Quest Magazine

The Power of the New Spirituality: How to Live a Life of Compassion and Personal Fulfillment

William Bloom
Wheaton: Quest, 2012. 258 pp., paper, $16.95.

While some of us may not have noticed, over recent decades a new model of spirituality has been creeping steadily into our culture. From amid the vast array of over-easy, and highly suspect, New Age concepts, something real and authentic has emerged. Easily surpassing the teachings of organized religions in scope and depth, the new spirituality is the New Age all grown up. In The Power of the New Spirituality: How to Live a Life of Compassion and Personal Fulfillment, William Bloom, one of Britain's leading mind-body-spirit teachers, distills what this new spirituality consists of, lists its implications for society, and teaches us how to participate.

Written in the form of a self-help manual, complete with exercises, the book describes how this new spirituality is arising out of spectacularly different circumstances from the cultural milieus in which our traditional religions were formed. With most of us in the Western world adequately fed and housed, we should be ready to move beyond mere security needs "the comfort, protection, and rules that earlier religions sought to supply" toward a spirituality based on "higher"-level issues such as universal love and the role personal fulfillment plays in meeting that end. With the perspective gleaned from spiritual teachings all over the world, we can now see what the various forms of spirituality have in common, regardless of cultural circumstance. But lest we fall subject to what Bloom calls spiritual materialism  self-help concepts promising simply to make people feel better, or be accused of promoting a spirituality with no values, we must see how the new spirituality not only includes the core values of all the world religions, but goes beyond them in several important ways. Examples include the green movement, the findings of developmental psychology, and a sense of personal responsibility for the vibrations we radiate into the universe.

Bloom describes three golden keys to the new spirituality.

1. Connection assumes the existence of a benevolent cosmos with which we might wish to connect. The new spirituality involves appreciating that each person will have his own best means of connection, his own style, and intensity of connection at which he is most comfortable.

2. Reflection is an honest attempt to get acquainted with ourselves as we really are. It helps us move from fear to love and enables us to step away from our monkey minds "which tend to make up stories to fill in knowledge gaps" toward a tolerance of ambiguity. It also helps us overcome resistance to growth and detach from desires and expectations.

3. Service involves working to release into freedom that which is trapped, becoming humble, truthful, and transparent about our psychological and spiritual challenges, and caring for the natural world. A very important aspect is the idea of vibrational service. If we recognize that we live in a vast field of energy, we must accept the ethical imperative to radiate a positive presence in the world wherever possible.

I was 100 percent in agreement with Bloom all the way up until the final chapter, where two concepts bothered me. In the first place, Bloom suggests breathing negative energy into ourselves: "Inhale some of this suffering and negativity . . . [It] is breathed into your heart and stomach regions, and held there . . . [until you] imagine this negative energy transforming into something benevolent" While I can appreciate the generosity in the idea of "absorbing" negative vibrations from others in distress, as a long-time Reiki practitioner I don't believe it is necessary to direct the energy we wish to get rid of to any particular place. Breathing it into ourselves sounds like a good way to invite cancer or some other illness. As long as we are choosing our own visualization exercises, why not just visualize the negativity dissipating into nothing?

In the second place, despite my best efforts to understand it, I still stumble over the spiritual practice of assuming personal responsibility for evils one did not directly cause. Bloom uses the example of a Dr. I.H. Len, an educational psychologist who is often called in to help solve a problem at a school. Before starting out, Dr. Len will consider ways in which he is somehow both connected to and responsible for the problem, and will start with "The Ho'oponopono Prayer of Apology," taken from the Polynesian shamanic tradition:

This is my responsibility.
I am sorry.
Forgive me.
Everything is love.
Thank you.

Though I am a huge fan of personal responsibility, and generally like the idea of unconditional responsibility, I just don't appreciate the value in apologizing and asking forgiveness for a problem one did not cause in a literal sense.

Despite these two minor points, I enthusiastically applaud Bloom's efforts to help us realize that all our traditional religions contain common wisdom and recognize the need for, and the presence of, a new spirituality that takes us beyond the limitations of these religions. Moreover, as he stresses, we must learn to distinguish this more vigorous new spirituality from overly easy and largely counterfeit New Age promises. The Power of the New Spirituality admirably meets all these ends.

Margaret Placentra Johnston

The reviewer is author of Faith beyond Belief: Stories of Good People Who Left Their Church Behind (Quest Books).

The Origins of the World's Mythologies

E.J. Michael Witzel
New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 665 + xx pages, paper, $45.

Why do so many creation myths sound so much alike? Why can myths about a flood that nearly destroyed all of humanity be found worldwide? And why do we find motifs of an end of the world in equally farflung places?

There are two basic theories that try to account for these similarities. One is the archetypal, which argues that these universal myths point to a common structure within the human mind. The other is the diffusionist view, which claims that these resemblances point to a common source of myth in the historical past.

