This is a post that I am sure will ruffle some feathers. However, its something that I feel really needed to be expressed. Given some of conversations I’ve had with many of my friends, I am almost positive that I am not alone in my observations and my feelings on this topic. This post is meant to be my own personal statement of my own personal experiences. You may or may not agree with how I feel, and that’s OK. I know that a lot of people in this world are in a lot of pain, and I have compassion for all of them. My hope is that those stuck in some of the vicious circles like the ones I am about to express in this post, can get out with their sanity intact, and move forward towards their own prosperous lives. I still believe we all can do this.
This is a story about how I have become disenchanted with the new age movement. First I’d like to say that I consider myself to be a very spiritual person. I believe in God and love God. I pray everyday. I meditate. I like things like crystals. I connect with nature. I even go into some conspiracy theories and I believe in extra-terrestrial life and advanced technology and quantum physics and all of that.
However, just recently I’ve become disenchanted with the new age movement. I had to think about this for a while, and I’ve decided that it is time to reclaim my own spirituality. I am a very spiritual person, and my displeasure with some of the things I’ve seen in the new age movement does NOT take away the fact that I am a spiritual person. However, I am leaving behind the new age philosophies that I’ve come across in search of my own spiritual path.
The main reason why I’ve become disenchanted with the new age movement revolves around my natural personality. I’ve always considered myself to be a “doer”, I do things, I get things done, I take pride and great passion in making something with my hands, or organizing a plan, or building a business and implementing a project and watching things come into fruition and manifest. A lot of what I’ve seen in the new age movement does not revolve around action and doing. For this reason I’ve always felt like I’ve been a black sheep in the new age movement, I’ve felt like I’m the only one doing all of this stuff and nobody else seems to be having the same goals and motivation and drive as I do. Others would rather NOT do, but instead, “go with the flow” or “sit back and let spirit guide them”. Rather than plan and act, others would choose to “Be in the Now”
So first, let me provide a little bit of background. I have a lot of higher education and a lot of work experience working in the corporate world, and also in the government world. About four years ago, I was in my ultimate dream job in the corporate world and I saw corruption that was hurting people. I blew the whistle and lost my job as a result. This was a very painful experience for me, and as a result ence I started doing research to try to figure out what was wrong with the financial systems. Finding all of the corruption in some of these businesses and corporations led me down a rabbit hole. That also led me into what many call an “awakening experience.” This basically means you’ve uncovered the truth behind all the lies you’ve believed in your entire life. The lies about the money system, the lies about technology and religion, the lies about politics and business, etc.
What goes hand in hand with this awakening experience, is a deep betrayal that you have to face. It hits you in the core of who you are. Its not easy finding out you’ve been lied to your whole life. It’s like a punch in your spirit. It hurts so deeply that you look for ways to comfort yourself.. This is where the new age movement comes in and plays a really big role in the awakening experience. It provides an outlet for you to meet people and talk about things that you can’t talk about in the main stream world. In many ways it’s a buffer that makes you feel better and provides you with comfort. However, its only good for a period of time. After this, if you want to continue to grow you have to graduate out of the new age movement. If you don’t, you’ll get stuck in an adolescent loop and you can end up in more pain than when you first went in.
I spent the first two years after my awakening experience, dabbling in the new age world. I started meeting people and I ended up working with many different groups that were all part of this new age movement. These are groups all over the world. I went to conferences, I was on many Skype calls, I did radio shows with some of them. A lot of these people became my friends, we toured together, and I spent a lot of time in these groups. I did this for two full years. And then, about one year ago, I “graduated” and broke free from it all.
I’ve spent this past year applying myself and building my business. I’m still a very spiritual person, I just chose to walk away from all of these new age philosophies. A lot of my relationships had been severed as well in order to make a clean break from the movement that was causing me pain. Now that I’m reflecting back here’s some of the reasons why I left.
Pontificating Philosophers
I can’t even count how many Skype calls or radio shows or discussions that I was involved in where people just wanted to sit and talk about theories and ideas…for hours. They called it “brainstorming” but it wasn’t. It was just philosophy that never led to action. There was one point in time when I was on the phone for ten hours a day, every day. All of these conference calls became nonstop philosophy spewing sessions and no follow up action. It really wore me down.
Perpetual Poverty
Not all, but most of the people that were involved in these groups, were always broke. And a lot of them seemed to almost want to stay that way. At least this is what their actions seemed to portray.
I know that a lot of people in many different situations outside of the new age movement are in bad situations where they need money. We have all been there, including myself. But this was dominant in the new age groups. It felt like everyone was broke, poor, and unemployed and a lot of people just simply didn’t want to work at all. I enjoy working on things and accomplishing stuff. I don’t want to sit around all day and ponder the mysteries of the universe. There was also and underlying resistance to money. Many thought that money was pure evil, therefore they wanted nothing to do with earning money. It almost seemed as if they wanted to stay poor.
