visions. It is an excuse to explore and to try out new behaviors and activities. If the New Age did not exist as an idea, the same function would still be present in society.

We would just call it something else. If it is to be growing and viable, every culture needs a place of experimentation and transformation out of the edges of what is familiar and accepted. Not that all that transpires in that place is valuable or useful, pleasant or safe. A lot of experimentation can be self-indulgent, different just for the sake of being different, and even dangerous and dysfunctional. But where there is integrity and vision, a desire to serve, and a sense of historical perspective and connection wo the well- being and destiny of the larger culture and of humanity as a whole, the experimentation can be profound and very helpful, leading us all to new and better lives. I believe the fundamental direction of the New Age is toward boundaries.

These will be the boundaries between one experience of self and another, between one person and another, between the self and the world, and between the self and the sacred. They will be between humanity and nature, humanity and the cosmos, humanity and the inner world; they will be between the physical and the spiritual, the mind and the body, or consciousness and matter. They will be between rich and poor, the developed and the developing, the industrial and the indigenous, the modern and the post-modern, the old and the new.

The New Age is an image of the transformation that can occur at these boundaries. Boundaries are the places where change can take place, where communication and exchange happen, where new things emerge. Chaos lives at the boundaries, but so does life. In fact, in chaos theory, there is a domain called "the edge of chaos." In this region - this boundary between stability and chaos - a system or organization loses enough of its coherency and stability to be open to change, transformation, and reorganization but not so much as to collapse into chaos. It is the domain where the known and the unknown, the familiar and the unpredictable come together in a co-creative way. It is the essence of life.

The New Age is the spirit of this edge of chaos, the spirit of the boundary, the spirit of emergence. It calls us to consciously understand and enter this domain, this edge, so that we may be in touch with a primal force of self- organization and unfolding, a force of newness and emergence. The New Age resonates with that part of us (and that part of the cosmos) that looks to what we can become, not just what we were or what we are now.

The New Age is too powerful an idea to become crystallized, channeled, occultized, and thereby ridiculed and dismissed. It is an idea that is in touch with wild and primal forces of life, forces of change and growth, forces of love and sacrifice, forces of challenge and expansion. It is an idea that takes us to the boundaries and introduces us to edges where all things are made new.

If you believe in the possibilities of a New Age, then you owe it to yourself to go beyond the images (or lack of them) in the media and find the elements, the people, the examples in the New Age that live up to its full and high possibilities, and therefore live up to the full and high possibilities within you. For myself, I dislike the term "New Ager," but I am proud to be associated with the New Age.

Reprinted with permission of Findhorn Press, Scotland. Reprint "New Age Journal", January/February 1997 edition)

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