Can the new age movement find the new age?
dead link
http://www.gurdjieff-con.net/2014/02/24/i-take-my-200-of-osho-first-editions-to-the-landfill-and-toss-them-in-the-dumpster/
(update: 2019 I once owned over three hundred first edition Rajneesh/Poona hardbacks and and in early nineties took them to the public landfill and threw them in a dumpster. They would be worth a small fortune now.
Good riddance…)
This melodramatic gesture, recorded in this post, succeeded and then failed. The books in question were so old and worn that it was better to be done with them. And as often with Osho world, going beyond ‘words’ often has a paradoxical result.
In any case, it strikes me that the posts here of late have described a nearly insoluble problem. or set of problems. It would be good for new agers to rethink their histories at this point, and look to a new future of spirituality. But that is a perilous venture. Last and First Men embarks in a new direction, that of ‘new age’ communism: communism was the real new age movement that emerged around 1848 and then went into standby. But it quickly became a part of the movement of positivism, viz. in the crystallization of historical materialism. That was important, but there is another task indicated in the movement emerging: a pathway to the future, as culture, material and spiritual, needed to move beyond capitalism toward a new civilization beyond that, in the same way Xtianity led the ancient world from the world of the Roman Empire to a world beyond slavery. The motion, ancient and modern, is the same ‘movement’. Capitalists, like the ancient Romans, are fierce in resisteance and rapidly acquiring the absolute power of domination in corruption that make the ancient Romans so decadent in the end. Let us hope the task will not require the centuries of catacoming Xtians. And we would need something that sublates beyond the doctrines of a monotheistic religion. But the gist is the same, and the alternate strategies, a revolution against power, versus a catacombing proletariat slowly overtaking declining power, confront the modern left in the same way. This introduces our discussions of a ‘new communism’ over at Darwiniana and here Osho’s text, Communism, Zen Wind, Zen fire, suddenly pops into the open as virtually the only discussion of communism by an Indian guru.
I think the task of reflection could be long, and the conclusion what we know already, so the issue remains, will the ‘new age’ movement ever find the new age?
New Man, New Age, New Socialism 