What happens in these situations is that there’s usually one person in the group who has money. (maybe they sold a company in the past or have a life savings they don’t mind sharing) For their own reasons, this person decides to become a part of the new age movement. They become the one person that ends up funding all of the other people that don’t want to work. I’ve seen this scenario at least 5 times in different new age groups. There is usually a big fall-out over money and “fairness”. To explain, there is this strange “sense of entitlement” that always creeps into a group. The deranged logic behind it is: “ I deserve to take everything you have, just because I exist. Since we are all one, and we all exist together, I should get all the money that you earned, but I don’t want to do anything to earn it. Because I provide value in a way that is left up to my own interpretation.” Needless to say, that gets really old, really fast.
Excessive Drug Use
I noticed a lot of excessive drug use in these groups. I’m NOT speaking about things like medicinal marijuana. I understand that there are things like cannabis oil that can cure cancer. I understand the many different uses for marijuana and I know all about social drinking etc. These things are all fine with me, I am NOT that much of a prude. What I’m talking about here is the party mentality.
I would meet up with these groups while on tour for my work, and there was always a huge party going on. People would smoke hash all day long, day in, and day out, for months. They locked themselves in their rooms all day to use drugs. They would forget to shower for days on end. They were just completely and totally unable to function because they were constantly under the influence of some kind of drug.
Of course it takes money to possess these drugs, so they usually would figure out interesting ways to obtain the money to pay for the drugs. I saw a lot of really nasty things that happened as a result of trying to get drugs. The demons of addiction possessed many of these people. They would all claim it was for “medicinal” purposes. They would give you a long winded sermon on pot, and its cures for cancer. But they weren’t using it for that, they were using it to get high and escape life. Another sermon I’ve heard many times is how taking these drugs would put you into an altered higher state of consciousness, one that makes you more connected to God/Source/Creator. They would claim that they had visions; they could see the future and predict things. They “understand the spiritual realms” and they can and move in and out of dimensions. They claimed they were getting “downloads” of information.
In reality, they were just stoned. They never did anything with their visions. The predictions they had of the future never came true. None of it was useful at all. This upset me, because I do believe in communicating on a spiritual level with my creator, but I don’t need drugs to do it. Very often the drug abuse just turned into this extreme case of constant paranoia. They felt that everyone was out to “get them” or everyone was the enemy. They accused every other person of being “an agent” or having some kind of negative agenda. This only grew worse over time, and by the end it felt like everyone had gone completely insane. People were constantly accusing each other of one horrible thing or another. Most of this insanity, I believe was drug induced.
Thank you JP Sears for your Candid take on this topic in your “Using Ayahuasca” Parody Video Here:
Drama and Diabolical Behaviour
In these groups, I observed the way people treated each other and I observed the way they treated me. Overall, there was a huge amount of mental and emotional immaturity. I saw extreme diabolical behaviours like “backstabbing”, vulgarity, name calling, ganging up on each other, extreme hypocrisy, false accusations, self sabotage or the attempt to sabotage other people in their projects, and theft.
Theft was a big problem. There was a “gimme!, gimme!, gimme!” mentality. Theft came in the forms of stealing your time, or stealing your money or stealing your energy. There was a lot of taking, and very little giving.
Perpetual Crisis and Chaos
There seems to be a loop in the new age movement. There was always a crisis, everything was always chaos. To help them cope, people would try to say things like, “oh the chaos is the beauty and the chaos is nature”. I know nature, nature can appear to be chaotic, but this was a different kind of chaos. It felt like everyone was always in some kind of crisis, and that there was never any kind of structure or organization at all. Structure of ANY kind in fact, was adamantly opposed. People would get flustered, and it felt like a giant nightmare most of the time.
Perverse Sexual Activity
Now before I talk about this next part, (which I’m sure most of you skipped over just to get to this part, lol) I’d like to briefly state my views on sexuality. Again, I am not a prude. I’m a sexual being like everyone else on this planet. I think sex between two adults (hetero or homo) is a healthy beautiful thing. And I’m not afraid or ashamed to talk about sex. However, when you start to pervert sexual activities it can get very ugly, very painful, and very harmful…very quickly.
