The New Age Movement (NAM) seemed really exciting and refreshing - for about eighteen months back in the mid-Eighties, that is. Then came Out on a Limb and the Harmonic Convergence and it all got super-cringe, super-fast.
The thing is that's the story with all movements. The next step past the first flush for a movement is to either wither and die or embed itself so deeply into the social fabric that most people don't even acknowledge its existence anymore. And I've argued over the life of this blog that the NAM took the latter path.
The NAM embedded itself into the culture via what all the cool kids call "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism." This impulse has taken many forms, from the Woke turbo-cancer to yoga-based Q-level "Conspirituality." Moralistic Therapeutic Deism was in fact a Trojan Horse virus that allowed the movement to insinuate itself into the collective consciousness.
And to be blunt, only the most blinkered or historically-oblivious can deny that the NAM didn't almost completely infiltrate and reconfigure Evangelicalism; particularly the Prosperity Gospel (the Law of Attraction by any other name) and the megachurch movement. I'd even throw in the equally estrogen-drenched New Apostolic Reformation for good measure.
I guess only cynical old bastards like me - who still remember the way Evangelicalism used to be - can even perceive the changeover.
I recently read The Celestine Prophecy - probably out of some deep-seated sense of self-loathing - a book which I'd actually listened to on audiotape back in the early 2000s. Back then I hated it with a rare intensity, but this time around I just found it - like most New Age artifacts - to be aggressively insubstantial.
It wasn't even fun to cringe at, like The Da Vinci Code. It was just an excruciatingly-dull and plotless monologue, where every Peruvian campesino the narrator stumbled across spouted Esalen-worthy psychobabble in grammatically-perfect American English. It's like Castaneda on a 12-Step program.
And yet The Celestine Prophecy sold millions.
One might chalk that up to the NAM still being a novelty to most Americans back then. These days you can find stacks of unsold New Age books at your local discount outlet. But to be fair, that might just be a volume thing: New Agejacent books still appear regularly on the upper reaches of the NY Times Bestseller lists.
But there is - and always has been - a terminal flaw in the New Age impulse, and that is its inability to account for existential evil. As well as the darker side of Nature, human or otherwise.
I chalk this up to the terminally-earnest (and frankly nerdy) Liberal Christian and Reform Jewish traditions most New Agers sprang from. Not to mention the Like-to-Buy-the-World-a-Coke idealism the Boomers who mainstreamed the New Age bathed in from birth.
Indeed, for all the talk you hear about "integrating the shadow" coming from NAM circles, there seems to be a doctrinal resistance to seeing the real shadows in the world. It's as if the incessant focus on "light" seems to drown out the shadows, and leaves you without shape or form.
Another deal-breaking flaw has come to light in the social media age, and that's the inability of the NAM to account for cringe.
It's a flaw I couldn't even fully recognize myself until the rise of the SchizoMystics, who take the lexicon and imagery of the NAM and put it into the service of 4Chan-worthy shitposting.
It's almost as if you can't see the transcendence without the cringe, in the same way you can't see the light without the dark.
But cringe is everywhere now - it's become a force of Nature in the social media age - and you can't escape it. In fact, ignoring cringe just makes it worse: there's nothing more cringe than someone who refuses to acknowledge their own capacity for cringe. Maybe the cringecore comics were onto something.
I realize that SchizoMystics may themselves find their own douches chilled to sub-zero levels when they read my posts on SchizoSpirituality - if in fact any do read them - but too bad, that's just the way I roll. I overthink everything, it's an integral expression of my OCD Synchromystic work. Deal with it.
Plus, SchizoSpirituality (especially in its meme form) is the only thing that's gotten me truly excited to scroll through the social media fever-swamps in a very, very long time.
It takes something old and worn-out and irredeemably cringe - meaning New Age language and imagery - and makes it fresh and new. Often simply by pasting schizoid word-puzzles over corny New Age memes plucked from Facebook groups.
EVERYTHING OLD IS SCHIZ AGAIN
I gotta be honest here: after doing the work I do for so long, I'm sick beyond death of symbols, secret societies, sicko sects, and all the rest of it.
At the end of the day, it's all just the psychic armoring of traumatized children. It would be downright pathetic if it weren't all too often so deadly to innocents.
Don't me wrong: religion, the occult, neopaganism, alt.history, UFOlogy, magick and all the rest of it is all super-interesting and entertaining and whatnot, but my ultimate goal now is to help people move through the handmade stuff and get to the point where we can all just simply vibe with the Godhead.
Tall order, but what else is there, really?
I know our Gordo says I'm an animist - and maybe I might have agreed once upon a time - but I reckon I'm more of a panentheist.
Maybe it's a vestige of my Eighties Zen-phase talking (or all the eddies) but I don't think you really need any of that symbol stuff to commune with the Divine. In fact, it can often be a hindrance. It's like slurping on lukewarm Aquafina when you could be sipping from a cold mountain stream.
And maybe that's why I love SchizMemes so much. Lovingly mocking corny New Age bromides and cliches actually liberates them from their Black Iron Cringe Prison and reveals the Sophianic Wisdom buried beneath all the shopping-mall stupidity. It's as if the only way out is through when it comes to cringe.*
I'm sure we'll start seeing a bunch of bandwagon-hopping pseudo-Schiz in short order, but that's the way of the world. For now, I'm going to bathe my soul in glorious Schiz.
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*Weirdly, I remember reading that the Scientologists - the ultimate shadow expression of New Age lightworking - thought something similar.
