The new awakening is not only experiential in character, it is
highly eclectic. More and more people who appear to be deeply interested
in spiritual subjects in no way confine themselves to a single tradition.
One might be Catholic and at the same time practice Buddhist meditation.
Someone brought up in the Jewish faith might be a member of a Moslem Sufi
meditation group, yet still observe Passover. The basic truths of the
spiritual life can be found for these eclectics as much in the Christian
Bible as in the Torah, the Koran, the Tao te Ching, or the Bagavad
Gita.
In her recent book, Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black
Madonna, one woman, China Galland, a working mother with two children,
recounts how she left the patriarchal sterility of Catholicism for Zen
before discovering Tibetan Buddhism. Within Buddhism she discovered a
lineage of goddesses whose identity she began to explore intensely. When
her spiritual search widened to the feminine aspect of God in other
religions, she rediscovered her roots in Catholicism through the Polish
icon of the Black Madonna. Enriched by her spiritual journey, now deeply
contemplative, she is once again a practicing Catholic--but, she insists,
on her own terms.
AND PSYCHOLOGICAL, TOO
There's one more outstanding feature of the new awakening--it is
inherently psychological. Its content has to do with the alteration of
consciousness, with the integration of the mind and body, and with the
connection between physical and mental health. Originally an outgrowth of
the psychotherapy movement, which dealt with problems of adjustment and
identity, paying someone to talk about one's self outside a traditional
institutional setting has now become more overtly psychospiritual and
holistic. According to sociologist Philip Rieff, who wrote The Triumph of
the Therapeutic, psychotherapy has become the modern world's new
sacrament.
Freudian psychoanalysis dominated the American scene only up until
the 1960s, when radically different systems appeared on the scene. There
was a veritable explosion of new psychotherapies. The analytic psychology
of Carl Jung, for example, has since became much more popular than
Freudinn analysis, precisely because it acknowledges the transcendent
dimension of personality functioning. But Jung turns out to be only one
among many. The meditation-and-psychotherapy movement blended the more
traditional verbal exchange of psychotherapy with Asian meditation
techniques, such as exercises in one-pointed concentration and breathing
regimens from yoga. In this environment, forms of psychotherapy dedicated
to intensive spiritual practice emerged. Over the past 30 years they have
matured in their own right and show no signs of diminishing. These
include Stanislav Grof's holotropic breathwork, Roberto Assagioli's
psychosynthesis, and the Buddhist insight meditation techniques of Jack
Kornfeld. As well, shamanic practices from various non-Western cultures,
which involve drumming, singing, and dancing, have also emerged as
popular psychotherapeutic tools for inducing what are believed to be
healing states of ecstatic trance.
A SHADOW CULTURE
One of the most distinguishing marks of the new awakening is that
it appears primarily to be a shadow culture of Judeo-Christian
Protestantism. If the interpreters of modern culture wonder what this
spirituality is all about they have only to recognize a widespread
emphasis on the transcendent by those of the largely white middle-class
generation who left the institutional church. This is a profoundly
Caucasian phenomenon.
People from Asian cultures are already steeped in alternative views
of transcendent reality, although many have set aside their indigenous
outlook after passing through the Western educational system. Latinos
have long hidden their deep native spirituality behind the symbols of
traditional Christianity. African Americans have an ethnic religious
tradition that has remained intact and helped them endure and then emerge
from centuries of servitude. Native Americans already have an integrated
view of the physical and spiritual world. All these communities are
hardly surprised when white authors on the New York Times best-seller
list proclaim that there is, in fact, a spiritual world! It is as if the
educated white middle class who represent the liberal Judeo-Christian
roots of American culture are collectively searching for universal
truth--but finding that the most vital elements related to meaning and
value turn out to be repressed aspects of their own unconscious.
PRESERVING THE GOOD
The new awakening is neither analytic nor materialistic, but rather
oriented toward the intuitive, the visionary, the archetypal, and the
transcendent. Its ethic is not power over others, the accumulation of
material wealth, or the destruction of the environment for purposes of
aggrandizing the comforts of some self-selected elite among the human
species. On the contrary, its tone is lovingly preservative, of the
earth, sentient creatures, native cultures, human relationships, and the
very best parts of the self.
