A BACKWARD GLANCE AT THE NEW AGE

Saw a picture of a chalkboard sign a little bit ago on facebook that said, "When life gives you lemons, ask for tequila and salt." Had to save it. I've seen a mess of kinda humorous sayings about lemons, like make lemonade, according to authors of laugh-all-the-way-to-the-bank books toward becoming a better person. This is head out of the clouds, feet on the ground. I don't mean to throw off on that period, the Seventies, Eighties, into the Nineties, now pop culture history, it helped a lot of people, self included. I say it's gone, but only in that it is no longer new. Even Sparta has yoga classes now. Sparta has coffee shops where political correctness is the rule. It seems like self-awareness opened up in that time of a popular interest in such things as astrology, the I Ching, even reading. The time saw emergence of some everyday life applications of knowledge from a century of focusing the scientific method on the mind. Lamas were writing books revealing theretofore hidden Tibetan wisdom. Joseph Campbell, reserved reading for graduate students, became popular reading as the grand old man of the wisdom of our origins. The time of Women Who Run With The Wolves. Noam Chomsky now appears to be Campbell's replacement as wise old man of our culture teaching us about plutocracy. Much that was learned then was incorporated into the lives of so many people, so individually, impossible to know how many, I believe many of our lives improved as a result of what we learned from reading, workshops, New Dimensions weekly radio interview show. Largely middle-class people tapped into the wave, then Oprah introduced self-help, self-awareness, to working class women. the mothers of the next generation. 

Though this period of time seems far away now, I did much inner work in that time, all of it on my own, reading what drew my attention. I didn't go for the unicorns and rainbows or the believe your way to wealth formulas, like Shakti Gawain's meditate your way to wealth plans or Marsha Sinetar's do what you love the money will follow. Exceptions came up in the interview and I loved Sinetar's reply, "I didn't say how much." I heard some brilliant minds on New Dimensions and some wise ones. The truly wise ones didn't have much to say. They don't chatter. They have no cocktail party experience. They don't care about dead air time. They don't think of the interview calling attention to themselves, requiring performance. The only thing about the interview for them was exhaustion from being required to talk so much. They don't write in journals, Interviewed by New Dimensions today. Most of the ones interviewed were advertising themselves, selling their books on the book-signing circuit. A time came when that's all it was, people writing books and leading workshops, telling a roomful of people what's wrong with them. In the early years, they had some fascinating people interviewed. Eventually it was like the people interviewed were lobbied by publishers. Like the hippie time, the self-awareness time came and went. Didn't last a long time, but brought with it some essential changes in our culture. I can see it a version of a shamanic ritual. Perform what you want to see out in the world, a small number of people get together of like mind and perform the change they want to see. Their action reverberates to a larger circle and to another, on and on. It's like a spiritual wave passed through us collectively, each of us receiving what we were ready for from the wave.

One of my more important learnings incorporated from the time was readiness, when an issue surfaces, to deal with it. Deal with it and let it go. I felt like that time introduced values into a society whose values were of another time and did not hold anymore, no longer practical. The American emphasis on money, from the founding moment onward, has inspired a whole population to give up the old values that went counter to self-advertising, making a good first impression, for more money. In the old ways, humility was an important value. After two-thirds of a century of television in service to Mammon, arrogance has become the preferred attitude. It is the time when the light of the spirit wanes to near nothing. And what follows the waning of the moon is the waxing of the moon, a cycle. I see the popular wave with us now of wanting to be a better person an outer ring from the initial splash that was the New Age. Before 1970, self-help books were rare, spiritual books were rare, psychology books concerning everyday life were rare. Spiritual teachings from the East appeared, one after the other. In a way, it was a quiet reformation beginning in the middle class, and passed to the working class of mostly non-readers where the two classes intersected, Oprah. Self-awareness came to many from the wave manifesting in the Narcissism of the time. A magazine called Self. Body awareness took a leap with gyms everywhere and advertising specific to hyper-exercise. The egoic "philosophy" of Ayn Rand was educating Wall Street and the politicians to practice me first and everybody else last. Self-awareness came in all levels of getting it, from the spirit to the body. Individuals received from it what resonated with them. My own spiritual awareness came forward in 1975. My interest in the time was matters of the spirit and the mind.        

