What is so New about New Age anyway?

I admit that I take great liberties and swipes at this movement called New Age. If someone called me a New Ager, I would probably bite back and I am not all that sure why. I seem to carry a negative stereotype of this movement.

Is this web forum, Gaia, a New Age website? What is this business about New Age anyway? AND…what is so new about New Age? 

Anyone care to straighten me out?

Re: What is so New about New Age anyway?

Greetings Denim~

I often feel the same way.  Some of it is rejection of what I see as too focused on the “self journey”, and some of it is simply disenchantment with its “spiritual teachers”.  I think what is seen now as the New Age philosophy or theosophy or however one wishes to view it, began with a good intention of broadening and questioning the powers that be within not only organized religion, but social restrictions as well.  I've come to view it now more as a corruption of the very philosophies it originally set out to explore and a series of buzz words that are not in themselves wrong, but have become such a dissolution that they simply lose their meaning after awhile.

I don't see the Gaia Forum as being New Age, per se, although I think there are some elements to its' structure that are.

Peace :)

Re: What is so New about New Age anyway?

The connotation of “New Age” to me, seems to encompass a spiritual elitism.

That is my experience of this label, but I do not label others in this way. I would like to understand ones unique way of being rather then to generalize in this.

~`~Harmony~'~

Re: What is so New about New Age anyway?

Should one not consider, perhaps, that even the likes of Plato, Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, etc., were at one time “New Age” thinkers?

That could make it easier, or more palatable, to swallow. It then becomes a semantic (versus difinitive) difference, a “new” way of looking at all things as compared to the “old” way?

Re: What is so New about New Age anyway?

I would reply both yes and no.

For their life may hold truth of the most ancient way.