New Age Spirituality and Me: lessons in tolerance and disbelief

Here’s a subjective, yet real, truth. A knowing shared by some folks, I think, when looking around them at the world they’ve chosen to co-create with others like.

I’m wary of many participants in the New Age and Alternative Community (AltCom) spiritual congregation.

The reason is they project their current spiritual status and go about their prognostications and prophecies, energy work and visualizations, channeling and walkings in, starseed heritage finding and higher dimensional chakra aligning as if they were beyond certain realities and in a manner that does not correspond to their actual, material station and responsibilities right here on earth. There is a lack of groundedness, honesty and truth.

Because of this deficit, I find much of their practice to be comprised of feel-good spiritual bypassing and escapism. I’m personally fine with cultural appropriation, which is part of it. I believe that is what America and the world is about. All of the yoga, all of the chanting, all of the meditation, all well and good. If all of that effort is not accompanied by the hard work required to overcome trauma and mediate familial genetic traumas as well as collective ethnic traumas — reflected in the lifestyles and situations experienced during singular and precious life journeys — then they cannot achieve the kind of spiritually-derived clarity sought.

I’m talking about people. Etheric System Practitioners, spiritually bypassing their responsibility for participation in and ongoing relationship to our shared economic and social system. I’m not just talking about the relationship between majority Americans and marginalized Americans, but that of all western interests that prosper from the extractive labor and materials gleaned from underdeveloped nations and peoples around the world.

We keep this going, together. Oppressors, oppressed and every soul in between. It is an individually collective agreement that includes this hologram, universe, Galaxy and solar-system, the quantum particles we coalesce in the shape of this planet and everything above, on and within it.

The intentions, attentions of and unity with the void, an agreement that goes far back in time and that we uphold or dismiss with every choice we make or don’t make. Every thought, every action, every creation supports its continuance or its negation. Living in this world together with all of its harmony and joy, pain and cacaphony, is a choice to become subject to polarity, to live and die by its dictates, good and bad, right and wrong and to even understand polarity as the substrate of reality. A 3D, 4D and spirited reality that many profess that they would like to transcend.

It is said that some will ascend to the 5th or 7th dimension. That they will leave this planet behind to those of lower vibration. They call it the Splitting of the Worlds. And yet, these same folk pay as little attention as possible to the beggar down on the corner by their New York brownstone or to alleviating the symptoms of a predatory capitalist system that is in its prime, extracting life and labor from the entire planet, while living it up, high on the vegan hog. Maybe that is what is meant by higher resonance; seeing material success as an indication that their spirits must be pretty pure also. It tracks, right? The higher your vibration, the mo’ skrilla you get, prosperity vibes all the way to Nirvana!

I have a lot of New Age friends. I’m with y’all. I’m down with checkin’ for the Starseed heritage because of what I know about human evolution and extraterrestrial realities. I’m really cool with yoga and meditation. I’ve actually had some natural — meaning non-drug induced — astral experiences that have taken me beyond the pale, which is why I am the way that I am.

I’m also raised Christian, Southern Baptist, with some Military Protestant, Evangelical and Pentecostal experience. I come from a family that knows the Word and, as a result, I am well-versed in it as well.

I’m down with Buddhism because of those non-drug induced experiences and where I went and what I saw during them. This tradition gave me answers to the nature of Mystery when no other could. Particularly, the Shambhala school as represented by Chogyam Trungpa and Pema Chodron.

I kick it Indigenous by engaging in Ceremony, Sweat Lodges, honoring Indigenous Heritage and uphold the sacred in all sites and situations I am involved with. My African genetics and roots have brought Ifa to me. The Orishas guide me and I have a connection with Asuo-Gyebi and Yemaya, so my spiritual heritage — all of which I claim proudly and with no qualifications — is as wide and diverse as this earth.

For those who practice with crystals and mantras, who seek to raise their personal resonance by aspiring to a higher way of being, do not forget to address the context of your lived reality. Your situation that you were born into. Be thankful for the things that are yours. Honor your honorable ancestors. Work with the dishonorable and seek to alleviate your personal and familial traumas. Accomplish this by recognizing them; by seeking historical information; by querying your family members about your family’s past. You can’t just forget about or ignore it — a whole dimension of your being — and expect your mantras and supplications to work.

You also can’t accept just the good parts of your station in life, with all of its privilege, even if you disown it like Siddhartha did. You’re responsible for your part in all of it and have to remember: the prince NEVER WENT BACK. He never took money from daddy and mummy again. He never lived in the extra house or the uninhabited wing while trying to find himself. He renounced it all and became the Buddha. You have to do the deep, hard work.

I love you all. One and All. We are in this together, allies, family and friends. Sister and brothersouls, we are working to build a better world. But for the world to be better, we have to be better and that means that we have to live our lives in awareness and learning, constantly trying to find out more, constantly digging deeper, flying higher and closer to the sun, constantly seeking to clear ourselves of that which we have internalized through no fault of our own as well as that we have chosen consciously.

We are responsible for our societies now. We are the ones in charge. We decide. We are the present, the past is gone, even if its effects linger. What lingers, we must deal with. There is nobody else to do it. It is nobody else’s responsibility. We may not have been the slaves and Masters who lived in this nation 200 years ago but the system they all co-created is still here with us. My black ancestors chose life, for us, their progeny, despite the probability that their children would be stolen away. My white ancestors, well, they chose to do what they did and I am, we are, here as a result.

And all of that still resonates in all of us. If your family came to America later and you don’t feel a part of that karma, fine, you’ve got your own to deal with as well as what your ancestors accepted as theirs when they took that oath to become American citizens and participate in the bounty that the blood and murder of millions built. You’ve got to deal with the sociopathy that you and your ancestors chose to take on when you matriculated into the American culture and treated people who were of a lower caste as terribly as they have traditionally been treated to fit in and become white.

If you’re European and your issues are of a different nature — having to do with post-colonial immigration and continuing wealth siphoning from developing nations — then your karmic debt is different but no less pressing. Marimba Ani calls it the global white supremacy system. Comparisons to past civilizations don’t work cleanly, as a planetary civilization like the one that we co-create has not existed previously in this Age and the interconnectivity of our nations is more comprehensive and extractive.

When you integrate this genetic cellular database work into your practice and seek to alleviate it energetically as well as materially, we can talk about New Age stuff. Mantras and meditations and working together to build a better world. Because I can sense it when you haven’t integrated this knowing and I can’t work energy with you. I can hear it’s absence in your voice and read it in your field. I can see the loss in your eyes and body language. I can feel it missing in your heart.

Take these words in the spirit they were written in; exasperation, love and an understanding that we are all in this together. Neither your successes or your failures are mine, but we have come together on this journey for a reason. For me to be me and you to be you.

I’ve been where you want to go and it is everything your drugs, LSD, DMT, Ayahuasca, intimated to you that it is. Try to get there without them. Ground yourself in your reality and deal with that which you must to move Beyond, along the way. Peace, and nothing but Love.