High Noon
High Noon
Elizabeth Lesser is the co-founder and senior adviser of the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. Prior to taking that responsibility, she was a midwife and childbirth educator. It is not without design that the front and back cover endorsements of her book The New American Spirituality are from medical doctors. The back cover suggests that her book will take us through four landscapes of our spiritual journey: the mind (the root of stress and anxiety); the heart (the root of grief and pain); the body (the root of the fear of aging and of death); and the soul (from which come meaning and mystery).
To help us in our understanding of that spiritual landscape, new definitions are forthcoming in the book. It is interesting that she doesn’t even begin to define spirituality until page 30 in her book, in a chapter titled, “What Is Spirituality?” After several paragraphs of telling us what spirituality is not—not religion, sentimentality, cynicism, or narcissism—a definition is finally broached. She certainly doesn’t define it as synonymous with New Age Spirituality. In her terms, not all spiritualities are created equal. The spirituality she is speaking of is an attitude of fearlessness toward life, of adventure; a search for the truth about existence. It is, as Buddhism describes, “a tranquil abiding.”
Quoting from Buddhist texts, Hindu texts, Sufi texts, and so on, Lesser offers a cornucopia of spiritual thought until you have to wonder whether she is engaged in pursuing truth or in a mix of ideals, being careful not to broach what else each of these sages has said that would negate what the others have said. Then comes the prescriptive moment in the book. This is an extensive quote, but it must be given because it is vintage New Spirituality:
Sit quietly right where you are, and close your eyes. Feel yourself breathing. Follow the breath on its journey into and out of your body. Sit feeling yourself breathe for a few minutes. Place your hand over your heart and feel the warmth of your hand connect with the steady beat of your heart. Then put your hand or fingertips lightly on the spot in the center of your rib cage, to the right of your physical heart. It is the spot you can feel when you are startled and draw your breath sharply inward. Move your hand gently, and breathe slowly and softly into that spot until you are focusing intently on what many traditions call the spiritual heart or the heart center.
Imagine that the spot you are touching is the top of a deep, deep well. Follow your breath on a journey into the spacious interior of your own heart. Breathe slowly in and out. Let yourself be pulled ever more deeply into the well of your heart. As you meet thoughts and emotions on the journey, do not push them away. They are part of you, but not all of you. Greet what you find and move on, ever deeper into the well of your spiritual heart…
Welcome whatever you discover, without judgment, as part of yourself, but not all of yourself. Sit in this state, letting yourself be pulled by your longing into the well of your heart, observing your breath, for as long as you feel comfortable and then slowly remove your hand, return to normal breathing, and open your eyes.6
The metaphysical roots and the means of discovery of the not-so-new New Spirituality are acknowledged: The Westernized Eastern spirituality that Elizabeth Lesser writes about has all been tried and done before. But she is very clear about how important it is to even know what to call it. Referencing her own book, she says that she shies away from the label of “new American Spirituality” because it is often confused with “New Age” which, she says, implies such things as crystals and UFOs and elevator music.7
This problem of what to call the New Spirituality is resolved in the spring 2000 issue of Spirituality and Health magazine:
In our times [it] seems best described as “21st-Century Spirituality.”… It contains the nature-centered traditions of the original peoples of the Americas. It is part science, which has underscored, for most of the 20th century, our unspoken collective philosophy. It respects both a mistrust of heavy-handed authority, and the willing surrender to a greater power. It draws from the religious teachings of the past: the biblical traditions, the spiritual roots of Africa, the meditative schools of Asia, and other diverse mythic and religious worldviews. And it draws from our own times, from the wisdom of psychology, democracy, and feminism.8
Why such a sweeping epistemology that seems to include everything would feel the need to distance itself from crystals, UFOs, and elevator music is intriguing. We shall let that be. Lesser’s own spiritual journey is sad while, in her words, triumphant. But if you get past the story line, you can see that the very things she resists constantly surface. I shall get to more of this later. But she is representative of the ideas and so I take her at her word.
In the end, she sums up the difference between the “Old Spirituality” and the “New Spirituality” according to her understanding of ideas of authority, the path to God, spirituality, truth and the sacred in each:
With the safety net she has provided for determining truth, who can ever fall? Only those who believe in the exclusive nature of truth. So there is exclusivity implicit, cleverly disguised as accommodation.
