Last but not least, the new spirituality has the weight of history
on its side. Scholars of American religion have identified periodic
intervals when ecstatic visionary revivals involving altered states of
consciousness have broken out and gripped large segments of the
population, with wide-ranging results. The first Great Awakening occurred
in the 1720s, in Connecticut, around the ministry of Jonathan Edwards.
What was at first a trickle of ecstatic emotion became a torrent that
generated a new wave of churches up and down the New England
coast.
The second Great Awakening occurred in the early 1800s, when
America was made safe for a spiritual democracy. Religious revivals, some
lasting months and involving hundreds of thousands of people, sprang up
on the American frontier, what is now the Midwest. People spoke in
tongues, were slain in the spirit, claimed miraculous healing powers, and
participated in numerous forms of socially sanctioned trance behavior.
During this period, Christian denominations such as the Presbyterians,
Methodists, and Baptists gained their largest number of converts.
COMING FULL CIRCLE
The outbreak of spirituality that began in the American
counterculture of the 1950s is just as charismatic and visionary as past
revivals. But there are telling differences. While the first Great
Awakening empowered the already existing pre-Revolutionary institutional
church, and the second Great Awakening expanded the variety of Christian
denominations, the core of spirituality has this time moved beyond
institutional religion and is now flourishing in the culture at
large.
The first Great Awakening occurred in New England; the second, in
the Midwest. The third, while international in scope, emanates from
California. The westward movement of the popular centers of national
spiritual consciousness suggests the rounding out of a natural cycle.
Most variant forms of spirituality extant today are typically labeled
"New Age." But such a label diminishes what is actually going on. Crystal
gazers, spiritual healers, astrologers, food faddists, meditators,
home-opaths, lesbian ministers, Caucasian disciples of non-Western
traditions, and assorted friends of native cultures are lumped together
as if they were the same.
If these expressions do have a commonality, it is that, to varying
degrees, they all blend ideas about the transformation of personal
consciousness with spiritual concerns. They reflect what I see as a
visionary folk psychology--an inwardly oriented psychology of spiritual
consciousness that has been an integral part of American culture from its
very inception.
There is nothing new about such spiritual awareness of alternative
realities at all. Mystical communities existed at the founding of the
American colonies. Homeopathy, phrenology, and mesmerism flourished in
19th century America and were used to promote character development.
Asian ideas were popular with the New England transcendentalists.
Spiritualism, New Thought, Theosophy, and Christian Science were the
vogue a hundred years ago, all propounding different forms of higher
consciousness. Alcoholics Anonymous had its genesis in earlier religious
psychotherapies, notably the Emmanuel Movement, started by the
Episcopalians in 1906, and Frank Buchman's Oxford Group, which began just
before World War I.
The catch is that in the past, the assorted varieties of dynamic
popular psychology remained peripheral to the concerns of mainstream
rational, Christian America. Now, however, the essentially nonrational,
experiential psychology expressed in folk culture has become a central
vehicle of spirituality in modern culture.
The pundits of American high culture scorn much of what passes
before us from the contemporary spiritual environment as superficial and
of little consequence. But the generations just behind them have broken
with the past and caught on to the deeper recesses of the new awakening,
which contains the germ of an ethic capable of inspiring succeeding
generations into the 21st century.
It is this: The doorway to ultimately transforming experiences lies
through an exploration of the personal unconscious; alternate states of
consciousness from pathological to transcendent do, indeed, exist within
us. Science is a tool and not an end; all the measurements and computers
in the world cannot replace the mystery of the person. Higher
consciousness is a viable inward reality. The experience of it changes
people for the better. Transcendent experiences present us with the
challenge of actualizing their effects in the outer world to improve the
moral and aesthetic quality of our lives. And while we are always in
danger of being captured by the demonic on this inward journey, we must
take the risk if any real growth, in the person or society, is finally to
take place.
The contemporary popular landscape is awash with mythic, visionary
statements to this effect, typically couched in metaphors open to the
spin of each person's inner reality. Exhibit A: the droll tale called the
Celestine Prophecy, a fictional adventure lingering on the best- seller
list.
THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS
