As a child who attended a Methodist Christian Church I realized that there was something wrong with the "old age" stuff. My great grandfather on my dad's side had been a prominent minister in the area. My father was a closeted Urantia Book reader. At 21 I had a spiritual awakening brought on by acute drug and alcohol addiction. So I began searching in earnest for spiritual truth. As a result, I get called a "new age" person usually by Christian critics. I think Jesus was sort of "new age" at the time he was on earth, that's why old age people tried to stop his teachings.
Wiki:
New Age - Wikipedia
New Age is a range of
spiritual or
religious practices and beliefs which rapidly grew in
Western society during the early 1970s. Its highly
eclectic and unsystematic structure makes a precise definition difficult. Although many scholars consider it a religious movement, its adherents typically see it as spiritual or as unifying Mind-Body-Spirit, and rarely use the term
New Age themselves. Scholars often call it the
New Age movement, although others contest this term and suggest it is better seen as a
milieu or
zeitgeist.
As a form of
Western esotericism, the New Age drew heavily upon esoteric traditions such as the
occultism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the work of
Emanuel Swedenborg and
Franz Mesmer, as well as
Spiritualism,
New Thought, and
Theosophy. More immediately, it arose from mid-twentieth century influences such as the
UFO religions of the 1950s, the
counterculture of the 1960s, and the
Human Potential Movement. Its exact origins remain contested, but it became a major movement in the 1970s, at which time it was centered largely in the United Kingdom. It expanded widely in the 1980s and 1990s, in particular in the United States. By the start of the 21st century, the term
New Age was increasingly rejected within this milieu, with some scholars arguing that the New Age phenomenon had ended.
Despite its eclectic nature, the New Age has several main currents.
Theologically, the New Age typically accepts a
holistic form of divinity that pervades the universe, including human beings themselves, leading to a strong emphasis on the spiritual authority of the self. This is accompanied by a common belief in a variety of semi-divine non-human entities, such as
angels and
masters, with whom humans can communicate, particularly by
channeling through a human intermediary. Typically viewing history as divided into spiritual ages, a common New Age belief is in a forgotten age of great technological advancement and spiritual wisdom, declining into periods of increasing violence and spiritual degeneracy, which will now be remedied by the emergence of an
Age of Aquarius, from which the milieu gets its name. There is also a strong focus on healing, particularly using forms of
alternative medicine, and an emphasis on unifying
science with spirituality.
The dedication of New Agers varied considerably, from those who adopted a number of New Age ideas and practices to those who fully embraced and dedicated their lives to it. The New Age has generated criticism from Christians as well as
modern Pagan and
Indigenous communities. From the 1990s onward, the New Age became the subject of research by academic scholars of
religious studies.