The New Age community here is pretty thick. And at times, it must be said that I have voiced a low tolerance for it’s superstitions. It’s not so much that I think the philosophy is inherently flawed. Some ideas I agree with. My personal issue is that the practitioners are sometimes significantly removed from the realities of life on earth. At its worst, New Age thought seems like a morality for those that can afford to be self indulgent.
The New Age appears to be as Moralistic as the old one.
We’re taught that we should be moral. And we think we are. But we never genuinely evaluate our motivations. We say, well I don’t rob that store because it’s wrong or I don’t go beat that jerk up because violence is wrong. Nonsense. You don’t rob the store because you don’t want to get caught, and don’t go kick that dude’s ass because your afraid he’ll win or that your wife (or partner) will give you hell for thinking your a tough guy and getting beat up. We still have base inclinations, we just try to suppress them in the name of morality. Consequently, we deny the power of our destructive energies. We’re afraid that they’re wrong, and we don’t give them an outlet.
The Inner Beast does not believe in morality
The chemical and electrical activity we experience as our bodies is very real and much of it has developed for specific purposes over the ages. That activity gives form to thought and takes shape as our animal behavior. But we have this misconception that our animal nature is not spiritual. It’s base. It’s not moral. It’s not the way to God. It’s not the enlightened path.
Different from the past 100,000 years or so, today, we in the U.S. at least, still have our innate animal behaviors but no longer know what to do with them. We no longer kill our food or our opponents face to face. We don’t watch the beast die when we slaughter it. We don’t have to drain it’s blood. We don’t watch the chicken run around the barn yard after grandma just lopped it’s head off. We no longer fight hand to hand with an infringing neighboring tribe and most of us no longer directly know the desolation of battle.
Destruction is as natural as creation
But we still fight, and we still kill. We just do it in disguised ways that provide none of the benefit of direct experience – of actually witnessing the destructive necessity of being alive. We kill thousands in video games, we engage in misogyny and domination though porn, we watch torture and murder in films and television. But we no longer experience the direct consequences of those acts. Unfortunate for us, – its the consequences of directly witnessing violence, not morality, that help keep those behaviors in check.
Our destructive energy is as natural a part of us as our creative energy. You can’t hold it back with Moral directives. It will just find weird ways to out. We have to understand it and give it a channel. Destruction and Creation follow the rhythms of the universe. In the natural cycle destruction is acknowledged as a sacred necessity, but the bargain is struck, that one day the taker gives back. Through making destruction a sacred act, we construct a framework that avoids the perverse and dehumanizing indulgence of modern moral age.
