The Dawn
EXHALING THE OLD, INHALING THE NEW
The Dawn
In a November 2, 2008, article in the Los Angeles Times, staff writer Elaine Woo reported on the death of Marilyn Ferguson, the author of the 1980 best seller The Aquarian Conspiracy. Ferguson had died on October 19 of that year, at the age of seventy. She was described as “a galvanizing influence on participants in scores of alternative groups that coalesced as the New Age movement.”1
From the extreme focus on rationalism came a balancing response of empiricism. From the displacement of personal value in empiricism came the tidal wave of existentialism that championed individual will, passion, and choice. From the nihilism that came hand in hand with existentialism, postmodernism was waiting to be born. Existentialism had harnessed the arts and wanted to tell philosophy in a story. But stories required an author, and the subjects of the stories reacted against the author and claimed their right to reinterpret the story as it seemed right to them. The likes of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and others framed the world of postmodernism and deconstruction. While these terms merit a rigorous philosophical analysis, the resulting authority was clearly the individual, and the reader claimed authority over the author.
The tale would go something like this:
In the beginning, God.
God spoke. But that was a long time ago.
We wanted certainty—now.
For this, only Reason and Rationalism would do.
But that was not enough. We wanted to “test.”
So we went into the senses and found the empirical.
But that’s not what we meant by testing. We really meant “feeling.”
So we found a way to generate feeling into the picture.
Truth was framed into a scene.
But the scene was left open to interpretation. Scenes are not absolute.
So the story was told as an art form.
But the reader still didn’t like it, because he was not the author.
So he read the story while he sat in a reconstructed and deconstructed cubicle to make of the story whatever he wished.
But what does one do with the long reach of the empirical?
The best way was to find a blend between the empirical and the satirical and end up with God again.
The only difference was that God could not be the storyteller.
We still needed God.
So we became God.
That’s precisely what the counterculture wanted. Postmodernism engendered a philosophical stance devoid of truth, meaning, and certainty. In literature, texts were deconstructed to fit the mind-set of the reader, not the writer. Foucault’s own foray into a sensually driven lifestyle that ultimately took his life was based on his aphorism that there were no boundaries. There were no absolutes.
While on the one hand those in the counterculture movement openly debunked American individualism, on the other hand, they brought in its place the individualism of a subculture with the underlying theme that it was all “in you and me.” Ferguson was one of the lead voices coalescing this collection of individuals, and she harnessed the popular theme of human potential. Her monthly newsletter, Brain/Mind Bulletin, won a great readership and became the catalyst for new ideas in spirituality that were a mix of science, albeit an inexact one, with ancient texts of spiritual voices, which in turn, would engender “new discoveries in neuroscience and psychology.” The writer of her obituary goes on to state: “That work led her to discern that a massive ‘cultural realignment’ was occurring, a conspiracy in the root sense of disparate forces all breathing together to produce personal and social change.”2
The Aquarian Conspiracy was the first comprehensive analysis to be written of the seemingly disparate efforts that fed the movement—from the scientific world, experiments with biofeedback, altered states of consciousness, and alternative birthing centers; from the political world, experiments in “creative” government; and from the religious world, a Christian evangelist who seemed to be promoting forms of meditation more familiar to the East—all coming together to break from traditional mainstream Western practices and beliefs.
Ferguson’s message was optimistic: “After a dark, violent age, the Piscean, we are entering a millennium of love and light—in the words of the popular song ‘The Age of Aquarius,’ the time of ‘the mind’s true liberation.’ ”3 By her definition, Aquarians were people who sought to “leave the prison of our conditioning, to love, to turn homeward. To conspire with each other and for each other.”4 Numerous publications exist today that were birthed and made popular by this category of thinking.
The Los Angeles Times also recorded some who disagreed with her positions, finding her views simplistic. In the journal Science Books & Films, R. C. Bealer wrote that Ferguson offered the “hyperbole of the ‘positive’ thinking huckster.”5 Bealer’s questioning of Ferguson was the same as Dawkins’s puzzlement by Chopra’s use of quantum as a metaphor for his brand of spirituality. By embracing alternative religions, Ferguson was accused of undermining Christianity. As her ideas gained followers and moved more toward the center of society, she was considered a trailblazer, and her work became the classic explanation of the New Age standard ideals and goals.
Has “spirituality” become such a vacuous term that like Humpty Dumpty one can assemble it to mean whatever one chooses to make it mean? But let me not move too far ahead of the argument here. Let me take a step back and then several steps forward to see what all this spirituality is about anyway. While its path may have been along political-cultural-religious lines, the destination to which the spiritual masters of today want us to head is clearly defined, rising above politics, religion, and culture. So let us give it the best representation and see where it leads to and where it leads from.