Pages

Sunday, April 1, 2012

For your reading pleasure...

Some say the "New Age," which was really launched by the 60s counterculture revolution, is way past its prime. Regardless, it seems that "yesterday's science fiction is today's science fact," and also that "yesterday's hallucination is today's quantum physics." The modern world has not assimilated what Einstein had to say -- never mind Niels Bohr, Edwin Schroedinger, Stephen Hawking or now, a new age voice like Deepak Chopra! Figures like Katie Byron, Marianne Williamson, Wayne Dyer, Eckhart Tolle and others, on whose shoulders the visible part of self-realization movement rests, at least in the United States, may be on a path of convergence with science. Their beliefs certainly do not oppose it.

A couple of decades ago, occultists were derided for mentioning out-of-body experiences; now scientists are producing those in a laboratory in Lausanne, Switzerland. Vortices have claimed a new legitimacy. Descartes' notion that the universe is composed of vortex fields was consigned to the category of quaint philosophical trivia; now his "relative space" is again more modern than Newton's version, and some physicists are exploring the notion that vortex motion is fundamental to matter and energy, down to the quantum level (example, work of Wiktor Lapcik). Scientists like Pete A. Sanders Jr. (author of Scientific Vortex Information, Free Soul Publishing, Sedona AZ), are helping dismiss the pseudoscientific theories of vortexes (it's "magnetism") while directing attention to the phenomenon as instrumental in the development of human consciousness of other dimensions of energy.

Thus, people who use crystals, interpret Tarot, cast the I Ching, channel the goddess, read a Fritjof Capra, could still be considered New Agers -- but it is the "old" New Age. Increasingly the vortex universe is much broader, both more involved in science and and in a view of consciousness which is not recognizable from that of 50 years ago. People like José Argüelles, whose work has certainly not been assimilated, may be on the line of transition from the old to the new New Age. The same people who are investigating vortexes, may be reading Ray Kurzweil (futurist, technologist), Mohammed Yunus (Nobel laureate, founder of micro-banking), Arundhati Roy (social commentary), Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (expert on rituals of death and dying), Abdul Aziz Said (author, professor, holds Chair of Islamic Peace at American University), or Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (Orthodox Rabbi, founder of the Jewish Renewal movement). Those aren't New Age voices at all; maybe they could be called "Third Culture" voices -- again, part of the point of convergence between scientific views with those of the "softer" arts and sciences.