Please Don’t Call Me New Age
I see a reader on amazon.co.uk has dubbed the contemporary story in A Dance in Time (Izzy’s story) to be “New Age”.
No, no, no.
I am not New Age. I never took on New Age beliefs for precisely the same reason that I dropped my
(Roman Catholic) religion in my teens. Because neither literal religion nor New Age thinking stand up to rational analysis.
This doesn’t mean I deny that human beings can have mind and consciousness experiences that are beyond the rational - in the realm that is usually referred to as soul or spirit. It is both my experience, and my evidence-based opinion, that we do.
According to the great transpersonal philospher, Ken Wilber, when it comes to matters spiritual, there are not, as is so often suggested, two camps - the rational versus the nonrational, the non-believers versus the believers - but three.
They are:
- the pre-rational (or prepersonal) –
- the rational (or personal)
- the trans-rational (or transpersonal).
This is not just a list but a hierarchy, with the higher levels both transcending and including the lower levels.
Researchers like Wilber - and the psychiatrist and meditation teacher, Jack Engler, the Harvard Psychology Professor, Daniel Brown, and Cambridge physicist Jeremy Hayward and many others - are working to separate genuine, universal, laboratory-tested aspects of human spirituality from idiosyncratic, magical, self-serving or narcissistic beliefs.
This is not always easy but evidence that human beings have a spectrum of consciousness - from prerational, through rational, to transrational states - continues to mount — and is now, in my opinion, incontrovertible.
What this research confirms is that the transrational mind has universal qualities. These have been uniformly depicted across cultures and time periods by writers, saints and sages.
“Living bodies transcend but include minerals,” writes Wilber in his great book, Integral Psychology. ”Minds transcend but include vital bodies, luminous souls transcend but include conceptual minds, and radiant spirit transcends and includes absolutely everything. Spirit is thus both the very highest wave (purely transcendental) and the ever-present ground of all.”
This is the understanding of self-and-soul explored in A Dance in Time - and in this blog. It has nothing to do with a New Age. Indeed, it is the very opposite of new. It is perennial.
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Next up: The seven perennial and universal truths.
Hi Orna,
Haven’t read the Amazon review, but I often think people who have more traditional beliefs tend to categorise everything else (other than outright atheism perhaps) as New Age. Anyway, I loved that aspect to A Dance in Time, but given your description above of your own “beliefs” I guess you’re preaching to the converted with me : )
As I’m here - I wondered have you come across Authonomy at Harper Collins? I signed up recently and would be interested to know if you know about it and have any views given your experience as mentor and author.
Best.
That’s a new way of organizing world views. Pre-rational, rational and trans-rational? I can begin to guess what they may mean….
I do believe that there are things that science cannot prove yet that are true. One time I heard that every 500 years or so, we tend to go through a scientific revolution where all the views up to that point get tossed out the window. Then there are some beliefs that have been around for thousands of years….
ari
Hi Siobhan,
Authonomy is, as you say the brainchild of Harper Collins, UK. Under the scheme, writers can upload anywhere from 10,000 words of their book to a complete manuscript online for visitors to read and rate. Authonomy uses the number of visitor recommendations to rank the submissions and then 10,000 words of the top five books are reviewed by an editorial board and HC offers the possibility that this may be a route to a book deal.
I’m not convinced that the scheme is a good thing for writers. The main difficulty, I think, is that few real readers are interested in wading through a slush pile of unmediated writing. The readers at Authonomy and other such sites tend to be other writers, giving each other puffs and praise in the hope of getting the same back. In other words, it is good networking, as much as (or more than?) good writing that would take you to the top of the list.
It won’t do any harm, perhaps, to post your work but I wouldn’t let it replace the search for a good agent or publisher in the old fashioned way.
You will find a good blog and discussion at: http://accrispin.blogspot.com/2008/09/victoria-strauss-authonomy-slushkiller.html
Hi Ari,
Welcome to the site. Those perennial beliefs, that are found cross culturally, in different centuries, and different parts of the globe, are key, I think. Whether in India, Mexico, China, Japan, Egypt, Ireland or elsewhere, whether today, in the fifth century or six thousand years ago, and whether they are unmediated or wrapped in a (religious) packaging, the similarities are striking.
Of course, pre-rational beliefs are also found in all cultures too. The point is to distinguish the difference.