I knew a New Age guru whom I respected as a person but whose ideas I found hateful. Our main source of disagreement was that he thought that there were no innocent victims and I thought there were. He then made a claim that I wanted to see myself as a victim and that I wanted to avoid taking responsibility for my life. My stance was driven by no such thing. It was driven by ethics. This attitude would justify any crime under the sun under the claim that the person at its receiving end has brought it about. This attitude robs people of ethics and compassion. And that makes people worse.
I was once traveling through Utah, and my car broke down. A man gives me a ride to the nearest service station; then he pays for my repairs and walks out before I could even thank him. I find this to be an amazing behavior. If this happened in a community with strong New Age influences, they would have thought that my car broke down because of negativity in my conscience. Not only would they have not helped me, but they would have avoided me out of the fear that I stood to inflict this negativity upon them.
If a Mormon right-winger can be a better person than we are, boy do we have a lot to learn.
So we have many people advocating for positive thinking and blaming negative thinking for the world’s problems. Positive thinking causes more problems than it solves. It leads to carelessness and short-sightedness. You think positive, you fail to anticipate problems, you do foolish things. So we have these people ignoring the problems of the world, and the problems keep getting bigger.
Then there is the claim that fear is at the root of the world’s problems. These people don’t know what they are talking about. I have known a number of very brave people. They never claimed to disown fear. They claimed willingness to act in presence of fear. The people who believe such things have not been through experiences that genuinely test courage. They have no authority on the matter.
Then there’s the claim that love is a search for external validation, which according to them should come from within. That may be the case for them; it has never been the case for me. My love for the women I’ve loved had nothing to do with validation for myself. It wasn’t about what I felt about myself; it was about what I felt about them. Maybe if all you care about is yourself you may believe something like that. However I have better values than that.
The same guru also told me that altruism is based on being three years old and having his whole existence depending on other people. I am involved in probably the most effective altruistic organization in the world – the Salvation Army. This organization does not consist of three-year-olds. It consists of honest, responsible adults working to relieve suffering, even when doing so carries no benefit to themselves. Altruism is inextricable from human makeup, and it is something that, if practiced correctly, generates excellent results.
It is also said that against-ness never works. That is untrue. It worked very well for Ronald Reagan and Ayn Rand to be against Communism. When you are against something, you make allies of other people who are against it as well. And that can be a very strengthening stance.
There is also the claim that wanting to do anything in the world is forcing one’s will on the world. That is completely wrong. The state of the world is everyone’s business. All sorts of people force their will on the world all the time. Not caring about such things is not being enlightened. It is being a jerk.
Then there is the claim that you need to work on yourself before you work on anything else. I see no reason for there to be a contradiction between the two. I work on myself; I also work on social issues. If you have enough discernment to see a problem, then you should be addressing the problem. You should not be working to make yourself more like the people who caused the problem.
Many of the people who are attracted to these ideas started out as hippie idealists. The work that they have done on themselves however has had a negative rather than positive effect. It took away their ethics and compassion. It made them worse people. And I have every right to reject the ideas that had that effect on them.
During the swine flu, my brother attended a parade in San Francisco wearing a pig nose. My mother put a picture of that on her Facebook page and wrote, “California has turned my son into swine.” Someone wrote, “Yeah, that state does that to a lot of people.” I spent a year and a half in California, and I loved it. However I do not love the ideas that are had by many in New Age movement. They have indeed turned a lot of people into swine.
It is perfectly valid to practice yoga or meditation or to take interest in Native American spirituality. It is not valid to embrace attitudes that make people worse. These people need to regain their ethics and compassion, and they need to go to work solving the world’s problems. That is where they started out. And if they have anything good left in them, that is the stance that they will take.