Spirituality Without Religion?

How the New Age Came into Being

Almost two hundred years ago, a movement began to create a new spirituality free from the strictures of religion. It began in the United States with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Madame Blavatsky, as a reaction to the dreary Calvinism of the colonial settlers, their Old Testament god who demanded constant work, work and more work. Calvinism viewed us all as sinners, languishing in ‘total depravity’. Life, in other words, was not supposed to be fun.

Transcendentalists, Theosophists, and New Thought

In the nineteenth century, however, translations of eastern texts arrived on American shores, courtesy of British orientalists — Vedic texts, Buddhist, Taoist, and Islamic ones. Among the new aficionados of Eastern religion was Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Harvard scholar who called on his audience to break with mainstream religion and materialism in favour of self-realisation.

‘Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind,’ he said.

Equally influential was Helena Blavatsky, a Russian aristocrat who moved to New York in 1873, where she formed the Theosophical Society. While Emerson was shy, solitary, and scholarly, Madame Blavatsky was flamboyant figure, immensely charming and tempestuous and volatile, strolling about her home in robes and beads, smoking hashish through a holder. She had a grounding in spiritualism and occultism and was a bitter opponent of orthodox Christianity, materialism and ‘the poisonous gas of Western official science’ (her home boasted a stuffed monkey in a bow tie clutching a page from Darwin’s Descent of the Species).

Madame Blavatsky claimed to be in psychic contact with Himalayan sages who were helping write her first book, Isis Unveiled: A Master Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, a 2,600-page tone which blends Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, Hermeticism, psychic phenomena, with the Vedas, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, esoteric Christianity, and Neo-Platonism.

Alongside Transcendentalism and Theosophy, the other foundational movement of the New Spirituality was New Thought, which began midway through the nineteenth century as a form of faith healing based on the belief that there is no material world, only Spirit, Mind, and Energy. In 1906, the editor of New Thought magazine wrote a piece in which he referred to ‘The Law of Attraction’, a phrase which became increasingly popular, resulting in books like Think and Grow Rich (1937); The Power of Positive Thinking (1957) *and, in 2006, Rhonda Byrne’s immensely popular The Secret).

Vivekananda and Yogananda

Transcendentalism, Theosophy, and New Thought were the American pillars of the New Spirituality, though it was equally influenced by the Asian spiritual teachers who migrated to America from the late nineteenth century onwards. Among them was Vivekananda, a delegate to the Parliament of World Religions in 1893 from Calcutta, who gave a speech so spectacular it resulted in a four-minute ovation. Vivekananda aimed to ‘put the Hindu ideas into English, and then make out of dry philosophy and intricate mythology and queer startling psychology, a religion which shall be easy, simple, popular, and at the same time meet the requirements of the highest minds’—a statement which could be a manifesto for the New Spirituality.

Vivekananda’s successor was a young monk called Swami Yogananda, who wrote The Autobiography of a Yogi, which ended up being translated into fifty languages and selling millions of copies. Like many spiritual teachers after him, Yogananda realised the secret was to blend Vedic philosophy and yoga with Western rationalism, the Judaeo-Christian tradition and New Thought-style references to the ‘The Science of Success and the Art of Getting What You Want’. The result was that Indian philosophy gained a permanent place in the Western psyche and made Yogananda a star.

Zen

By the time Yogananda died in 1952, Zen had become as established within the American psyche as Vedanta. Phrases like ‘That’s so Zen’ didn’t enter the language by accident but due to the efforts of Japanese missionaries who arrived in San Francisco in 1898. Their original mission was to teach Buddhism to Japanese immigrants living in the US, but to their surprise, Zen, a small, somewhat conservative outpost of Buddhism, proved extremely receptive to Americans. In New York, the Zen master D.T. Suzuki noted that sitting meditation was particularly popular and made this the focus of his teachings, encouraging ‘self-development’ while rejecting hierarchy and superstition in favour of rationalism and science.

Among Suzuki’s students was a young Englishman named Alan Watts, who had studied Christianity at a seminary and whose interests included Vedanta, yoga, Taoism, pantheism, and, eventually, psychedelics. Watts was something of a Madame Blavatsky-like figure, fond of kimonos, sarongs, and beads, highly influential in bringing about the ‘Zen Boom’ in the 1950s, attracting Beat Generation writers like William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder.

Hippies

In keeping with the Transcendentalists and Theosophists, the Beats espoused an opposition to industrial-rationalist culture and a belief in what Kerouac called the ‘second religiousness’ developing within Western society. In his novel The Dharma Bums, he wrote:

I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution, thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ‘em’ Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures...

Part 3 to follow: the Beatles, the Maharishi, Deepak Chopra and others…