Aum wrote:Eugene,
There is obvious interest if I took the time to respond to the discussion. Do please enlighten me with why you think the New Age is 'bad'...
I said a lot of New Age literature was bad, just to be clear. And so it is.
As others have suggested, the New Age movement (or whatever you want to call it) we've inherited today largely originated with Blavatsky and her immediate cohort. The basic starting point was/is that all spiritual systems evolved in response to the same fundamental reality. That idea in itself has a lot of surface appeal, and based on reasoning alone, we rightly conclude that it's at least partially true. As such, much of Blavatsky's literature is aimed at demonstrating an
all systems are one system principle, and there's where the problems begin.
Her treatment of Vedic cosmological constructs, for example, which she frequently refers to, tend to be categorically flawed. If one is well read enough in both Western and Eastern esoteric literature and reviews her work in their light, one will recognize that in many instances, rather than treating Vedic constructs for what they are, she's instead found some rather typical Western cosmological notion that she must have assumed was
close enough to be expressing the same thing, and then in essence renamed it with a Sanskrit word, carrying at most bits and pieces of the meaning from the original Sanskrit, just enough to muck-up the Western construct too, so that she manages to utterly muddle the original meaning of both constructs. Heh.
The basic idea (all systems are one) was so appealing, so it seems, and knowledge of Vedic philosophy in the West was so scant at the time, those glaring flaws went largely unnoticed (not by the more scholarly, but by many none the less). All reports suggest that she was a gifted and highly charismatic cold-reader too, which helped her develop a
cult of personality among New York High Society around the turn of the 20th Century (she was a must at any party worth attending for a good while there), which no doubt aided in more or less
canonizing some of those flawed ideas, which have been repeated time and again by successive generations of authors, often without citation, as if they were
the gospel truth. I suspect that for many such authors, they're not even aware of where those ideas came from. They're just repeating what they were
taught, etc.
The lack of citation and passing along of flawed ideas by people who don't have the background to even begin to understand the flaws is a problem in itself and has been percolating in the culture for 100 years now. And there's something of the gossip game effect going on, you know, where someone whispers a sentence into someone's ear, say,
The blue car drove past the house, who then whispers the sentence into the ear of the next person, and on around the room till it comes to last person, who stands up and proudly exclaims:
Purple monkey dishwasher!. Again, heh.
Take for example: dakshinachara and vamachara, which she introduced into the Western vernacular as Right Hand Path and Left Hand Path, respectively. I'll refer readers to this
okay wiki article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-Hand_Path_and_Right-Hand_Path. Read the whole thing of course, but the most relevant bit is under the "History of the Terms" heading.
In brief, in the Tantric traditions those terms come from, the goal in the same in both cases: escape from Samsara (the cycle of birth, live, and death), but that goal is approached in different ways. The so-called Right Hand Path is the acetic path, the path of denial, wherein the aspirant more or less sits and meditates and tries to do nothing, resisting the temptation to engage in those activities that will keep them bound to the Wheel of Samsara. Alternatively, the Left Hand Path is the path of immersion, wherein aspirants deeply indulge in precisely the sorts of activities that tend to keep people bound to the Wheel, in an attempt to burn their influence away, to render themselves immune to those temptations. In their original context, neither approach is good nor evil, neither
more spiritual than the other, etc. They are simply opposing routes to the same same end.
Blavatsky, however, frequently equated the Left Hand Path with "evil" and the likes, a usage of the term that continues to this day.
So, one might wonder, does it really matter? So what if we don't really know what Vamachara really means, right? Well, that in itself is not important, but that's not the extent of the Blavatsky legacy. One might characterize what she was trying to do as a forced syncretism. Throughout the history and development of esoteric thought, in all areas of the world, where ver cultures begin to intermingle enough, their spiritual traditions tend to merge (consider the Egyptian influence on Plato, for example). But syncretism is an organic process that evolves naturally over time, much in the way a unique dialect of given language spontaneously evolves under certain circumstances.
Briefly, the reason an organically developed dialect works is because over time the dialect grows into a comprehensive and coherent codification of more or less everything people might want to express (as much as any language can). All languages are in essence built to express the same world, so in that way, the different languages of the world kind of fit the Theosophical notion: all systems are one. However, the way each language breaks down the world into component parts is different, so if you try to force the meanings of words from one language onto another, sometimes the break points will be different, meaning will be lost, and communication will be difficult at best, and misunderstanding will be highly likely.
Likewise, by trying to force partially incompatible cosmological constructs together, where different systems have divvied up the cosmos in different ways, many of the elements that render either construct coherent and part of a comprehensive whole are just lost, so that the final product is, well, pretty much a muddled up mess. But in this case its much worse than the linguistic example, where the result is just difficulty in communicating. That's because the developmental techniques people use these days are tried and true; they tend to work. So if someone's doing good developmental work with such a muddled up cosmological system, they're actually instilling all those inconsistencies right into their deep psyche. It's all to common today, and it's a crying shame, really.
Aum wrote:I am also curious of what you mean of this 'popularizing particular interpretation of literature.' If you are referring to Karma, is is not the only thing they popularized.
I think I've adequately addressed this in the above, but if you have additional questions, I remain willing to continue the conversation. And if you're still willing to provide your understanding of what "karma" is, I'm still interested.
) to make it more "fluffy" and dilettante friendly.
