New Age
2012: The End is Nigh
05/01/08 10:42
Hardly a day goes by that I don't hear some reference or other to the Mayan Prophecy - the one that says that the world ends on 22 December 2012. Well at any rate, when I first started hearing about it decades ago that's what it was supposed to mean, but these days I hear all sorts of wild New Age theories. The latest was just the other day, when someone told me that the Mayan calendar 'ending date' is in fact the day that the earth enters the Galactic Centre - a place billions of light years away that we orbit over unimaginable lengths of time and that we can't get any closer to since we are circling it - duh!
This New Age business is gobsmacking. They have managed to transform a prophecy of the end of the world - a key principle of any religious organisation worth its salt - into the characteristic new age fluffy unicorn stuff of "transformation", delight, bliss, elevation of our miserable lives into a spiritual rescue mission that sends us into another dimension, by means of the usual hodge podge of misunderstood science, bastardised and misunderstood Astrology and Religion of the Self.
It's nothing more than the Catholic Rapture twisted into an almost unrecognisable mockery of itself, which is ironically true of much of the rubbish that the 'New Age movement' recycles: so much of it is a shallow relic of long-crumbled Judaeo-Christian spirituality with a tad of Hinduism and a healthy dash of anything Native American.
Anyway, this date is derived from the fact that the fascinating Mayan Calendar comes to the end of its great cycle on that date. It's a remarkable blend of partly understood but complex concepts of time, much like the same kind of things that most ancient cultures have, but of course claiming an altogether different measure of time as all the others do, as is generally the case. (Let alone the fact that the Mayans knew nothing of the Galactic Centre.)
What makes little sense is why the New Age pundits have seized onto this particularly obscure theory of time as the gospel? Especially since there is not much that these ancient American cultures have to offer that is particularly desirable, profound or applicable to the rest of humankind. Part of the reason is of course that little of their culture is known, having been so utterly destroyed by their contemporary enemies and even more so by the marauding Spaniards.
Ah, there's the rub: there is nothing so attractive as a vague and unsolveable mystery. When something is coded and lost in the mists of time it could be made to serve anyone's theories - Nostradamus' obscure scribblings are a great example of that. No better way to prove vague New Age ideas than with vague historical ones - there's a reason to punt some obscure culture's obscure prophecies.
And here's a more important rub: everyone seems to neglect the fact that the very same Mayan calendar predicted the 'previous' end of the world as 11 August 3114 B.C. Oops. Not only did that prediction patently fail, but so has every other end-of-the-world prediction failed, and there have been no shortage of those across various times and cultures.
Yet the Calendar-thumpers persist in their prophecy of doom transformed into another good old fashioned deus-ex-machina, their Rapture, the hoary old "listen to us and you will be saved!" And there's the other reason why end-of-world prophecies are so necessary to any burgeoning religion that wants to be worth the parchment its scriptures are printed on.
There's an aspect of human psychology here too: it seems that throughout time people need to believe that they are the last generation, the pinnacle of all that has gone before, the ones cast with the divine responsibility of saving the world from certain destruction. It is the psychology that underlies much of that religious thinking, as well as the need for individual and own-group purpose and meaning. And it also reveals the materialism that lies behind New Age 'spirituality' - there is no room for redemption in spirit or in time, it has to be in our own lifetime. Ah well, New Age spirituality is the spirituality of the Ego, as I have said elsewhere in this blog (see The Secret Behind the Secret.)
But let's face it: it really does seem that the world is in a sorrier state than ever before. There is little doubt now that we truly have brought our planet to a brink of some kind, with our destruction of natural resources and the environment adding up to actual evidence, for once, that an end is indeed nigh. Maybe this time, the prophecies are right ... ?
Well, what time and failed prophecies prove is that the earth - nature - is self-correcting, as all systems are. It is sadly likely that death and destruction do follow, that global warming, HIV and other diseases, you name it, are indeed symptoms of a world at a brink, but in reality what follows is a turn of a cycle, a natural cycle, one that does not change magically on some special date predicted by a people not noted for any intellectual, spiritual or cosmic insight. Nope, the consequences of the result of our destruction themselves eventually bring about the correction - many humans will die from these horrors over the next decades and centuries: not a disaster, though - a sadly necessary natural correction.
