New Age - BRAVE NEW AGE

by Suma Varughese

First, a personal confession. Five years ago, before I met Parveen Chopra and joined India's first New Age magazine, I had but a hazy idea of what the term 'New Age' meant. True, I was looking for absolute happiness and unwilling to settle for less, and even considered starting a magazine on integration, but I had never imagined that this personal quest would echo a mushrooming movement. This is because people around me didn't share my concerns and interests. Then.

Today I appear to be a walking talking compendium on the New Age. And privy to thousands who think and feel the same way.
,br> New Age is utopia, really. It is the ideal poets, dreamers and mystics have been striving for since time immemorial. A time when, as the Bible says, there will be peace on earth and goodwill towards all men. New Age stands for the possibility that man can learn to transcend all the barriers of caste, class, sex, race, religion, and self-interest that have separated us for so long, and live in peace and harmony with love for all creation.

New Age is a freewheeling movement that draws its sustenance from the teachings of Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, and even the spiritual moorings of the aborigines and Native Americans. It coheres with Aldous Huxley's Perennial Philosophy (equivalent to sanatana dharma), the common spiritual ground underlying all religions. Its fundamental premise is the concept of oneness. The universe is one unit and all in it are interconnected and one with the Creator. The manifold unity and divinity of all creation is the fulcrum from which emanates the innumerable spokes of the New Age wheel.

ANCIENT ROOTS

Here in India, signs of the New Age or what is actually an Old Age, lie very close to the ground. Indeed, I learnt very quickly that there is a whole subterranean reality that has been quietly fertilizing this land for eons. Underneath the frenetic reality of politics, business, cricket, movies and celebrities eulogized by the media, gushes a wellspring of spirituality. I learnt of spiritual masters with lakhs of followers, of innumerable spiritual techniques and movements, of humble clerks and accountants meditating in the privacy of their homes. I found too an abundance of goodness, of people selflessly serving the needy, the old, the orphaned and the dispossessed, yet strangely invisible because they operated far away from the media glare.

Perhaps the most dramatic change of all in these five years is that the invisible has become visible. Today, the media is drawing this reality upward and outward. Spiritual masters like the Shankaracharya of Kanchi and Mata Amritanandamayi are now accorded the status of celebrities. The Shankaracharya was photographed in the Times music store, Planet M. Spiritual concerns and perspectives are aired on edit pages, and the whole panoply of New Age gadgetry such as crystals, wind chimes, pyramids, runes, tarot cards are splashing across newspaper columns.

Old Age may have been a vibrant reality, but the New Age was pretty nascent five years ago. By this, one refers to the eclectic techniques and ideas from across the world. Perhaps only reiki was aggressively attracting doyens across the board. A form of hands-on healing, reiki is said to have been discovered by the Buddha but reintroduced to India in 1992-93 via a Japanese clergyman, Mikao Usui. In the next few years the phenomenon kept peaking. Virtually every second urbanite was either doing reiki or had heard of someone who was. Being easily accessible, reiki has played a significant role in turning many people towards the spiritual zone.

Today, the New Age is everywhere. The latest entrant to the shore is feng shui. Like the indigenous vaastu shastra, it is the science of placement, of aligning space. It offers symbolic cures such as the placement of a painting or a color to correct inauspicious energy flow. Today, it has swept the country through a wild enthusiasm for wind chimes, mirrors, flowing water and the like. A city supplement in Mumbai carries a weekly feature on the subject, and is crowded with advertisements for feng shui courses.

Books on New Age subjects—particularly, reiki, vaastu, feng shui—are selling like hot cakes. The western authors and publishers are being replaced by homegrown ones. Publishers such as Full Circle, B. Jain, Motilal's New Age Books, Sterling and Diamond have hefty lists of typically New Age books.

EXOTIC IMPORTS

Among other flourishing imports are channeling, ascension and Kryon. The premise is that evolved people can act as channels to wisdom passed on by spiritual entities. Many hot selling books in New Age circles, such as one purportedly passed on by Mother Mary, are channeled. Kryon is one of the most popular of such entities. He is said to be in charge of changing the earth's magnetic configuration so that mankind may easily move into a higher realm of consciousness. These movements verge on the occult with borrowings from Jewish and Egyptian wisdom.

Divination has always been fascinating, giving our local astrology; palm and face reading a run for its money are newcomers such as tarot card, runes and I-Ching, helping you to chart out your present and your future.

