Dear Friends, Known and Unknown,
As I have said, these confessions are based on my own looking-out at the soul of the world and the suffering of the world. They are based on many years of searching for ways to a more humane culture.
How many years have I been with this and how many years did I believe that the rapidly ascending New Age culture held the key …
For as I look out on the new millennium, it seems incontestable to me, that the challenges we face will require the greatest degree of spiritual maturity and spiritual strength that humanity has ever marshalled.
The challenges are just SO great. And as I have written here before, I have never been able to muster faith in solutions solely of a political nature – a new economic system, a new set of laws, a new kind of government …
All my adult life, I felt that **by themselves** these could amount to nothing but a superficial panacea, a quick fix, a band-aid for a far deeper and more structural problem. The only real answer I could imagine was not in essence political, but spiritual.
Now as ludicrous as it will no doubt sound to many Christians reading this, for years my greatest hope for developing the requisite degree of spiritual strength and maturity was the New Age or holistic movement.
This may sound ludicrous in part, because of the popular image of the New Age: one of channelling, crystals, UFO’s, astral travelling, pyramid power …
And God knows what else besides. Here is the place to clarify that this is NOT the New Age movement I knew in my nearly two decades involvement with it.
No. Starting with my life-changing visit at age 16 to Findhorn in Scotland – a major centre of holistic culture in the world – I knew a very different New Age.
The New Age movement I knew was a site of very sincere and open-hearted endeavour. Its spirituality had far more to do with depth psychology than wacky phenomena.
At Findhorn, the psychological practice originated by the depth psychologists, wherein one person (the analyst) took **seriously** the life issues and life suffering of the other (the analysand) had become generalised to the entire culture.
That is to say, people at Findhorn listened to each other, really **listened** to each other. They made real ‘the reality of the other'.
And in the psychological safety that people experience when they are taken **seriously**, I witnessed people opening up, becoming creative. The New Age I knew then, was marked by authenticity and personal growth– not crystals.
All of this was far, far more convincing to me than the world of (Protestant) Christianity I had experienced – which seemed simply desiccated by comparison.
And for years, I truly believed that this new spiritual holistic culture would grow, transform and open the heart of the mainstream culture.
I certainly did not expect that the growing coldness of the heart in 1980’s Reaganism and Thatcherism would continue, let alone DEEPEN. I did not expect materialism to keep **growing**.
As it now seems to me, that unless there is radical change at the **roots** of our culture, it will keep growing - impoverishing our souls and making ever more demands on the biosphere …
I read not so much wacky New Age channelings, but holistic and spiritual thinkers such as David Spangler, William Bloom, Richard Moss, Ken Wilber, Peter Russell, Caroline Myss, William Irwin Thompson, Stanislav Grof, Matthew Fox, Krishnamurti - people who deeply impressed me, and often still impress me …
And I did not notice the **Common Factors** that now seem absent - to one degree or another - in their thinking. Common Factors which so often seem to me either relativised, dismissed or not very present in the consciousness of such thinkers, but which factors are embodied in the Christian Tradition of the West.
And which I suspect are essential to 'radical change at the roots of our culture'. I shall be returning to these Common Factors that seem missing in New Age thought ...
Yes, there was so much I failed to remark. But looking back, I can understand why, in my youth, I really believed that New Age spirituality held the key to the challenges of the new millennium.
And how long it took me to begin to see its radical insufficiency and **why** it was insufficient …
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