As an astrologer, I believe that we should learn more about cycles than worry about predictions. Perhaps you're surprised that an astrologer would say that, but there is a lot more sense to astrology and how it works than most lay people know, more topics for future posts. Astrology is also an ancient study of time, a study that concludes that everything goes through cycles, be it the weather, events, beliefs and even individual human experience.
Mayan astrology has not survived (although it has been reinvented, not at all the same thing.) There is a culture whose notion of time cycles have endured for millenia, undestroyed, and that offers a view of cycles that provide a more useful and meaningful set of symbols to understand these cycles, and why the earth is such a sorry mess. The ancient astrology of the Vedas, the early (East) Indian culture, describes cycles as vast - from hundreds of thousands to billions of years in size, much closer to what nature and experience actually show. In their cultural worldview, we are now in a long age of 'iron' or darkness, an age predicted at about the time the Mayan calendar was predicting the previous end of the world 5000 years ago.
The characteristics of that age are all we see in our time: materialism, loss of our respect for humanity and nature, loss of our natural spirituality, destruction of species, the list goes on. But this is what is important: since it's a cycle, eventually it will shift and gradually start going in the other direction. No intervention necessary, no chosen people, no chosen culture.
No spiritual rescue is required, no subscription to a religion or even a belief in astrology. It is not relevant whether the number of years given for each cycle is right or wrong. It is the underlying universal wisdom we should see in these ancient teachings rather than the assertion that an individual culture is correct - the wisdom of huge cycles expects no individual culture to last billions of years; only humanity itself could.
So we are not required to subscribe to some lost culture's beliefs. In this worldview, all that is required is a personal commitment for the individual to live his or her life as respectfully as possible, and to strive toward one's own innrer enlightenment rather than to look to outer events or to proselytise. In this way, we can keep the tiny fire of mankind's natural spirituality burning, passing it on down the generations, through the inevitable destruction of much more of this planet and our species, until the day returns many years hence, not in our lifetimes, when we can again live in harmony with everything else.
And even then, the Galactic Centre will be as many billions of miles away in space and relevance as it has ever been.
This New Age business is gobsmacking. They have managed to transform a prophecy of the end of the world - a key principle of any religious organisation worth its salt - into the characteristic new age fluffy unicorn stuff of "transformation", delight, bliss, elevation of our miserable lives into a spiritual rescue mission that sends us into another dimension, by means of the usual hodge podge of misunderstood science, bastardised and misunderstood Astrology and Religion of the Self.
It's nothing more than the Catholic Rapture twisted into an almost unrecognisable mockery of itself, which is ironically true of much of the rubbish that the 'New Age movement' recycles: so much of it is a shallow relic of long-crumbled Judaeo-Christian spirituality with a tad of Hinduism and a healthy dash of anything Native American.
Anyway, this date is derived from the fact that the fascinating Mayan Calendar comes to the end of its great cycle on that date. It's a remarkable blend of partly understood but complex concepts of time, much like the same kind of things that most ancient cultures have, but of course claiming an altogether different measure of time as all the others do, as is generally the case. (Let alone the fact that the Mayans knew nothing of the Galactic Centre.)
What makes little sense is why the New Age pundits have seized onto this particularly obscure theory of time as the gospel? Especially since there is not much that these ancient American cultures have to offer that is particularly desirable, profound or applicable to the rest of humankind. Part of the reason is of course that little of their culture is known, having been so utterly destroyed by their contemporary enemies and even more so by the marauding Spaniards.
Ah, there's the rub: there is nothing so attractive as a vague and unsolveable mystery. When something is coded and lost in the mists of time it could be made to serve anyone's theories - Nostradamus' obscure scribblings are a great example of that. No better way to prove vague New Age ideas than with vague historical ones - there's a reason to punt some obscure culture's obscure prophecies.
And here's a more important rub: everyone seems to neglect the fact that the very same Mayan calendar predicted the 'previous' end of the world as 11 August 3114 B.C. Oops. Not only did that prediction patently fail, but so has every other end-of-the-world prediction failed, and there have been no shortage of those across various times and cultures.
Yet the Calendar-thumpers persist in their prophecy of doom transformed into another good old fashioned deus-ex-machina, their Rapture, the hoary old "listen to us and you will be saved!" And there's the other reason why end-of-world prophecies are so necessary to any burgeoning religion that wants to be worth the parchment its scriptures are printed on.
