caleb wrote:Awesome post, Eugene.
@Aum The very best thing you can say about the new age movement is that it's a harmless watering down of the western tradition. To actually say that, though, would be optimistic in proportions worthy of Forrest Gump.
A good portion of the new age's roots are in Theosophy (as you pointed out earlier). If you take even a cursory look at Theosophy you'll see that it is batshit insane.
Besides the harmless lunacies (Atlantis theorizing, etc.), there are also very dangerous ones. Ever wonder where Hitler got his ideas about Aryan supremacy, Jews being subhuman, etc.? From Blavatsky's "The Secret Doctrine."
Putting aside all these problems with factual accuracy that seem to plague Theosophy, you also have their spiritual deception. I'm sure you've heard of Jiddhu Krishnamurti? Well, he was trained from birth to play the part of messiah for the Theosophists when he got older to help them gain more power. That didn't pan out, and the story is very inspiring, but I won't go into it here. The point is, that with its roots in shitholes like Theosophy, how could anything good come of the new age?
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'...
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.
caleb wrote:I think. Love him or hate him, the fact remains that Crowley is the most influential magician of the last century or more.
Silenciumetaurum wrote:If this is degenerate, then let me be degenerate.
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
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.
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:You make it sound like this is exclusive to Theosophy . Anyone can be greatly inspired by a work and adopt it as their own and fail to cite their sources and whatnot and speak of a subject that they know little of. She was very clear on where her ideas came from: The Great White Brotherhood. She may have not been correct in her definition of the work, yet she was trying to shed light on ideas that were mostly unknown and unthinkable to the West at time. Theosophy proposed that the East were greatly advanced in spiritual matters though they were not materially advanced as West. Her main objective was to link the gap.
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