Excerpt from chapter three in: A Catholic Response to the New Age Phenomenon by the Irish Theological Commission in 1994. To see the contents of the whole chapter, click here.
"New Age Movement" is abbreviated as NAM.
The so-called 'spirituality' of the NAM could be called 'spiritual humanism'. The corner-stone of this humanism is the belief that humankind is divine in nature, and is therefore, essentially 'god', or an enlightened god-man.109 Whereas secular humanism denies deity, and exalts our own intellectual, creative, moral powers as the way to find true meaning to life, spiritual humanism affirms deity, one that casts us in the role of a higher race of cosmic gods. This spiritual humanism is born of a deep-seated disillusionment with much of the mainstream western values and institutions, especially the Church. It was born of an intense search for an alternative way of solving life's biggest problems.110
Marilyn Ferguson, whose book The Aquarian Conspiracy brought the NAM to the masses, says that God is the sum total of consciousness in the universe expanding through human evolution. She proclaims that the radical centre of the spiritual experience is 'knowing without doctrine'.111 She further claims that those who persevere with this 'transformative process' give up conventional Christianity and Christian dogma.112 The gurus, she explains, merely teach techniques, but they positively discourage religious dogma as second-hand knowledge. The seeker must learn by personal experience. This so-called mystical journey leads to the 'white light experience'.113
Miller confirms that personal experience is the all important factor for the NAM. He says that 'for the responsive subject, "ASCs" (altered states of consciousness) can produce a profound mystical sense of "transcendence" of individuality and identification with everything. Such experiences of undifferentiated consciousness suggest to the seeker that ultimate reality itself is undifferentiated; everything is one, and the nature of the One must be consciousness'.114 He further states that the person who passively submits to, or pursues ASCs, 'is setting himself up for a religious conversion' (ibid.), that may be either a 'passageway to reality, or a passageway to delusion.115
One of the problems is that the mystical states that ensue have such an impact on the psyche that the person becomes absolutely certain of what they experience. These people tend to think that they alone understand reality and consider Christians who have to believe without seeing (c£ Jn 20:28) as unenlightened souls. Because of their absolute certainty it is very difficult for rational arguments to penetrate their thinking. Their response is that you 'do not know'. The people who are most vulnerable to this experience are the humanists or materialists who are experiencing the spiritual as real for the first time (ibid.).
NOTES
(Full details of the publications referred to in these notes can be found in the Select Bibliography).
109. Inside tbe New Age Nightmare, Randall N. Baer, p. 84.
110. Ibid., p. 86.
111. Tbe Aquarian Conspiracy, Marilyn Ferguson pp. 241, 414.
112. Ibid., p. 414.
113. Ibid., pp. 415, 423.
114. A Crasb Course in NAM, Elliot Miller, p. 36.
115. Ibid., p. 37.