There's an aspect of human psychology here too: it seems that throughout time people need to believe that they are the last generation, the pinnacle of all that has gone before, the ones cast with the divine responsibility of saving the world from certain destruction. It is the psychology that underlies much of that religious thinking, as well as the need for individual and own-group purpose and meaning. And it also reveals the materialism that lies behind New Age 'spirituality' - there is no room for redemption in spirit or in time, it has to be in our own lifetime. Ah well, New Age spirituality is the spirituality of the Ego, as I have said elsewhere in this blog (see The Secret Behind the Secret.)
But let's face it: it really does seem that the world is in a sorrier state than ever before. There is little doubt now that we truly have brought our planet to a brink of some kind, with our destruction of natural resources and the environment adding up to actual evidence, for once, that an end is indeed nigh. Maybe this time, the prophecies are right ... ?
Well, what time and failed prophecies prove is that the earth - nature - is self-correcting, as all systems are. It is sadly likely that death and destruction do follow, that global warming, HIV and other diseases, you name it, are indeed symptoms of a world at a brink, but in reality what follows is a turn of a cycle, a natural cycle, one that does not change magically on some special date predicted by a people not noted for any intellectual, spiritual or cosmic insight. Nope, the consequences of the result of our destruction themselves eventually bring about the correction - many humans will die from these horrors over the next decades and centuries: not a disaster, though - a sadly necessary natural correction.
As an astrologer, I believe that we should learn more about cycles than worry about predictions. Perhaps you're surprised that an astrologer would say that, but there is a lot more sense to astrology and how it works than most lay people know, more topics for future posts. Astrology is also an ancient study of time, a study that concludes that everything goes through cycles, be it the weather, events, beliefs and even individual human experience.
Mayan astrology has not survived (although it has been reinvented, not at all the same thing.) There is a culture whose notion of time cycles have endured for millenia, undestroyed, and that offers a view of cycles that provide a more useful and meaningful set of symbols to understand these cycles, and why the earth is such a sorry mess. The ancient astrology of the Vedas, the early (East) Indian culture, describes cycles as vast - from hundreds of thousands to billions of years in size, much closer to what nature and experience actually show. In their cultural worldview, we are now in a long age of 'iron' or darkness, an age predicted at about the time the Mayan calendar was predicting the previous end of the world 5000 years ago.
The characteristics of that age are all we see in our time: materialism, loss of our respect for humanity and nature, loss of our natural spirituality, destruction of species, the list goes on. But this is what is important: since it's a cycle, eventually it will shift and gradually start going in the other direction. No intervention necessary, no chosen people, no chosen culture.
No spiritual rescue is required, no subscription to a religion or even a belief in astrology. It is not relevant whether the number of years given for each cycle is right or wrong. It is the underlying universal wisdom we should see in these ancient teachings rather than the assertion that an individual culture is correct - the wisdom of huge cycles expects no individual culture to last billions of years; only humanity itself could.
So we are not required to subscribe to some lost culture's beliefs. In this worldview, all that is required is a personal commitment for the individual to live his or her life as respectfully as possible, and to strive toward one's own innrer enlightenment rather than to look to outer events or to proselytise. In this way, we can keep the tiny fire of mankind's natural spirituality burning, passing it on down the generations, through the inevitable destruction of much more of this planet and our species, until the day returns many years hence, not in our lifetimes, when we can again live in harmony with everything else.
And even then, the Galactic Centre will be as many billions of miles away in space and relevance as it has ever been.
The Secret Behind the Secret
04/10/07 18:18
You must have caught the hype by now - the book/DVD called 'The Secret' that is supposedly changing everyone's life. It's all about 'The Law of Attraction', the universal Spiritual Law that says that what you 'put out' is what you attract back to you.
There is nothing new about this 'secret', of course. New Age evangelists have been singing this one since the before the New Age was new (is it? See a forthcoming post on the secret behind the New Age). It boils down to the claim that you attract to yourself the manifestation of what you think and believe about yourself and your own life.
At first glance, this is an attractive philosophy, nobly holding ourselves entirely responsible for our own lives and all thats in them. Responsibility is a good thing, we think, this makes sense, and we start buying into the idea. But quickly it develops into the idea that if anything bad ever happens to you, you caused it by your beliefs and thoughts about yourself. This is an attractive idea because it implies that nothing bad need ever happen to you if you think positively. It gets even more attractive when it quickly becomes the even more attractive idea that you can have anything you want, just by thinking and believing it so.
