New Age Spiritual Movement Frustrations

[tadeus]

From my perspective, the New Age movement is as it ever was. It's just that today, after the Internet has expanded exponentially, enabling anyone to publish anything, more and more people are taking advantage of a digital platform from which to do business of any kind and share anything they want to share.

I would make two points regarding this phenomenon:

1. Because of the flood of digital "information" coupled with the massive growth in online (much amateur) business, the need for discernment has generally switched from filtering systems (such as traditional publishers who used to verify credentials, edit the works, discern content) to the end reader/user. This is probably a good thing, but in the meantime there is a morass of stuff out there to slog through if one is inclined to seek there.

2. The desire to learn from, or follow, someone else (gurus, teachers) be looked at. This is not to suggest there is anything wrong with following a guru. The idea of teach/learn may be seen as a construct within which an individual exists, where everything is in relationship to everything else (just as there is no one static point in the universe—everything is moving in space relative to everything else), and we constantly interact with each other and all things and conscious evolution is born out of the complexity. The traditional guru/teacher/minister is more like a linear one-way construct where the teacher is showing the way which has already been determined and the student is following an already-determined path. 

Thank you for your thoughts Diana.

I agree to both of your points - these do not contradict my considerations or what i have written.

Maybe i can add here a book about the New Age Movement (german) with the title
"Facts about the New Age Movement - Real alternative or aberration?" (2001) from John Ankerberg and John Weldon

Who are the leading proponents of the New Age movement?

The American actress Shirley MacLaine is one of the best-known proponents of the New Age.
She reached an audience of millions in America with her television series. Apparently, thousands followed her suggestions about contacting the world of the supernatural. Her seminars offered throughout America in 1987 were attended by some 14,000 participants.
She founded a spiritualist recreation center in Crestone in the American state of Colorado on a huge site, where so-called "transmitters" (people through whom spirit beings speak) offer their services to all visitors.

...

The American science journalist Marilyn Ferguson is also one of the leading representatives of the New Age. The programmatic title of her bestseller, which has also been published in German, is "The Gentle Conspiracy."
She is the editor of the journals Brain-Mind Bulletin and Leading Edge Bulletin.

...

The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, first published in 1969, is considered the leading journal in the field. Dr. Frances Vaughan, the editor of this journal, states: "The transpersonal perspective views the disciplines of Far Eastern spirituality and the scientific methods of psychology in the Western world as complementary" ( The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, Vol. 14, No. 1, p. 37).


Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

So the New-Age-Movement did begin in the 70's.