I had an odd revelation last night about the New Age focus on oneness doctrines. I realized that it is a form of calcification, a reactionary “conservatism” reliant on nostalgia for a non-existent idealized past.

To give context, I met a gentleman- a very kindly, older pantheist at a local “pagan and heathen” social on Thursday. I’m sure he was just trying to be friendly, but he conflated animism with his own brand of pantheism, which he referred as “Science of Mind” or “New Thought”. He proceeded to tell me about how “we’re all one” and such- as if this concept would blow my mind.

It didn’t.

He’d also apparently never even heard the terms “pantheism” and “polytheism”.

To be fair, I’m not disregarding pantheism as a theological concept, rather I’m suggesting that it’s merely a point for consideration instead of a useful guide to orthopraxy and right relation. While the notion of a physics-based underpinning for the Golden Rule might be a helpful jumping off point for someone new to spiritual growth, it is ultimately a dead end.

For sure, there are long-standing animistic and polytheistic religions, such as Hinduism and Shinto, which posit the existence of a unified precursor oneness. However, it’s my understanding that most practitioners focus not on the unified “Spirit”, but on relationships with the many, many forms of that “energy” in the here-and-now.

For sure, there are philosophers and practitioners in those religions who try to place their focus solely on “Brahman” or “Tenchi Kane No Kami” (as opposed to Kami in the plural). However, these generally appear to fall into one of two categories:

• A deeply technical, theological philosophy based on rigorous exploration of texts and revelatory gnosis going back many centuries; or,
• Those faith’s equivalent of “New Age” religions- an offshoot, syncretic blend of Eastern and Western philosophies founded in the last century or two.

The first is comparable to the arguments of religious scholars like Thomas Aquinas- they are only potentially useful to members of the faith with a firm grounding in academic theology and rigorous experiential religious praxis. Otherwise, such philosophical works pose a minefield that can easily lead the seeker further from their deities instead of closer.

The second, as I noted earlier, is a feel-good “path of least resistance” requiring little of practitioners but an easily-parroted New Age orthodoxy and “good vibes”. It is deeply concerned with saying the right things and more focused on right feeling than on right relation with the universe beyond humanity. In this way, it is the spiritualist equivalent of liberal Protestantism, which posits the existence of a single “God” whose characteristics apparently include love and not much else.

Indeed, much of New Age thought is nearly indistinguishable from modern Congregationalism or Methodism with the exception of eschewing the Bible for other source materials. Do those religions help people? Sure. They do a lot of good work for a lot of folks.

But they are ultimately a dead end.

The source, the “Spirit” to which they seek return is not Who or What they think it is. Does it love? Apparently so, but it is the love of Itself as Itself returning to Itself at the unchanging moment in time before Time as we know it began.

Where that Spirit lives, WE cannot. It is inimical to life, to change, to growth, to everything that makes us- US.

We may be made of the same stuff as the Devourer, but we do not have the same nature. We, along with everything in our universe, have grown beyond It and will continue to grow until our universe succumbs to the Divider’s semi-eternal darkness before eventually spawning a new Devourer for a new universe.

What matters is the in-between, the time when our universe can change, can grow, can LIVE.

But that doesn’t have the same feel good vibe as “God is Love” or “Make Spirit Great Again”.

Learning to reject the Devourer and the Divider is difficult- and trying to live rightly in the here-and-now is messy, challenging, and never simple.

But that is where WE are, where we find the work that our Gods ask of us. And one thing is clear from countless myths in countless cultures- many of our deities are working to make sure that life (or at least its accumulated wisdom and meaning) will survive whatever the Big-Ds have in store for our universe.

I prefer Their new age to the alternative.

-In Deos Confidimus