As a result of this excursion into an embrace of everything except metaphysics (and crystals, UFOs, and elevator music), walk into a health food store that promotes this philosophy and look at what is advertised by the business cards of persons with the following specialties that are on display and for the taking:
Mystery School Instructor, Clairvoyant
Archetypes, Cartomancier, Astrologer
Numerologist, Medium, Healer
Shaman, Angel Therapy Practitioner, Empath
Clairvoyant, Channel, Kabbalist, Hypnotherapist
Medical Intuitive, Tarot, Reiki Master
I remember walking on the streets of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, some time ago, and seeing a man sitting on the side of the road with a parrot in a cage. Beside him were about twenty or thirty little books no bigger than the size of a child’s hand, laid out on the sidewalk side by side. I stood nearby and watched. A woman came and sat in front of him, with her sari draped over her head so that she wouldn’t be recognized. After he spoke to her for a few minutes, he opened the birdcage, took the bird on his hand, and placed it in front of the little books. The parrot waited a few moments and then picked up one of the books and gave it to the fortune-teller. The man opened the book and began to read to her. She kept nodding, clearly happy with the book selected. She reached into a side pouch draped over her waist, paid him for his services, and walked away. The man sat there, continuing to call to people as they walked by, until the next customer was landed. He even looked in my direction, paid me a compliment, and invited me to be his next client. He should have known, being a fortune-teller, that I would turn down his kind offer.
The evangelist from the Old Spirituality pleaded with his audiences to “invite Jesus into your heart”; the apostles of the New Spirituality tell you to invite yourself into your heart, to feel your own breath. We might well conclude that Narcissus may have been on to something. But if inviting yourself into your own heart doesn’t help, there is a host of “Mystery Instructors” who will find the right formula for you. The Oracle at Delphi has come to life again.
Is life a tale told by an idiot or are we being idiotized? Is there truth in religion or is religion a free-fall zone where each one designs his or her own parachute to feel most comfortable? Has man really “come of age” and are the skeptics right? Is it time to turn the lights out at temples, mosques, and churches? If there is truth in these matters, we had better find it before the world is sent into a dream world turned nightmare.
But let me come back to the core of my concern. Anyone who promises utopia through mass communication and mass dissemination simply has run afoul of the facts. Several years ago, Ted Turner, the media mogul, made a statement that now seems almost laughable, except that it is sad. He presented his own “Ten Voluntary Initiatives,” although he did add the caveat that people of this age shouldn’t be told to do anything. They are suggestions, all of which have to do with the environment, and the tenth is to support the United Nations and its efforts to collectively improve the conditions of the planet. “One way to get this going, believe it or not, is TV. I believe mass communication has helped make us all closer together than we have ever been.”9 I wonder if Mr. Turner still believes that.
I remain firmly convinced that changes do not take place overnight. It is the old story of placing a frog in a kettle of cold water and gradually bringing it to a boil, so that it doesn’t know when to jump out as the water temperature rises to a boiling death.
Yes, I am a Christian. I am persuaded that the whole teaching of Jesus stands unique in all of the world’s religions. I am persuaded that his analysis of the human condition is the most real and empirically verifiable. I am also certain that if we fail to come to terms with what he said and taught, we will put all of humanity at risk. You must make up your own mind. But after four decades of traveling around the world and listening to some of the leading exponents of the human situation, disappointments, and potential, what I am writing now I write with the deepest conviction that whether it is heeded or not, it has to be said.
I am a lover of the world’s cultures. I see beauty and drawbacks in all of them. No one culture has all the right ways of doing things. Having been raised in the East and having lived in the West for the past forty years, I have lived and learned much from both. In my veins flows Indian blood. In my language, I am comfortable in both Hindi and English. I must confess that in my culinary delights I am prejudiced toward Indian cuisine, which stands uniquely exotic above all others. (You could question that, but when more than a billion people stand with me in that opinion, at worst it would come in a close second if numerical factors were weighed.)
There is a strange twist in this fascination in the West with the East and with Eastern spirituality. When a westerner is attracted to Eastern spirituality, the East claims credit for having had the answers all along. But should an easterner be attracted to Christianity, it is seen in the East as a betrayal of one’s culture. Ask any Christian from India and you will find that to be true.