New Age Spirituality

[The following is by Jennie Marlow http://www.blog.overcomingfearofuncertainty.com/. I loved it so much that I wanted to include it here. I hope you find it interesting and useful.]

New Age spirituality began in the 19th century with metaphysical movements like Spiritualism and New Thought. In the 1960s and 1970s, many counter-culture groups gathered themselves under the umbrella of the term. Some ideas that characterize New Age thought include reincarnation, an afterlife devoted to the soul’s journey of evolution in consciousness, and practices such as meditation, spiritual growth and energetic healing. Central to the philosophies of the movement are a higher purpose for a human’s life and the need for the individual to follow his or her own spiritual path. The New Age has sparked many popular life-style movements such as organic food, sustainable living, alternative medicine and an interest in Eastern practices such as yoga, tai chi and qi gong.


The “post-New-Age” is a term coined by Spotted Eagle to describe a shift away from the New Age idea that people can accumulate vast amounts of wealth and possessions through positive thinking and affirmations. Spotted Eagle disputes the validity of the core of these prosperity consciousness notions: the Ask-Believe-Receive model for “manifestation” and the “Law of Attraction,” an idea first proposed by 19th century lawyer and occultist, William Walker Atkinson, in a book entitled, Thought Vibration or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World, published in 1906.


Spotted Eagle’s post-New-Age model focuses, not on wealth creation, but how we want our lives to feel. His model emphasizes essence, the feeling experience we desire from our possessions, relationships, careers and everything else in our lives. He says that fear of uncertainty is the root cause of our suffering. By avoiding or medicating our emotional pain, we lose sight of essence and reinforce behavior and thought patterns that cause us to suffer the effects of what he calls the “anxious mind,’ the part of our humanness that craves the illusion of certainty and security. In his post-New-Age model, perception, behavior and choices are demonstrated to create the vast majority of the outcomes of our lives. He posits that if we root out the out-of-power distortions in our perception, and resist the temptation to medicate or act out existential fear, then our behavior and choices will be authentic, guided by our desire to experience essence qualities like joy, creativity, ease, freedom, fun, unconditional love, satisfaction, contribution, and so forth. In Spotted Eagle’s model, positive thinking, when fantasy-based and used as a cover-up for fear, can be just as destructive as negative thinking. In the post-New-Age model, neutral, undistorted thinking results from exercising dominion over the anxious mind through such practices as observing our “story,” waiting out our emotional wave and seeking emotional neutrality before taking action. Through undistorted thinking, our emotional pain will be allowed to move to its natural conclusion of acceptance and balance.


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http://steeltoedmoccasin.com/ http://www.jenniemarlow.com/