My stance with New Age is that the arbitrary-ness of it all is really off putting and misleading, personally speaking. I believe that what we call "manifestation" is something we already "do" by simply existing, in presence, and that trough deliberate use of intent that we change our experience to the desired one, as the implications of magic reveals that linear time and conventional cause-effect relationships are merely illusory. The same goes for the ascension bit, as people discover magic, they eventually "evolve" in becoming more aware of the thin line between the world itself and their minds. Modern New Agers emphasize in techniques, feelings, vibrations (concise morality dichotomies of "negative" and "positive" energies) and overall metaphorical fixation as something
necessary or
crucial to manifestation when...it's not. I mean, the mere existence of Chaos Magick/Post-Chaos Magic is enough to make an inquiry about those kind of assessments. Of course i'm talking about those communities out there that opt for an almost religious attitude towards New Age and general explanations (or lack of those) that i found to be detrimental, insane, and not useful at all.
As far as the New Age movement getting anything "right", I don't see any difference from any other path. For me, its all about the application of Will, style conforming to inner nature. Formulae and terminology are empty vessels to be filled, and the ethic of "positive thinking" can be beneficial to anyone who knows how to use it to damn (or use) the pain of existence and march forward.
Really great post. New Age is just an approach of many, despite their fanatics telling you that is the "end all of it all". Also, "positive thinking" hippie attitude of the new age is one of the many main reasons why i frown upon it. "Positive" could mean anything for an infinite myriad of persons, the same with "God"; manifestation is an amoral Santa Claus that doesn't care about morality, because "morality" is just an storyline, and whatever bad or good is just a distinct flavor of the experience in the end. In my perspective what gurus and NA authors refers to "bad behaviour", for me can be actually a way of living, and there is no contradiction because your personal will belongs to the eye of the beholder ultimately, and the magician decides for himself. This, and for others reasons that would be redundant to get into, is why i see New Age as the crypto-evangelicals/Jeovah Witnesses of the practitioners.
My beef with the New Age, in general, is aesthetic. A lot of material I have come across is just fucking corny to me,
This.
The Neville Goddard (LOA) folks are far more hardcore than they appear from the outside, More so than neo-Wiccans.
I found this to be the opposite in my experience, but maybe it depends of who read Goddard material. I found that people who never had genuine experimentation with the practice prior to him end up...
bad in the head when coming across LOA, while magicians from Chaos Magick backgrounds and others familiar with the practice were able to integrate his material with no problem. Personally, i was never fond of Goddard, it never made sense to me, and i never found it useful at all, but the people i did learned from synthesized his stuff with a greater perspective, and a grounded, more logical approach in a way that resonates with me better, so i forgot about him in the end.
As for LoA overall, as i stated above, i consider it a very dubious framework that cause more trouble than it's worth. The subconscious, just like the ego, is just a conceptual fictional idea, and has no substrate by it's own unless you act upon it, and in that case,
they are an entirely fabricated and illusory constraint, byproduct of not understanding, forgetting about, or not being aware of the impersonal nature of intent. The essence of any magical act, i believe, is only deciding that you doing the ritual cause things to happen, and committing to it,
it does. Any further complexity beyond that would be confusing the solid mechanical facts of the experience with abstraction, which is what actually lead to insanity: Acting on lower truths. New Age failed from the beginning assuming that our will is dependent in arbitrary morality, sensory theater, and procedures, when they were all fabricated systemics that we could drop in favor of rising above complexity and embracing our personal nature beyond any foreign notions of "what's wrong and what's right". That's my understanding of it at the moment.
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