Separating authentic mysticism from New Age fluff

[John Zeger]

Although New Age thought has popularized traditional mystical beliefs and has made them accessible and understandable to millions of people who might not have stumbled upon such ideas at all or at least not until later in their lives, this has not come without a cost to the purity of the underlying mystical beliefs. In its effort to popularize these esoteric ideas, the New Age movement has also diluted them and married them to all sorts of questionably related notions such as astrology, positive thinking, pre-ordination, and remote healing, to mention just a few.

One authentic writer on mysticism who has been critical of such New Age tendencies is Walter Truett Anderson. Anderson has written such masterful books as The Future of the Self and The Next Enlightenment in which he has demonstrated great depth and breadth of thought in areas of science, psychology, and philosophy, as well as mysticism. In The Next Enlightenment, Anderson lists the following shortcomings of New Age thought:

-- A tendency toward narcissim, logically resulting from the popularity of the romantic notion of an idealized inner "true self"
-- A bias against rationality, especially unfortunate when coupled with an affection for Big Ideas
-- A kitsch constructivism that fails to respect the limits of our ability to create reality and degenerates into little more than a belief that wishing will make it so
-- A lack of ability, or even desire, to evaluate critically the various beliefs, practices, and ideas imported wholesale from other cultures and other ages
-- A chronic susceptibility to cults and cult leaders

It is my hope that intelligent and earnest spiritual seekers are willing and able to separate the wheat from the chaff.