New Age Belief, Millennial Angst and the Denial of the Other

Perhaps this is too harsh an assessment, given that by its very nature, New Ageism is a plethora of ideas, many New Agers believing in a power higher than themselves. However, the dominant ethos of this philosophy is that god is within you and thus you are god. This is not a logical leap but a blind leap of faith. If god is by definition infinite, then god could be anywhere and nowhere, not solely inside the believer. We are living in an age of deeper stress than any other in history. This is proven by the fact that more people receive some form of mental health care than ever before. While we might suggest this is due to the greater availability of such care, we also know that resources are being cut and that waiting lists for all types of treatment have never been longer. It would be too simplistic to blame this solely on the end of this millennia, I merely want to offer a few ideas.

Christmas time and New Year are generally periods when suicide increases. This is a lot to do with people feeling they should be happy and they are not. Entering into a New Year, there are resolutions and prayers for hope and the d-ream mantra- things can only get better. If we then place this angst onto the scale of the end of a thousand years, with this perspective we can see how traumatic this end, this form of death and abandonment can be. The extremes of this potential for hope or failure have never been greater. Paradoxically, what comes with a feeling of insecurity is a belief in self-reliance or self-destruction. When all seems to be coming to an end, the whole world is deserting you, what is left. You. And you either commit the suicide of yourself, or commit suicide of the world. New Age belief, despite ecological fringes, has done just this. The New Age has killed off the world.

Im not suggesting that New Agers dont have friends. What I mean is that if you just trust yourself, your instinct, your inner god, then you are bound to fall flat on your face. So much of ourselves is unconscious to ourselves. Other people know me better than I know myself because they can see me more objectively, the different parts to me. If I ask everyone I know something about me, then I will learn a great deal. Obviously this will then be re-interpreted through my own self-paradigm, but these observations that are enlightening came from others. I am not suggesting we should just listen to others but listening to others must be part of the equation. The French philosopher Levinas writes that it is through the face of the Other that truth is revealed.

It is only through others, through relationship, that the truth is manifested. Thus, believing god to be merely inside yourself, to be you, will cause a complete lack of truth, because you will never move really outside of your relationship with yourself. Of course we should know ourselves, but believing ourselves to be god is the ultimate fault. Here we see how Nietzsche, the hippy bloke who appears to be so humble, and all the rest, can be equated. Because of a feeling of lack of love from others there is the denial of the other. As I have suggested above, it is due to fear of rejection, fear of abandonment, that we begin to believe in the will to power, the self as all and thus what appears to be a strong belief I am it, I AM the ALL, is based on a cringing fear of others and the Other.

It is commonly asserted that belief in a God is slavery, subservience to a higher being, merely a denial of responsibility and for the weak alone. But if God is God, that is, all powerful, then attempting to embrace this entity is the most courageous act of all because the process may dissolve the self in the fire mentioned by the mystics. This will only be a problem if we fear, this fear, I repeat, stemming from a core feeling of fear of abandonment. If god is only within you, if you are god, it is difficult for you to abandon yourself and thus live freely without fear. But ultimately the self has been abandoned if you have this belief because you are disbelieving the Other, stating that your truth is higher than anything other than yourself and thus you die due to a fear of death.

Again we get to a paradox, in that New Agers often claim to be open and tolerant but claim that those who are not adherents are morons, ignoring their inner selves and not really loving themselves, not really going their true way. How often is the phrase, you've got to find your own way, tread your own path stated. I have nothing against love of the self, but believe it is more useful to see this self as more ambiguous, as it is more useful to see God as both tangible and intangible. This is why people often mock New Agers, as they mock Born Again Christians, and so on, because these believers often become a parody of a set type, all they hold to be true is that which they know, the tangible, letting nothing that others say or do influence their supposedly open beliefs. Far from the 'actualisation of other dimensions' or other such hokey stuff, they forget the third dimension and exist as two dimensional stereotypes. This way of life is easy. Again a paradox results, people thinking they are trusting their instinct but in reality being caught up in the cultural angst and committing intellectual suicide.

The New Age is full of old age beliefs, and is connected to Schopenhauers world as will and idea. One can see how deep this philosophy is linked to the capitalist system. Go to any sales team meeting, God forbid, and the phrases you create your success, you can control your world, you can convince the customer go for it because you are it, make it happen, all link to this belief that only you exist, which obviously links to hedonism and the pseudo-Epicurean slogan: eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die. How often are the phrases 'think only of yourself', 'you are number one', 'it's a dog eat dog world', 'you control your universe', chanted, creating self- deception. If Oasis speak for a generation then it is useful to mention the words of Liam: I did it myself. In complete denial, he maintains their success was entirely due to their talent, luck, the cultural tastes of millions, marketing and opportunity not being anything to do with it.

With the millennial angst there is such a panic, such a fear of death, such a fear of abandonment of the self, that the self is clung to or completely lost, both leading to madness. Deep down then, this is a belief system for lonely and scar(r)ed people who try desperately to control their own universe by beleiving they have the sole power to do so. In the short term, it works, because you are in control and you make your own universe, which feels safe because it is populated by you, or clones of you, that is, other New Agers. In the long term, it exacerbates this loneliness and leads to isolationism because the obsession with the self is a dead end.

We can see how this obsession links to the never ending pursuit of more and more bizarre forms of therapies, attempts at changing the self instead of the world.Therapy can not right social ills, just teach people a certain acceptance, therefore it seldom can be radical. The client is the cause of all ills, regardless of the situation, as all the therapist has to work with is the client. Basically this is down to a Freudian view that all beings are a bundle to selfish desires, love being totally denied. This is insanity, but an insanity born from a supposedly distinguished Western philosophical tradition.

If the world is no more than my perceptions of it then the suffering of others is not more than my own self. This may appear like benign empathy but in reality it comes from a society where the I of self is placed at the epicentre of all creation. In this manner, the I is god and the I creates all. This means total control and no real life as I can not be affected or effected by the world because the world is created by me. We can see that this belief system is formed from a fear of exchange, as if any sharing would lead to corruption and also due to a fear of having nothing, of death, of abandonment of the self by the self. If I am god I will never die and thus with this deception I run my universe.

When death does occur we may be jolted into realising we do not fully control our world but then this can quickly be forgotten and the I can go on until it dies without knowing it, livng forever in a state of projection of its own illusions within the abyss.

Once the hamster has run around its wheel once, once the self is the world, then all that is outside, all that can reach the inner self, is ignored and the self dies. Because of this death to life there is then an invention of millions of future worlds beyond this life, another New Age obsession. Perhaps this can be seen as an attempt to embrace the other, to reach out beyond the self but it is merely a deception, again a desperate clinging to the self due to the fear of endings. The year 2000 is not only an end but a beginning, lets hope it will be a beginning for the true recognition of self and others.

Charles Jason Peter Lee

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