Comments on: Book of the Week: Gregg Lahood’s critique of new age narcissism https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/book-of-the-week-gregg-lahoods-critique-of-new-age-narcissism/2010/08/09 Researching, documenting and promoting peer to peer practices Mon, 30 Aug 2010 06:22:45 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.15 By: Gary https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/book-of-the-week-gregg-lahoods-critique-of-new-age-narcissism/2010/08/09/comment-page-1#comment-436583 Mon, 30 Aug 2010 06:22:45 +0000 http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=10028#comment-436583 What was written by Robert Perry is very misleading.
There is no way that something like A Course in Miracles can be turned into something other than narcissistic.
The Course is quite clear. There is a workbook of narcissistic exersises that go with the course.
Each and every one of the exercises contain the word “I”, “Me”, or “My”.
It starts off as briefly nihilistic. This table does not mean anything to me.
This chair does not mean anything to me… on and on.
And then to the narcissism.
I am the light of the world. I am one Self, united with my Creator.
I am not an illusion, but a reality. Only God is real.
The above statements taken together say in no uncertain terms,
I am God, I am the only one thing that actually exists, Everything else in the entire universe (including you) is an illusion to be ignored.
Nothing in the world you could write or think or feel could be more narcissistic than that.
As a matter of fact it goes beyond narcissism into schizotypal.
The course even claims to be non-dualistic but non-dualism in the course means “I” am the only one real thing.
The entire universe constitutes a non-dualistic unity of the only one ME !
The whole thing is the height of existential dysfunctionality and mental brokenness.

]]> By: Robert Perry https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/book-of-the-week-gregg-lahoods-critique-of-new-age-narcissism/2010/08/09/comment-page-1#comment-434992 Wed, 11 Aug 2010 14:17:19 +0000 http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=10028#comment-434992 I am on the better-known interpreters of A Course in Miracles, and while I suspect I would disagree with Lahood in many fundamental ways, the fact is that I also profoundly agree that New Age spirituality is fundamentally narcissistic. I don’t know what is meant here by “relational spirituality,” but I spend my days trying to promote a more relational spirituality among Course in Miracles students, arguing that it is basic to the Course as written, though not as practiced. I have finally concluded that the beginning premise of the contemporary spiritual search is that it’s about me and my inner peace, so that when you tell people that helping, serving, and joining with others is central to the path, something deep inside them says, “This isn’t what I signed up for.”

As for Wilber, I am not a devotee, but I do have a measured respect for his writings. And he has been moving more and more in this direction, with his focus on relationships, the “we,” shadow work, what he calls second-person God (God as Other), and Boomeritis (a culture-wide disease of narcissism or “no one tells me what to do”). I personally don’t feel he has gone far enough in the relational direction, but he has still gone quite far, and that doesn’t seem reflected in the Lahood excerpt.

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