Wow! Having already bought the idea, this then seems to be a deep and profound truth. And so you spread the word and the authors behind the secret make another few hundred bucks (and no doubt end up having everything they want.)
The sickening thing about this idea is that its chief proselytist is Oprah Winfrey,a woman with a bank balance big enough to not only have whatever she wants, but whatever all of the rest of us want too! She can smugly sit there and proclaim You Can Have It All from atop a heap of gold while millions around her, in her own country, ours and everyone else's, die in poverty, disease, lack of sanitation and housing, education and all the rest of the basic human necessities.
Ah, but of course, that's their fault. They just think wrongly. Those starving masses don't really want food, they probably believe they don't deserve it. And would Ms Winfrey have us believe that the millions of desperate, hopeful children she never accepted into her elite academy in South Africa actually didn't really believe they deserved it? Yeah, right, just like the victims of Hurricane Katrina that Oprah shed all those tears about. Why worry, why cry, why help them? Didn't they attract that hurricane themselves?
There's an even darker side to this - I'm gonna say it, wicked idea the Secretists are purveying. A woman I know who (even before the 'publishing phenomenon') made her living teaching that you cause your own illnesses by your beliefs ("yes you do!" chant the Secretists) suddenly was diagnosed with an aggressive breast cancer. Because of her beliefs, she blamed herself, sunk into a deep depression (much more dangerous than 'beliefs') and tragically failed to fight the illness because she believed she must have caused it. She agonised because she couldn't imagine how and why - she had been so positive about everything, she was the passionate evangelist of thinking positive! The wickedness is that (apart from the clear fact that The Secret Can Kill You) the Secretists would have her believe that she unconsciously had negative beliefs that caused it.
Yes, the Secret always works because if it doesn't, it was merely that your unconscious belief was the opposite. How clever and manipulative is that? The Secret can never be disproved because the 99% of the time it plain doesn't work is because you had wrong beliefs you are not aware of and actually can't control. (Er, never mind the apparent contradiction that no-one seems to have noticed there...) So if it doesn't work, that's also your fault, not the fault of this supposed 'Law'.
Despite the authors' claims that this is an ancient knowledge they are revealing to us, it isn't - they are manipulating some traditional or ancient ideas and fitting them into the modern materialist mentality that measures success and happiness by having what you want. Ideas like 'as you sow, so shall you reap' (which has altogether different implications than 'you can have it all') and even the law of karma, which in many ways is the opposite of the Secret but to the naive looks just the same ... also a topic of a future post.
There are no spiritual or scientific worldviews that rest entirely on one law - the notion is absurd. These Secretists would have us believe that millenia of spiritual and scientific thinkers somehow managed to miss this point. That lifetimes dedicated to trying to penetrate the mystery of Life, the Universe and Everything, which absorbed the greatest minds that have ever lived on this planet, were wasted because they didn't realise there's only one Law of the universe. How arrogant could they be? They've essentially negated all of human thinking in all cultures ... the mind boggles!
So why do people buy into it? For the same reason that they believe the advertising that says FREE! and YOU HAVE ALREADY WON $40,000! We want to believe there's a magic bullet that will remove the difficulties of life. We want to believe we have control. We want to believe that we can have whatever we want without working for it. We don't want to believe we're subject to the laws of nature or of God (take your pick, but neither are compatible with the Secret, another fact the materialistic Secretists seem to have missed.)
But most of all, our world has become driven by materialism. You don't need me to tell you that, it's all about buy buy buy and want want want! And some clever people got together and created a religion based on You Can Have What You Want - the perfect religion for the New Age, the age of materialism and the belief that humans are the most powerful thing in the universe. Of course people would buy into that!
And right now, with millions of books and DVDs flooding the world, and millions in the bank, the authors of The Secret have exactly what they want: your hard-earned cash.
There is nothing new about this 'secret', of course. New Age evangelists have been singing this one since the before the New Age was new (is it? See a forthcoming post on the secret behind the New Age). It boils down to the claim that you attract to yourself the manifestation of what you think and believe about yourself and your own life.
