11.21.08

The New Age postmodern sabotage game

Posted in New Age at 3:43 pm by nemo

I said I would scan up something from EnlightenNext magazine, Building the Foundations ofa New Worldview, Joel Pitney, EnlightenNext mag, winter 2008-9.
here is a paragraph or so, enough….

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, it’s hard to imagine living in a world without democracy and the natural right to live a life of one’s own choosing. These fundamental principles of
modernity, which flourished in the salons of Paris during the late eighteenth century, have become so ingrained in our individual and collective psyches that we mostly take them for granted. But
the principles of the Enlightenment might never have become manifest were it not for the founding fathers of the United States, who designed the world’s first democratic government and self¬determined nation with only their philosophical convictions to guide them.
Fast-forward more than two hundred years to the present, where another group of individuals is attempting to incite a new philo¬sophical revolution that has such profound and broad-ranging implications for human life and the world that some observers
of cultural evolution are calling it the second Enlightenment. They’re talking about the emergence of the integral worldview. And thanks to the work of philosopher Ken Wilber and others,
this new perspective is helping hundreds of thousands of people around the world-including the editors of this magazine-to start to see the many dimensions of reality, both inner and outer, as multiple reflections of one unfolding process of cosmic evolution. After decades of relative obscurity, an international movement of integral scholars, practitioners, and activists is now working to give this little-known perspective more legitimacy in the public eye. And through a variety of social networks, websites, centers, academic programs, and conferences, they are attempting to build the cultural foundation for what integral theorist and author Steve McIntosh suggests could ultimately be “a new, historically signifi¬cant level of human civilization.”
The roots of the integral movement go back more than a cen¬tury to the theories and visions of various philosophers, mystics, and developmental psychologists, such as Sri Aurobindo, and Pierre Teilhard de (hardin, and Jean Gebser. But in the last thirty years, so much more developmental work has come to the fore that we now have a variety of maps and established theories to describe these processes of psychospiritual, cultural. and biologi¬cal evolution and how they are related. Perhaps the most complete synthesis of this recent work can be found in Wilber’s AQAL (All Quadrants, All Levels) model, which is based on years of exhaus¬tive research and spiritual inquiry and brings together the many disciplines through which humanity seeks truth-the spiritual …..

This is apparently a mouthpiece essay from an Andrew Cohen flunkie, or hanger on.
The opening paragraph of this piece is ambiguous, and in the context of these New Age gurus, alarming. It is seemingly affirming the principles of democracy and rights, or snidely setting them up for debunking, tacitly, of course, in the stealth fascism lite of Andrew Cohen (the original version in the early twentieth century on the part of New Age occultists having faileld). We know the answer. Here comes another ‘postmodern’ reevaluation of that dratted Enlightenment, and its replacement with a ‘new world view’ provided by these remorphs like Cohen of the Neo-brahmanical gurus of medieval India. Cohen looks Jewish, but he is really a Indian medievalist in disguise. Clever tactics by his guru, a notable ‘shaktipat’ windbag in the post-Rajneesh disorganization of Indica spirituality.
If they want a new age so much, why not sell ‘shaktipat’ in jars, a sort of compressed gas approach to ‘instant gurudom’ we see in Andrew Cohen.
Cohen is in trouble, the postmodern fad is passing, and the New Age appropriation of the leftist/secularists on the subject was never convincing anyway.
Why is it these people have such a problem with the Enlightenment? I can see no problem with a critique of the Enlightenment, the source of so many critiques, but it would seem useful to remember (as many secularists don’t) that the Enlightenment period triggered the rebirth of Indic spiritual studies, long nearly moribund in India itself. (Cf. Schlegel et al, or a biography of Schopenhauer for this effect of the later (counter)enlightenment)
Moral: there is no going back to the restoration of an Indic spiritual culture in the induced postmodern rubble of modernity. It is a fascist notion that has been turned into chewing gum ever since its hidden conspirational birth in the nineteenth century and echoed in such figures as Blavatsky and, indeed, even the unwitting Nietzsche.

Meanwhile, the sheer presumption in this passage, that Ken Wilbur single-handedly is going to replace the Enlightenment with a new one is breathtaking, and completely stupid. It is a misunderstanding of what the Enlightenment was, and its place in world history. Quite apart from anything else (as a study of the eonic effect makes clear) the rise of modernity is far larger than the Enlightenment, and is constructed to be more than the sum of its parts, not so easy to dismantle with confused New Age cults.
Teilhard, Gebser, and Aurobindo are poor competition with the net advance we see in the whole transition from the early modern to the Enlightenment and beyond. Its effect is as decisive as the Axial Age, which produced among other things the world traveller Buddhism, an incident far beyond the capacity of these guru degenerates to imitate.
It is sad to watch Ken Wilbur go into overdrive on such an issue. These gurus have kidnapped this person and wasted his talents on a false proposition. These gurus are getting desperate. After a century of the New Age movement, the whole gang can’t even produce a simple text of ‘spiritual psychology’ that is clear, honest, and useful. The reason is that the vice of deception has entered into the presentation of these ancient teachings. Thus a recruit like Wilbur thrown into the game ends up with a useless pastiche of pre-Kantian metaphysical notions that noone can use.
Now this integral nonsense is getting turned into a business. Who can stop them? Why worry about them? They can’t recreate the Enlightenment, that much is sure.

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