The Rainbow Connection
New Age, New World
In my twenties and thirties, I scoffed at everything New Age, despite taking up yoga in my early thirties at my gym. I met a few people who went to Burning Man but wasn’t that impressed with them and had little interest myself.
By my early forties, I had developed a daily yoga practice in response to a chronic illness. It helped considerably. With social outlets diminishing as I grew older, I began sprinkling in sound baths, kirtans, qigong classes, and meditation. I prioritized cutting edge art and music events over New Age ones, but participating in mystical healing modalities became my backup choice. I took several trips to Esalen as a simpler and more social alternative to traveling places alone and even spent a couple of enjoyable Christmas vacations there. I had fun dancing to EDM at “Afterburn” events on Venice Beach. I took up belly dancing.
I never found New Age subjects particularly engaging, but I did some superficial reading on people like Blavatsky, Swedenborg, and Gurdjieff, and began to notice that small groups revolving around such figures were springing up in L.A. (or perhaps always existed). Prior to those explorations, I had enjoyed George Pendle’s Strange Angel, Erik Davis’s The Visionary State, Michelle Goldberg’s The Goddess Pose, and Lyra Kilston’s Sun Seekers.
Although I am beginning to appreciate the ways in which Christianity undergirds the freedom we take for granted in the West, I still find myself alternately bored or uncomfortable in the presence of traditional religion and God talk. Sunday morning yoga classes became my “church”— a way to experience some vague spirituality and expression of gratitude in the presence of other people, with the added benefit of lots of stretching after a long week in an office. Not to mention, I felt much more comfortable as an older single person in a yoga class than in a church pew.
In the last couple of years though I have heard lots of criticism of “gnosticism.” I don’t completely understand what “gnosticism” is (the pages seem to blur whenever I attempt any heavy reading on religion), but it appears I’ve rather innocently spent a significant amount of my adult life dabbling in it. I recently read Constance Cumby’s The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow, which is fairly convincing in the connections it draws between the New Age and the New World Order. The sort-of vague, all-encompassing spirituality of the New Age would be very compatible with a nationless world.
In regard to the Covid years, the New Age milieu for the most part went right along with the program. Burning Man events enforced vaccine mandates. Amongst the medical freedom groups in Los Angeles, however, there were a few with a New Age flavor.
When I ponder the adult playground the New Age has become, I find myself facing the proverbial chicken or egg question. Did the New Age help to dissolve the family unit, or is its rising popularity the result of that dissolution?
Image: The Burning Man Temple 2024.jpg/ Wikimedia Commons