At first glance, this is an attractive philosophy, nobly holding ourselves entirely responsible for our own lives and all thats in them. Responsibility is a good thing, we think, this makes sense, and we start buying into the idea. But quickly it develops into the idea that if anything bad ever happens to you, you caused it by your beliefs and thoughts about yourself. This is an attractive idea because it implies that nothing bad need ever happen to you if you think positively. It gets even more attractive when it quickly becomes the even more attractive idea that you can have anything you want, just by thinking and believing it so.
Wow! Having already bought the idea, this then seems to be a deep and profound truth. And so you spread the word and the authors behind the secret make another few hundred bucks (and no doubt end up having everything they want.)
The sickening thing about this idea is that its chief proselytist is Oprah Winfrey,a woman with a bank balance big enough to not only have whatever she wants, but whatever all of the rest of us want too! She can smugly sit there and proclaim You Can Have It All from atop a heap of gold while millions around her, in her own country, ours and everyone else's, die in poverty, disease, lack of sanitation and housing, education and all the rest of the basic human necessities.
Ah, but of course, that's their fault. They just think wrongly. Those starving masses don't really want food, they probably believe they don't deserve it. And would Ms Winfrey have us believe that the millions of desperate, hopeful children she never accepted into her elite academy in South Africa actually didn't really believe they deserved it? Yeah, right, just like the victims of Hurricane Katrina that Oprah shed all those tears about. Why worry, why cry, why help them? Didn't they attract that hurricane themselves?
There's an even darker side to this - I'm gonna say it, wicked idea the Secretists are purveying. A woman I know who (even before the 'publishing phenomenon') made her living teaching that you cause your own illnesses by your beliefs ("yes you do!" chant the Secretists) suddenly was diagnosed with an aggressive breast cancer. Because of her beliefs, she blamed herself, sunk into a deep depression (much more dangerous than 'beliefs') and tragically failed to fight the illness because she believed she must have caused it. She agonised because she couldn't imagine how and why - she had been so positive about everything, she was the passionate evangelist of thinking positive! The wickedness is that (apart from the clear fact that The Secret Can Kill You) the Secretists would have her believe that she unconsciously had negative beliefs that caused it.
Yes, the Secret always works because if it doesn't, it was merely that your unconscious belief was the opposite. How clever and manipulative is that? The Secret can never be disproved because the 99% of the time it plain doesn't work is because you had wrong beliefs you are not aware of and actually can't control. (Er, never mind the apparent contradiction that no-one seems to have noticed there...) So if it doesn't work, that's also your fault, not the fault of this supposed 'Law'.
Despite the authors' claims that this is an ancient knowledge they are revealing to us, it isn't - they are manipulating some traditional or ancient ideas and fitting them into the modern materialist mentality that measures success and happiness by having what you want. Ideas like 'as you sow, so shall you reap' (which has altogether different implications than 'you can have it all') and even the law of karma, which in many ways is the opposite of the Secret but to the naive looks just the same ... also a topic of a future post.
There are no spiritual or scientific worldviews that rest entirely on one law - the notion is absurd. These Secretists would have us believe that millenia of spiritual and scientific thinkers somehow managed to miss this point. That lifetimes dedicated to trying to penetrate the mystery of Life, the Universe and Everything, which absorbed the greatest minds that have ever lived on this planet, were wasted because they didn't realise there's only one Law of the universe. How arrogant could they be? They've essentially negated all of human thinking in all cultures ... the mind boggles!
So why do people buy into it? For the same reason that they believe the advertising that says FREE! and YOU HAVE ALREADY WON $40,000! We want to believe there's a magic bullet that will remove the difficulties of life. We want to believe we have control. We want to believe that we can have whatever we want without working for it. We don't want to believe we're subject to the laws of nature or of God (take your pick, but neither are compatible with the Secret, another fact the materialistic Secretists seem to have missed.)
But most of all, our world has become driven by materialism. You don't need me to tell you that, it's all about buy buy buy and want want want! And some clever people got together and created a religion based on You Can Have What You Want - the perfect religion for the New Age, the age of materialism and the belief that humans are the most powerful thing in the universe. Of course people would buy into that!
And right now, with millions of books and DVDs flooding the world, and millions in the bank, the authors of The Secret have exactly what they want: your hard-earned cash.