E.J. Michael Witzel, a professor of Sanskrit at Harvard, argues on behalf of the diffusionist view in this enormously learned and important volume. Comparing and contrasting the lore of cultures worldwide, he paints a picture of the history of myth that reaches back as far as 100,000 years.

Witzel claims that certain universal mythic elements may actually go back to the earliest stages of humanity, when the whole species still lived in Africa. He calls this strain the "Pan-Gaean" mythos (he uses the geological names of prehistoric continents to characterize these different strata). The next oldest is that of "Gondwana," a mythos that can be found today chiefly in sub- Saharan Africa and Australia. The myths of the rest of the world,”not only Europe and Asia but the Americas and even Polynesi,”are "Laurasian" They share one central feature: unlike the earlier strains, they all present a continuous and more or less similar narrative, beginning with the origins of the cosmos and the gods, extending to the birth of humanity and its different ages and finally to the end of time, whether this is portrayed as the Nordic Gmerung ("twilight of the gods") or as the Last Judgment of Christianity. Indeed, for Witzel, the creation narratives and eschatology of the Bible are only comparatively recent manifestations of the Laurasian mythos (which, he suggests, arose, probably in southwestern Asia, between 40,000 and 20,000 bc).

Why have these myths lasted for so long? According to Witzel, one reason is that, quite simply, they are good stories. Another is that the Laurasian mythos in particular recapitulates the human lifespan on a universal scale: like us, it is saying, the cosmos is born, grows to maturity, and eventually withers and dies.

Even taken as a whole (and the reasons I have just cited do not give the complete picture), Witzel's explanations for the persistence of myth are not entirely satisfying. The flood story”weird”goes back to the Pan-Gaean mythos, which, he says, is over 65,000 years old. Why should it, along with other myths that are almost as durable, have retained its fascination for so long? Whatever facts it may point to are in the remote and unattainable past. Witzel replies in part that, as others have argued, the human brain may be "hardwired" for myth and religion. This may well be the case, but it cuts against his criticisms of the archetypal view, which, after all, is also saying that myth is hardwired into the brain.

Witzel hits a wall in another way as well. He has no trouble fitting the Judeo-Christian mythos into his Laurasian scheme—but then what about the current scientific worldview, complete with its Big Bang, its gestation of the stars, and its picture of a universe that eventually collapses in upon itself? Isn't this just the Laurasian mythos recast yet again, this time by the scientific temperament?

Witzel does not go this far, and one suspects that he simply cannot. But if this is true of the scientific mythos, then we have to grant that any picture that we form of the cosmos may be simply a picture of ourselves writ large. The human being, the esoteric traditions say, is the microcosm of the universe. Is this really so, or are we simply foredoomed by the structures of our minds to see it that way?

Richard Smoley

Finding the On-Ramp to Your Spiritual Path: A Road Map to Joy and Rejuvenation

Jan Phillips 
Wheaton: Quest, 2013. 146 pages, hardcover, $14.95.

Jan Phillips, who has spent time in a Catholic religious community, now devotes her energies to writing and leading workshops on spiritual and evolutionary topics. In her sixth book, Finding the On-Ramp to Your Spiritual Path: A Road Map to Joy and Rejuvenation, she invites readers on a spiritual journey and offers tips on how to progress. Through the analogy of a road trip, Phillips describes an entry point, mentions likely pit stops, and warns readers of roadblocks they may encounter along the way to spiritual wholeness.

Titled with highway terminology, complete with authentic traffic signs, each chapter describes one such phase in the pilgrimage. Readers should not be put off by the "STOP"sign that graces the first chapter. It is a much needed warning that a spiritual stance requires us to stop, look, and listen before proceeding ahead.

Similarly, chapter 2, "Lane Ends," may not sound like a good beginning for a journey to joy, but in fact most of us don't recognize the need for this type of trip until something in the conventional world has failed to work for us.

The following chapters, "Yield," "Curves Ahead," "Divided Highway," "End Divided Highway," etc., each describe an important spiritual concept. Each includes at least one simple but poignant story to illustrate the main point.

My favorite was chapter 9, "Merge." It expresses the importance of being attentive to and engaged with others— present to their experiences, whether they are feeling pain or joy. It also emphasizes the value of expressing ourselves authentically and truthfully to others. "We are mirrors to one another's mission and meaning, for ultimately we have all come here to light up the world," Phillips writes.

While the entire book is filled with spiritual gems, what struck me as the most immediately useful to someone needing a spiritual GPS appeared in chapter 10, "One Way": "Joy is the compass point for this discernment [of our own ultimate concerns, and where we should place our commitments]. If you could solve any global problem in the world, which one would bring you the most joy to solve? Your answer to that is a clue to your next step on the spiritual path."

