Leveling (Actually, Tilting) the Playing Field

See the New Age Spirituality for what it is; a systemic methodology of appealing to a cultural mind-set that despises certain things and that follows a reductionistic approach that actually distorts any claimant to truth that differs from those the New Spirituality endorses in order to make them all say the same thing. This is the goal of the New Spirituality. Bring everything to the same level. There is a clear agenda. In their deep prejudice against Christianity, advocates of the New Spirituality malign the Christ of history in order to remake him into an image that is consistent with their ideas.

In his one-volume brief synopsis of spiritual writers, 50 Spiritual Classics, English author Tom Butler-Bowdon reveals this prejudice even more clearly. From covering all kinds of extreme positions on spirituality, including that of Ram Dass, and giving them all a pass even in their dangerous recommendations, he nevertheless finds enough in his pen to cast in negative light any Christian writer who holds to salvation through Christ.

Some readers may remember that Ram Dass is actually Dr. Richard Alpert, former professor of psychology at Harvard. In the 1960s he became a drinking buddy of Timothy Leary and discovered getting high on the black mushrooms in Mexico. Alpert and Leary, along with Aldous Huxley, acquired a synthetic form of this “magic” mushroom, psilocybin, which they said produced within them visions and helped them experience the “I” behind the facade of knowledge, the “I” of timeless awareness. This was just what Alpert had been looking for. Leaving his position at Harvard, he backpacked through India and met up with another American, a guru named Bhagwan Dass. Bhagwan Dass (we are never given his American name) introduced Richard Alpert to the teaching of “the Now” in his pre-Tolle version, and Richard Alpert was “delivered” from his “sheer rationality based thinking” into a new consciousness and became Ram Dass. Ram Dass, whose name means “servant of Ram,” the Hindu deity, came under the tutelage of Bhagwan Dass, whose name means “servant of God.” He was moved, in his words, “beyond personality to consciousness” and “beyond rationality.” Ram Dass went on to write a book titled Be Here Now: A Cookbook for a Sacred Life, in which he talks of the means of “awakening, from meditation to fasting to drugs.”¹¹

Many readers may not be aware that a vast majority of the men in India’s holy city of Varanasi are knocked out on drugs during Shivratri, a euphoric celebration of the third member of the Hindu Trimurti, Shiva the Destroyer. The night is spent in a drug-indulging stupor, no doubt Ram Dass’s kind of celebration. I mention this because Butler-Bowden goes on to say that Ram Dass’s book is “one of the outstanding works of spiritual transformation” that “reminds us of Augustine.”¹² It is really too bad that Augustine is not here to request that his name be removed from this list.

Regarding Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Life, Butler-Bowden’s critique is that some readers will be offended by the Christian fundamentalist posture of the book. He finds Warren’s statement that one is saved only through faith in Christ “a little threatening” and takes issue with Warren for not giving credence to other faiths or traditions. “Religious fervor is one thing,” he says, “but denying the truth of other beliefs is what makes The Purpose Driven Life seem, in places, quite narrow.” He also takes great offense at Warren’s support of missions, or of taking the message of Christ to other people in other areas of the world.¹³

Butler-Bowdon’s discussion of the meaning and application of C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters is very shallow, and he challenges the reader to lift it beyond its narrow confines into their own. One gets accustomed to seeing these comments reserved for Christian thinkers/writers and to laments that the Christ of history and experience is lost in their writings, and to the most pejorative words being reserved for those who follow Christ.

Here is the summary of it all: If you take all the religions of the world and all the claimants to divine or prophetic status and make them all equal (but the theistic ones less equal), then you have at work a false induction, which takes you through the seductive use of language and reduces spirituality to a pragmatic mysticism until it deduces that, after all, there is only One. And that One is you. The playing field is not level. It is tilted against any monotheistic faith and is pantheistic in its determined starting and ending points. Writers such as Butler-Bowdon are really not presenters of classics… they are ideologically driven and cannot resist reserving their sharpest barbs for Christianity.

But notice the genius. By wresting a cultural tension to their advantage, be it the environment or sexuality or gender conflict or political correctness, they engender a negative attitude toward anything that smacks of the “old authorities” (unless they are pantheistic) or of absolutes, and find then a heart ready to rebel into autonomy. The New Spirituality encourages a unified theory of God, which is actually a nondefined entity, a made-to-measure religion for each and every person. But don’t be fooled by this “Let’s get together” spiritual talk. The reason there are so many movements and voices and organizations and treatment centers and retreat places is that they do not believe their own communal theory of spirituality. It is truly a case of each one with his or her personal brand of spirituality, grabbing the newest ancient source to appear more esoteric than the next. What is lost, in the end, is any distinction between God, humanity, and the animal world. That is why all these definitions appeal to intuition gained through introspection. The New Spirituality will have its shelf life, and it, too, will someday suffer the same fate as Christianity when it became commercialized.

The apostle Paul summarized this ploy two thousand years ago in his letter to the Romans when he said:

Since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles. (1:20–23 NIV)

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