EDIV

"The Hidden Psychic Market – About Longing, Greed and Spiritual Entrepreneurs" (2017), by journalist Anette Nyman.

The book is presented full-bodiedly and can be purchased here at AdLibris eg.

 

Cecilia Wemmert at Umeå University has interviewed a number of people about their experiences of healthcare, after they dropped out of different spiritual movements. This is the author of "Because You Become a Newcomer in This World When You Leave the Cult" (2016).

Welcome to the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, otherwise known as frequency illusion or recency illusion. This phenomenon occurs when the thing you've just noticed, experienced or been told about suddenly crops up constantly. It gives you the feeling that out of nowhere, pretty much everyone and their cousin are talking about the subject — or that it is swiftly surrounding you. And you're not crazy; You are totally seeing it more. But the thing is, of course, that's because you're noticing it more.

What's the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon? (Huffington Post)

Some kind of youth psychology?

"It is not Islam that has been radicalized, but radicalism that has been Islamized."

Martin Aagård writes about the French author Olivier Roy and his book "Jihad and death – the global appeal of Islamic state" (Aftonbladet, 2017-06-19).

I wanted to write about something that, for lack of a better word, gets called "maturity errors". I will try to develop what is meant. As you get older, you change, at best, mature. This is the natural time. A model for this has been presented by, for example, Erik H Erikson, a stage theory. Some, Jean Piaget, for example, have focused on the little child, while others have tried to cover the entire life span. Erikson is an example of the latter. But this is probably perceived by the vast majority as common sense. You change and mature, through different life experiences. The crowning glory, the target, is perhaps the wise old man or the old man.
With a newage/new-age view of life, the picture becomes more complex, since two additional developmental processes are often expected:
1) Through your own efforts, certain exercises, studies, insights, you have the chance to develop into something higher or larger than is general in this life. This also crept in with, for example, the psychologist Abraham Maslow, with thoughts about the "self-made" man. Within various spiritual systems, this higher stage is called various things: "enlightened", "cosmically conscious", "clear". We humans go differently in this regard. If you play your cards right, do the right things, you have a great chance to get extra far.
2) With the idea of reincarnation, there is an "adult life" that is not limited to this life alone. The person comes back, in a new body, and then builds on what he or she achieved during the lives before. Previous experiences. So, in this life a young person may be more "grown up" than a much older person, if the younger person in the larger developmental process has progressed further in his development, is an "older soul".
Back to the "maturity error". In conversations with people who have a new age/new-age outlook on life, and who may have reached middle age, I find that it can be difficult to navigate. They can tell you that they have become calmer, more wide-sighted, not as convulsively ambitious, etc. And often this is taken as revenue because the special doctrine one has been a follower of, the special method of spiritual development that one has practiced, etc., has been an effective substance. When you're just, just getting old, are you? This is something that most others will also experience.
(This has some relation to the phenomenon of "pre/trans fallacy", i.e. when an immature stage of development is confused with a spiritual one, which the author Ken Wilber has written about, but is still not the same thing.)
A special case is the people that the signature Muertos (2012, January 28) writes about in a blog post, people who had a very idealized, even elitist, image of what they represent or are about to achieve:

I suspect that what's going on is that New Age, now entering its third generation, has developed a theodicy. Now, this is a theological term, but it essentially means an explanation of the existence of evil – why bad things happen to good people. For some of those in the New Age milieu – Foster Gamble, David Icke, Whitley Strieber, Duncan Rhodes and others, all incidentally in middle age and with a long term involvement in the New Age milieu – an explanation is needed as why, if we've entered the Age of Aquarius, is the world less peaceful, equal and progressive than ever? Conspiracy theories offer such a theodicy – the New Age hasn't happened because evil people prevented it from happening (Muertos, January 28).

Paul Vitz (1977) is in on similar thoughts based on the promises that came with the so-called humanistic psychology:

Second, as people aged, they realized that many of the things thought necessary for self-actualization would not be attainable in their lives. Besides interpersonal disasters, there were career failures, serious health problems, and many other disappointments. The discrepancy between the promised "high" of the Maslovian self-actualization or Jungian individuation and the reality of their lives created a vast disappointment and "credibility gap." The belief that psychology could make you happy, that it was the answer, began to fade (Vitz, 1977, Kindle location 2231).

Muertos and Vitz both write about forms of disappointment. In the first case, this is projected out to a greater extent, in the second case it is more of a disillusionment, at best reconciliation.

Översikt Aktuella texter

Definition of the concepts "spiritual emergence" and "spiritual emergency", from the Psychology Dictionary of Nature & Culture (Egidius, 2017).

The essence of Osho's message is that man is born free but during life becomes increasingly locked in by his repressive environment. Through meditation, blockages can come loose, pain points uncovered, and life can begin anew.

Report by Björn af Kleen (DN, 2017-06-16) about the course yard Baravara.

A report in the journal Modern Psychology (a longer version was available in issue 4/2014) by Lotten Wiklund, which also dealt with alternative therapy courses such as Baravara and Mullingstorp. There are also interesting reflections on society and the zeitgeist:

"Today, mental illness accounts for 35 percent of all sick leave and is considered a serious threat to public health. Töres Theorell is professor emeritus of social medicine and has written the book In the wake of the 90's (Karolinska Institutet university press 2006) where he analyzes the development.
"The business environment of the 1990s was characterised by increased competitive thinking, tougher return requirements and, not least, a management approach that we have never seen before. State aid for occupational health care, where preventive work was worked, disappeared and public health care was competitive. The society that has developed since the 1990s places increasing demands on people and today we have a much more distinctive competitive climate," he says.

Criticism of new age spirituality comes from different directions. It may be that this type of spirituality is too commercial, unchrissable, historyless, dumbing down, tasteless, etc. The criticism that is most relevant to this website is the one that is made from a psychological perspective. Three of the sharpest critics of the latter kind, whom I encountered, are Carl Raschke, Mel D. Faber and Paul C. Vitz : MD Faber, in his book "New Age Thinking – A Psychoanalytic Critique", writes: "From the psychoanalytic angle, three items stand out clearly; first, we have an overarching presence of infantile omnipotence, the egocentric, unconscious belief in one's unlimited powers […]; second, we have the urge to fuse regressively with the environment, to attach oneself to the surrounding world (universe) in a way that denies, erases, cancels out the ever-present sense of separation which the cronologically mature individual must cope with during the course of his days on the planet; third, we have a longing for narcissistic inflation, the longing to go about in the belief that one is somehow magical, wonderful […] as opposed to being simply another regular person in the world. […] "I regard New Age thinking as essentially regressive or infantile in nature. It is absorbed, I contend, in matters of symbiotic merger, omnipotence, narcissistic inflation, and in magical thinking and wishing generally. New Age thinking makes war on reality; it denigrates reason; it denies and distorts what I consider to be the existential facts of our human experience; it seeks to restore the past, specifically, the before-separation-world, in an idealized, wish-fulfilling form that has little or no connection to the adult estate." (Faber, 1996, pp 14-15) Vitz (1977) writes about the new spirituality that it "knows no laws at all, since laws imply a law-giver". Raschke, writing (ref?): "I would call it [New Age] the spiritual version of AIDS – that is, it destroys the defences, the immune system, the abilty to cope and function." (Raschke, 1987, quote from any U.S. newspaper, should find ref!)