Other systems that appeal, particularly to the corporate crowd, are NLP, today's hip numbers: EQ, SQ (Spiritual Quotient) and the latest offering, Design Human Engineering. Says Nandan Savnal: "Now these spiritual technologies come to India almost as soon as they have been released in the USA." A la Hollywood movies.

Today, the hold of religion has loosened. At one extreme, transcendence is no longer defined spiritually. Says artist and philosopher, Baiju Parthan: "I have a friend who is a director of a company by day and a Rave freak by night. Designer drugs, wild music and the philosophy of raving is a way of going beyond himself."

At more conventional levels, Christians are doing vipassana and TM, Muslims are experimenting with reiki and Hindus are moving into Christian Science and theosophy. Says writer Anjali Bhagwe: "I see people borrowing from other religions, of Hindus going for novenas or worshipping at dargahs."

There's a groundswell of change all around which one sees reflected in the appeal by one organization for everyone to chant the Gayatri mantra at six in the morning. This mass spiritual resurgence is best exemplified by the recent Maha Kumbha Mela at Allahabad. The event attracted crores of participants, a significant percentage belonging to highly educated professionals who would normally have looked askance at such a traditional ritual. Says Shibani Sachdeva, a marketing consultant: "It was a deeply moving experience. I was in tears at the sight of such faith."

WEB OF CHANNELS

Nowhere is the awakening more visible than on the Internet. There are thousands of websites devoted to matters spiritual, spanning the gamut from the serious to the flaky. In India, lifepositive.com has been followed by the spirituality channel of Indiatimes site of The Times of India group. There is a website on Indigo Children, a term devoted to today's hyperactive children, who are considered to be at a higher spiritual wavelength than the rest of us.

Then there is Intuitive Vision, a PR company specializing in metaphysical issues. There's even a kundalini support group for people going through difficult kundalini awakenings. You can access websites of vision coaches, who will help you locate your purpose in life.

In India, many spiritual organizations have their own websites. A few brave solo ventures are also registering their presence. Says Gautam Sachdeva, of Impressions Advertising, who has started indiayogi.com: "The web is the perfect tool to communicate spiritual information because it is fast and cheap."

What's new is also the rise of at least two 24-hour spiritual channels: Aastha and Sanskar. Though stodgy in their content featuring a diet of discourses and satsangs (communion), they are testimony to the hunger people feel today for a spiritual anchor. The Zee network will be unveiling their 24-hour pay channel Chakra very soon. The content will feature a combination of body-mind-spirit issues and the quality is likely to set industry standards.

Inevitably, the New Age is throwing up a range of new jobs and lucrative careers. Businesswoman Rohini Gupta holds workshops on the side on subjects as diverse as mandalas (geometrically designed mystical designs) and tarot cards. Many have shifted to teaching reiki or feng shui consultancy. A high-profile fashion designer now plans to teach yoga. "My father is scandalized," he confides. Naturopathy, ayurveda and other holistic healing methods are also attracting many, including allopathic practitioners, into the fold. Says Gulrukh Bala, a reiki master: "One of my American students gave up a job in Microsoft and decided to move into reiki and yoga instead."

COPING WITH CHANGE

But of course, in the New Age, no one perspective tells the story. For many, we are living in the worst of times. Liberalization has laid waste much of indigenous industry. People are being laid off as never before.

Says Ajit Parikh, a small-scale industrialist and ardent vipassana meditator, who recently sold a major part of his equity: "There is no room for human values in business. Your reluctance to fire people is a weakness today. People are under tremendous stress because there is no job security any more. That is why they are turning to vipassana. In 1991 when I first did vipassana, there were 271 meditators. Now each course in Igatpuri accommodates 700 people and we have to turn an equal number away."

There is also the accelerating rate of change brought on by technology, particularly the Internet and the human genome project. Says Baiju Parthan: "Internet has changed the way you transact business or communicate. E-mail has decimated regular mail. Today, as an artist, I deal both with real galleries and virtual ones. Both Internet and the human genome project are opening up fundamental questions on what it means to be human at a time when you can create a virtual self on the Net or clone yourself through genetic science. People are forced to reexamine their belief systems and change."

Even as the economic upheavals and technological changes send families into crisis, there are the cataclysmic natural calamities to contend with such as last year's super cyclone in Orissa and this year's killer earthquake in Gujarat, India. As the very foundation of conventional security is cut away, many are locked in the agonizing question of what is the source of real security. The answer will lead many within. The birthing of the New Age with all its anguish and trauma, is underway.