I saw a number of different sexual behaviors in these new age circles:
Polyamory, Pecking Orders, and Pain
There were some groups that were involved in polyamory lifestyles or philosophies. This is the idea that nobody’s really a “couple”. You love everybody! So you have these like relationships that consisted of three, four, five, or even ten people. They were all dating each other, and yes, the were all having sex with each other. People would say that this is “natural”. They would would say that alien race’s promote polyamory. They claimed that monogamy is NOT natural. They called it “Big Love”. I mean, if we all just loved each other, then everything would be happy unicorn bliss in our world right???? Wrong. That was that the theory, the dream, the hope… but that was never the outcome. Instead, there’s always a pecking order in polyamorous relationships and usually more than one person always gets hurt. Once I did a facebook post expressing my views on the harmfulness of polyamory and I got all these letters from women in Australia that were part of these polyamorous communities. These women felt trapped and abused.
Disposable Relationships and Fear Of Commitment
I saw a lot of careless partner swapping. One day a guy would be with a girl, then the next day he was with another girl, or two girls would leave their guys to be with each other. There were a lot of variations. People were just swapping partners back and forth. Relationships became short shallow and disposable. Even decade-long marriages dissolved due to this. People were trying to act like they were having fun. But you could tell they were hurting, you could tell they weren’t happy.
When it came to relationships there was an overall chronic fear of commitment. A lot of people felt like they did not want to commit to only one person. But then again, they did not want to commit to ANYTHING. They couldn’t even commit to showing up on time. The twisted logic behind the fear of commitment is: “I need to feel free, so committing to anything is slavery.” This logic gets so out of hand that the individual actually ENSLAVES THEMSELVES within the inability to commit to anything. Therefore they never can accomplish anything or move forward. They are trapped by their own incessant need to feel free, they have limited experiences and their relationships lack any true depth or intimacy.
Conference Predators
This one is especially for the ladies out there. Be wary of the creepy guy who goes to new age conferences just to pick up women for one night stands. I’ve been to these new age conferences, as I’ve been a key note speaker at some of them. I call these guys “conference predators” and I’m telling you, there is at least ONE if not SEVERAL at every new age conference. How to spot em? He’s usually a “sensitive” guy. Who wants to talk to you for hours about your “divine feminine” beauty. He says he wants to worship you for the “goddess you are”. He’ll say you are a “woman in her power” and he “just wants to support that”.
They act like they’re really, really “into you”. But they are not. They want to talk for hours about the universe and the stars and the moon. They say they are awake and enlightened. They’ll tell you some sob story about how they feel like no one really “knows them for who they really are”. No one understands them… except… YOU!!! Then before you know it, they’re using phrases like “we knew each other in a past life”, and “I think we are twin flames”. Its ALL BULLS*@T!
I suppose it’s a step up from the singles scene in a bar. However, it’s just twisted because these conference predators are using your desire for spirituality and knowledge to prey on your vulnerability.
Thank you Again to JP Sears for his amusing video on “Dating Spiritual People”
Getting off the New Age Merry-Go Round
I skirted around this minefield of the new age movement and I tried my best during this time. Admittedly, I wasn’t always extremely level headed. Who would be in such a situation? Things got really crazy sometimes and there was a lot of emotional pain. However, now that I’ve been out of it for a year, I’ve been growing stronger and stronger than ever before. Looking back, I realize that what kept me in-tact during all of these experiences was my own self discipline. I always had my own relationship with my creator. I had the ability to set a goal and then perform an action towards that goal and get measurable results. I have logical thinking and I did my best to stay grounded.
After all the pain experienced in these new age circles, I just didn’t want to suffer anymore. But there was one final straw that caused me to make the decision to leave. And that was this: Nothing was ever accomplished. Lots was talked about, and there was a lot of drama and chaos. In in the end, these groups were not able to complete or implement a project and the people were not able to move forward. Because I’m a “Doer” by nature, this really went against the core of my being. I want to make things happen and get things done. I want to be able to sit back and look at my results.
So it’s been a whole beautiful year now since I left the new age world. I’ve spent this past year growing my business, watching my dreams manifest before my eyes, and slowly and incrementally making the changes that I think need to happen with my mission and my goals. I’m very happy at where we’ve ended up. Sometimes I’ll check in on some of the people that I used to know who are still in the new age movement. Sadly they seem to still be caught on the adolescent merry go round. A lot of them practically disappeared from the public; some of them ended up homeless. They still regurgitate the same scripts over and over and over again. If there is one common theme, it’s that most of them never prospered. I can only hope they will eventually get off the merry go round soon, so that they can move forward in their own way.
In closing, I have to also say it wasn’t all bad. There were a handful (and I mean a minute handful) of people that seemed to make their way through this new age craziness. They’re bright, beautiful souls and beings and good friends of mine that have always held up their integrity and honor. I call them beacons in the storm of chaos, and I commend them.
As for me, I’m relieved to finally have all of that behind me, and I press on each day with excitement about my future. On good days like today, I take brief moments to sit back and observe the fruits of my labors with confidence. I will continue to work towards helping to change things for the better and then at long last, get the job done.
