Regarding your first remark, it probably depends where you’re coming from, but for example in european culture, there was a stark division between those that “believed”, and those, the secular atheistic and even anti-religious culture, that rejected that belief. But the intermediate position, that there are a wide variety of psycho-technologies which can be experienced, affect the bodymind and change our relationship to the cosmos, was very absent from the whole surrounding culture. It simply wasn’t available on a realistic scale. I suspect that even in protestant countries, there was little separation between ‘experiences’ and belief … i.e. most believers are convinced that an external divine person is talking to them and immediately embed their experiences in mythological. The new age practices, based on an autonomous individual that can experience various spiritual experencies without the attendant mythological beliefs, did exist before, but became a massive possibility with the broader acceptance of such practices. It is only ‘after the fact’, after the experiences, than many started discovering that even the traditions that we had rejected, also had such possiblities within them.

Regarding your second remark, well, I believe it is one sided. The “new age” that I knew in the late seventies, was very varied, it was about communal living, alternative education and medicine, environmental concerns, i.e. the for-profit selling of experiences and ‘rapid enlightenment’ was just part of it, not the whole of it. I’ve seen and experienced what rushkoff is talking about, for example Osho was clearly about preparing the advent of neoliberal “(hu)Man”, but equating the whole of the spiritual revival with this particular part of it, is reductionist in my point of view,

Michel

You say:

“One of the first tangible benefits of the new age was to reintroduce the consciousness in the Western world, that spirituality was not a matter of belief, but one of personal experience”

I think this is a bit ahistorical. The notion of interiority in Western religion, particularly Protestantism, is very strong, and goes back at least to St. Augustine’s division of the inner, spiritual world and the outer world. The Protestant doctrine of private judgment, that one should follow one’s conscience in matters of faith, is also a very significant part of the Western tradition that should not be ignored. Even the New Age anti-authoritarian, anti-institution ethic can find its roots in the Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of believers, which rejects the idea of an institution mediating between individuals and the divine. And don’t we find the Quaker testimonies of simplicity, peace, integrity, community and equality in New Age spirituality?

These links to Western tradition are so strong, so I think we should reject the typical account of New Age spirituality as the importation of Asian religions into the West. Looking from a cultural perspective, isn’t it more accurate to say that New Age spirituality is actually Protestantism with Asian religious theology, and not quite the spiritual revolution that it is so often claimed to be. I think what we find instead is that New Age took us one step further along what is turning out to be the Western tradition of individualism and interiority.

Secondly, you say:

“Finally, being born itself in an age of hypercommerce, it didn’t take on the feudal trappings of the earlier spiritual movements, but the trappings of the market”

I think this is account soft-pedals the degree to which modern spirituality supports capitalist-consumerist culture. It is not just that contemporary neo-romantic spirituality is quietistic and simply accomodated the dominant economic system, failing to address the exploitations of capitalism, it also directly facilitated it. We should look to the book “The Romantic Ethic And The Spirit Of Modern Consumerism” to see how the same Romantic ethic which drives contemporary spirituality also drives consumerism. On this point, I think Rushkoff’s is right that the New Age/self-help movement didn’t sell out, it was sold-out to begin with.