The new age movement is dying, bugger off to vampire Osho, and the other primetime ghost gurus
Readers of this blog may have begun to get a sense that something is badly wrong in New Age fantasy land. A movement has to have a rational or at least reasonable basis to persist, but this movement is failing this basic test. ‘Grotesque’ is the best way to describe the current state of the New Age world. That is partly a personal issue; if you attack Mr. G, ghost or no ghost, the fury of the ghostplane is strong. The G factor is a strong fascist/neoliberal/hyperreactionary malevolence. You snap out of it and it’s over when it’s over. Gurdjieff bites the dust. Unfortunately the power to persist in harm…persists…
The basic problem is our spiritual ignorance, and the exploitation that creates. I am not an unreasonable man, but when two set of dead gurus start assuming the masks of the other and acting to compete then the issue of gurus is hopeless. You can’t use dead gurus. But you can’t really use gurus when alive. How many have achieved realization with a living guru? Gurus are very nervous, btw, on that point: they undermine rivals from day one…
I fail to see what the method is then, as to gurus? The dirty secret is, there is none.
New Age seekers have no real sources of accurate information, as the remote abstactions of the ‘guru’ world fail to gel as anything really robust. Instead we are treated to the gang war of rival traditions, teachers, occultists, spiritual politicians, and the results are so toxic it is important to drop all of it.
What are one’s assets here?
Xtianity is almost defunct, and never made any sense anyway. Noone achieves enlightenment from xtianity. What the fuck is the use of it? In fact, it creates a robot who is protected to some degree from…gurus, occultists, etc… But beyond that nothing.
The early nineteenth century saw a kind of euphoria in the discovery of the East. But then figures like Blavatsky started the slide into confusion and plain lies, and the seal was capped by the demonic indirections of figures like Gurdjieff, who is now squandering his remaining spiritual energy trying to eke out revenge on Ouspensky. Moral, disobedient disciples are at risk of spiritual in the next life if they don’t grant total surrender and absolute obedience. The fourth way is a fabrication and yet the myth has been planted and is permanently profitable with the endless round of new suckers, usually readers of Ouspensky, who is tragically in a state of sorrow his work ended up in the hands of conmen. It is oddly significant that the basics of the new age movement come from two suspected Intelligence agents, Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. The reason is not far to find: the emergence of fascism with esoteric echoes and occult echoes drove the spy agencies to infiltrate.
More generally the legacy of Blavatsky, as Theosophy, is very thin stuff, as Krishnamurti saw with great clarity.
The world of Gurdjieff is a total waste of time for the majority: there may be hidden groups, of course, but these feed on the exploitation of exoteric suckers. These suckers do a good job promoting this mess here in the comments to this blog.
Conclusion: we have no real ‘New Age’ movement yet. It is yet to happen.
Buddhism is under suspicion of esoteric fascism, and its Mahayana has created an army of static deadbeats who can’t grasp the world they have created, because they have re nounced enlightenment.
It goes on and on and I know no options that are reasonable here. Even the Osho option is useless. Some might suggest refuge in Xtianity, but I wouldn’t recommend it. In a way the Xtian world is the worst, and its teachings are so worn with age and bad theological trappings as to make the whole game worse than nothing.
So what are we to do if we have lost all the foundations, buddhist to sufi to xtian, in the failures of Blavatsky and Gurdjieff, the dishwater idiocy of xtianity, and wasteland of idiot gurus, power yoga fetishists. The coup de grace is the way deadly dead gurus prey on ‘disciples’ and use the ‘negation of the ego’ as a front for the invultuation and spiritual cannnibal game hinted at in Gurdjieff, and others.
That must have been the rationale of Mahayana: the teaching will cease to help, so drug the disciples and put them in cold storage. But this strategy is a failure. Study Tibetan Buddhism: it is a desperate attempt to keep track of a ver small clique of boddhissatwas. That much takes up a whole lineage’s energy. The rest, the majority of buddhist converts are simply discarded after death: there is no program to keep track of them, and their lives end up in failures to pick up where they left off.
It is important for a buddhist to break out of this treadmill and either go join the foreign legion or embark on a real path to enlightenment making whatever effort one can to create continuity between lives. The slow but steady overcoming of false recurrences starting over and over can be dealt with slowly but surely. The Tibetan sangha is totally useless here.
We need to start over: buddhism is almost finished casting its seeds into the ground of modernity. Xtianityis weakening rapidly, sufism is a cabal of crooks. I will leave the question of Islam to Moslem commentary.
New Man, New Age, New Socialism 