In that time my spirit began its journey to self-realization, which sounds like egoism, but is the contrary. Self-realization only comes after ego goes away. Remember, the kingdom of heaven is within? It doesn't mean beyond the clouds in outer space. It means within, one's own interior true self, the observer of our thoughts and dreams, consciousness. Learning about the application of karma to everyday life made a difference in my attitude toward life. Somebody pulls some shit on me, I want to get them back, and really mean it, unto wishing I could plot murder, I've learned to let it go. A karmic return will settle the matter perfectly. Plan revenge from my mind, it will either be too little or too much. Let karma, you get what you give, the natural law, handle the situation. From the moment I turn it over to karma, I'm at peace, no more thought necessary on the matter. I laugh about it. I don't need to know what the return might be. I already know it will be perfect to the occasion. Somebody I know who knows him asked me what I'm going to do about it. I said, Nothing. Why? It will take care of itself. He just opened the door and invited somebody to do the same to him one surprise day down the road. Friend was puzzled at the moment, but got it. I've seen him, since, wax furious with somebody unto wanting revenge, then calm right down, saying, "It'll turn around and bite him in the ass," and let it go. It's important to treat others as we want to be treated. It's how we will be treated in turn. I'm aware that when I talk about somebody in a gossipy way, I've made it compulsory for that individual to talk about me the same way, to the good or the bad. This awareness of karma, another learning from the wave of the New Age, has brought peace into my mind, made my later years much more interesting with a clarity of mind I never dared hope would unfold.

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BACK TO THE NEW AGE

Hatred can be expressed

in the most correct of terms

and affection in the crudest.  

                  ---Lucas Pasley

A few hours ago I listened to the syndicated NPR show NEW DIMENSIONS for the first time in some years, and it was years before that time. It started as a weekend evening show at about the same time I came to the mountains. I receive several NPR stations up here on the mountain. Started hearing New Dimensions, liked it and listened regularly for several years, a lot of years, maybe 20. In the early years the guests to be interviewed were very interesting people with a very great deal to say of importance. Physicist David Bohm, eco-philosopher Henryk Skolimowsky, Tibetan monks, people I could do nothing else but sit down and listen to while they were talking. Now when I turn it on, I'm always disappointed. It's people who write what I have to call "laugh all the way to the bank" books. Found a formula, worked it out, got a book, author tours. The people I've heard there for quite some time remind me of whoever it was I bought a book by that was supposed to be a study of crows. I read half of it and she never said anything about crows. She told about her daughter not liking that she hangs her underwear on the clothesline. I couldn't read any more. Half way into it she was telling at length about buying binoculars. Her writing reminded me of what some people believed worked for them when I was in school writing essays, padding the text with words that had no function but to up the word count.

What I heard this evening was someone who goes by "gangaji." She had that studied funeral director's voice dripping with mock concern. She does workshops on finding who you are. I felt like much of what she had to say was filler. At first it sounded kind of interesting, then it faded to not interesting at all. I tried to continue to pay attention, but couldn't. It must be that they're doing 80s New Age over and over. It's worn out by now. Talking like funeral directors is really over. However, these are California people. I've heard it said that one day the earth tilted and all the crazy people in America slid down to California, then the earth righted itself. I don't think that's particularly true. If it is, plenty of them stayed behind. California is just a different culture than the rest of the country. At first, the Southern part was Florida West. I was born in San Diego. I once knew a man here, the lawyer Lorne Campbell, who died in 1989, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall; his sister was a nurse in the hospital in SanDiego that I was born in the day I arrived. She worked a different floor. I saw the hospital twenty-some years ago. It was an eerie feeling, a white building that stood out from all that was around it, looking at it, seeing it my point of entry into this lifetime. I didn't quite know what to make of it, so I let it be.



I was interested to hear what she had to say about tuning in to one's innermost self. Like she said, we're already who we are. It's just not so easy to see the back of your head without mirrors. When she got there she didn't really say anything. It was a conversation between two women talking what seemed to me New Age cliches. It felt like something from the past. It was like: Oprah's already been there and gone on. It had been so long since I've heard New Dimensions, I was surprised when I should not have been that it is still 30 years ago there. I don't mean to be so hard on gangaji. We all gotta make a living the best we can. She did, however, set me to thinking about taking a look at my own innermost self. Then I ask, Why? Why not? It might be something I'll have to sleep on. One thing, my self is directing the body's nervous system to make the fingertips touch the different letters in rapid succession keeping up with thoughts. My innermost self is thinking the thoughts and seeing them. My innermost self sees my dreams in sleep. My inner self never sleeps, is always aware. The observer.



The observer is how I see my innermost self. Like I'm sitting here in the body, hands on the keyboard, letters and words appearing on the monitor. Something is flowing from subconscious into conscious mind and then sorted out with words provided by dancing fingers. My inner observer is seeing the thoughts come to the surface and watching through eyes the dancing fingers and the words appearing on the screen left to right, from mind to fingertips via nervous system setting muscles in motion. Thought rising from the subconscious and applied to the screen by dancing fingers simultaneously. Like a musician using mind to tell fingers what to do until mind becomes an obstacle and the fingers take off with the music on their own. My innermost self sees all that mental and physical activity. The observer never forgets anything. Every experience is an impression on the soul, which I take to be the observer, the innermost self. It's that innermost observer I suspect leaves the body when the body's vital functions are finished. Maybe. The Dalai Lama can answer these sorts of questions better than I can. I'm just going by what I sense and feel to be the case. Dalai Lama has thousands of years of wisdom behind him. I don't have a minute of it behind me.

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