The final chapters promote a bigger story than that offered by the typical traditional religion. Spiritual maturity is increasingly becoming understood as something broader than a particular belief system invested in some faraway transcendent deity and unduly concerned with personal salvation in the next life. Phillips would have us focus our efforts on things that are more immediate on "this world, these crises, these choices," which are in "our hands." At her recommended destination, we derive our strength from a strong and rich power that comes from within when we follow our own true path.

Certainly Phillips speaks from a frontier not too many have reached, and she is in a position to advise readers from her advanced perspective. I hope telling readers about these steps is an effective way to help them get from point A to point B. Lest the book leave anyone in doubt about Phillips' own spiritual point B, appendix 1, "An Apostle's Creed" elucidates ten of her core beliefs.

Finding the On-Ramp provides yet another way to inspire readers to travel beyond the rules and structure of conventionality and organized religion that keep us powerless and dependent on external forces. Her prescribed route alerts us to our individual callings, and promises a destination where our true bliss can be found in following them— for the sake of our own fulfillment, and for a healthy society as well.

Phillips forecasts a quietly spreading, societywide grassroots revolution wherein many are leaving their churches behind to find the Divine within. If enough of us keep finding inventive ways of presenting this concept, perhaps one day conventional society will recognize the futility of its current divisive "small story" tactics and will come to support individuals in their journey to spiritual maturity.

Margaret Placentra Johnston

The reviewer is author of Faith Beyond Belief: Stories of Good People Who Left Their Church Behind (Quest Books).

Printed in the  Winter 2023 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard,  "From the Editor’s Desk" Quest 111:1, pg 2

Spooky action at a distance. Three times.

Let me explain this cryptic utterance.

The first time: 1687. Sir Isaac Newton published his Principia Mathematica, which first set out his theory of gravity.

People had problems with this. The “mechanical philosophers”—followers of Descartes—objected to the concept of gravity because it set out a nonmechanical form of influence: the gravity of one body affected another even at a distance. Newton couldn’t explain the cause of gravity: he just posited it as a hypothesis, but it turned out to be one that worked very well.

The second time: the early twentieth century. Albert Einstein objected to quantum entanglement—the ability of objects to share a condition even though they are separated—as “spooky action from a distance.” He didn’t like quantum theory, which was at variance with his own theory of relativity. A coming Grand Unification Theory is supposed to harmonize these two theories. We’re still waiting for it.

The third time: now. As Mitch Horowitz ably explains in this issue’s article, psi research, conducted in countless experiments over the last 150 years, has proved the existence of such powers as clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, and even retrocausation—the ability of an act in the future to affect one in the past. Yet the scientific community still resists these findings, and the gross biases of the media (I mean those read by the intelligentsia) leave the hapless public believing that science has refuted the existence of psi capacities. But the exact opposite is true.

In each case, the underlying problem is the same: skepticism about proven scientific findings because many thinkers cannot accept the idea that there can be a causal connection between two events that are not proximate in time or space.

The physicists never really found a mechanism to explain gravity, so they finally had to give in and posit it as one of the fundamental forces of the universe (to be understood later on—maybe). As for quantum theory, the Nobel Prize‒winning physicist Richard Feynman once remarked, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.”

This takes us to the fundamental problem in science: causation. All of scientific theory is predicated on causation: the idea that one thing affects another in a consistent and predictable way. But there is nothing in human thought that is shakier than the concept of causation. As far back as 1913, the British philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote, “The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the [British] monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.” (For more about this, see my book The Dice Game of Shiva.)

One of the most influential treatments of causation was by the Scottish philosopher David Hume in the eighteenth century. Hume begins by saying that as he looks over the whole range of things that are called causes, he can find no one characteristic they have in common: being a cause is not a property like color or size or shape; the same is true of effects. He inferred that since being a cause or an effect is not an innate property, it is a matter of relation. “This relation,” he wrote, is “constant conjunction.”

Hume’s insight had a great effect on Immanuel Kant, who said that it wakened him from his “dogmatic slumber.” Kant developed his entire philosophy as a consequence. He said that causation (like certain other basic concepts such as identity, necessity, and negation) were not the inherent properties of objects in the world but merely “categories” by which we apprehend those objects.

Kant’s theories proved revolutionary in their own right. In any event, the problem of causation has never been solved: it may have no relation to the actual world “out there” but may simply be a way employed by the human mind to make sense of it.

Of course this puts large brackets around all scientific conclusions, which are based on the premise that one specific thing or event will inexorably lead to another. But nothing of the sort may actually be the case.

Furthermore, since causation is based on “constant conjunction,” scientists stumble over what appears to be remote causation, having difficulty believing that an object can influence another despite separation in time and space. Yet, as we have seen, science itself has proved—three times now—that this does occur. One more time, a narrow and inaccurate view of causation is impeding the progress of actual scientific findings.

Science has already stretched the limits of the human mind almost beyond capacity. When it comes to acknowledge the reality of psi phenomena, it will do so again.

Richard Smoley