New Age Thought (A Variety of Passion)

Difficult problems that require creativity, resourcefulness, and new skills can be found everywhere, for frontline workers and support teams, in business, government, and other public- and private-sector organizations. Consider the case of the captive logistics business of a heavy-industry manufacturer based in the Midwest. In , the logistics group, which had historically been a cost center, reorganized its operations, assigning logistics coordinators to serve groups of customers or drivers rather than dispatchers serving regions.

Where previously the dispatchers might have used a fairly simple assignment system to move freight across a region with the available truckers within that region, today—with the trucking sector struggling with high churn and variable quality—companies that rely on their logistics as a competitive advantage have needed to pay more attention to driver retention and satisfaction. As a result, a dispatcher today has a more complex challenge: It used to be a job you could do with a high school degree, and that was what most of our staff had.

At the same time, trends such as automation, augmentation, virtualization, and gig employment are opening up new opportunities for the companies that can exploit them. In this environment, companies will continuously need to find new ways to be competitive and deliver value for customers, new and old. For that, they will need employees who can solve challenges in a rapidly changing environment, think flexibly, learn quickly, and create new tools and approaches or adapt old tools and approaches to new contexts.

Yet many workers are under significant pressure just to perform, right now. With the ongoing march of technological change and globalization, workers face the disappearance of some types of jobs and transitions to others that require new tools and in many cases, new skills and understanding. At the same time, workers are feeling the effects as companies react to these pressures with cost-cutting, tighter controls, and intense focus on short-term results.

In this environment, mounting performance pressures lead to cognitive biases—such as shortened time horizon, zero-sum thinking, heightened sense of risk, and diminished expectation of reward—that get in the way of effective action for both organizations and individuals. The world is changing too quickly to predict the shape of the next challenge or to forecast all of the skills your employees will need, even in the near future.

But through cultivating passion in the workforce, you may develop people who can spot new opportunities and quickly acquire the skills and other resources needed to pursue those opportunities. The passion of the explorer has three components: An additional 39 percent of workers have one or two attributes of passion see figure 3. This concept of worker passion grew out of our research for the book The Power of Pull. In researching environments where organizations and groups were achieving accelerating performance improvement under conditions of rapid change, we kept seeing these same three attributes.

Tapping into this kind of passion can shift individuals from the fear of change or failure to excitement about the opportunity to test boundaries, to expand skills more rapidly, to apply creativity to meaningful problems, and to have a significant impact. For example, not only do passionate workers report seeking additional skills and knowledge from a much wider variety of sources—they report spending significantly more time outside of work in gaining new skills and knowledge.

The organization further benefits when workers are committed to finding solutions despite—or even because of—obstacles and constraints. In fact, 71 percent of passionate workers find themselves working extra hours even though they are not required. Employees who are optimistic about the future and focused and energized in their work are a powerful resource for companies that will need to continuously invent the future.

In spring , the Deloitte Center for the Edge surveyed more than 3, full-time US workers from 15 industries across various job levels. The purpose was to explore how the attributes of the explorer manifest in the workforce—and how they relate to traditional measures of employee engagement, to gain insight into the impact of employee engagement initiatives on passion. This large sample size allows us to detect relatively small differences between different populations and gives us confidence in our results.

The analysis explored the differences between three distinct clusters that comprise the worker passion survey population: Additionally, the majority of our findings in this report are based on inferential statistics and predictive analytics to bring more durability and robustness in insights. In the nine years that we have been measuring worker passion, the percentage of US workers exhibiting it has remained consistently low, with no statistically significant change over the past three years.

During this same time, employee engagement, although higher, has also remained stagnant at around 32 percent, according to organizations such as Gallup and Glassdoor. The low scores persist despite significant investment from US companies in strategies and initiatives to engage workers. How are passion and engagement related, and what can we take from these efforts to close the passion gap?

Engagement is seen as a key tool in retention and has been associated with reduced downtime, improved productivity, and better customer service, all of which can help improve overall financial performance. Engagement may improve retention, but the people who stick around may not be the people you need; consider that government employees topped the list for retention in a recent study based on Glassdoor data.

Companies will need to focus on passion plus engagement to develop and retain the talent they will need to navigate and succeed in a rapidly changing business environment. What we found is that being engaged is hardly a guarantee of passion: Engaged employees most often lack the questing disposition, the inclination to take on difficult challenges with a desire to learn figure 4. Only 38 percent of engaged employees have the questing disposition—comparable to the overall population, suggesting that whatever else they do, engagement initiatives are not encouraging people to embrace challenges.

Both engagement and passion are more common at higher levels, although engagement is also more heavily represented in middle management and manufacturing roles, each of which scores below average on passion. The statistics might seem to tell a fairly negative story, one of a dispirited and apathetic workforce at odds with the organizations that employ them, passively awaiting their own irrelevance.

This is far from the case. While managers should see the data as a wakeup call, it also contains a more hopeful story: Not only do many people want to be passionate—they want to learn and make a positive impact. They believe themselves to be open to challenges and opportunities. For example, 66 percent of the halfhearted express at least some agreement that they welcome opportunities to try new tasks, while 61 percent suggest that they are excited to encounter new challenges at work see figure 5.

They aspire to be better. The passion of the explorer is defined by behavior, however—a propensity to act in certain ways. When asked questions that get at actual behavior, respondents show a gap between what they believe about taking on challenges and how they actually behave: Fortunately, the three attributes of passion reinforce each other in ways that can activate passion. So although the contented often lack the questing disposition—the tendency to seek out challenges—they may, in the right environment, be propelled into questing behavior if they are strongly committed to making an impact.

Similarly, those strong in connecting as the contented tend to be may discover both greater commitment and increased capacity for questing through the example and support of others who are dedicated to seeking out challenges in order to improve and make an impact faster. In this light, those 39 percent of workers who have at least one attribute of passion—and particularly those engaged who have at least one attribute of passion—have great potential to be developed.

Everyone, we believe, is capable of having the passion of the explorer. For some, work is just the source of a paycheck, not a place for learning, growth, and enthusiasm. In other cases, some jobs—among them, the likeliest targets for automation—may currently be such that almost no one could be passionate doing them. When it comes to developing passion, both the work itself and the work environment matter.

A majority 56 percent of passionate employees report having discovered their passion through work, compared with a third of the contented and 13 percent of the halfhearted. Cultivating worker passion as a cornerstone of talent development , 13 it is relatively rare to have a passion that sustains itself into a job without some trial and error.

In other words, we discover passion through practice. Yet many organizations fail to support—and sometimes squelch—the behaviors we associate with passion. That might mean focusing on different organizational structures, such as teams or workgroups, that support the peer-based learning and curiosity that feed and amplify passion. Given the investment in engagement efforts, why are so few employees seeking out challenges and opportunities to create the new tools, approaches, and ideas that the organization will need for the future?

What can we learn that might point to useful actions to start shifting workers, of all kinds, toward passion? The passionate, the contented, and the halfhearted differed significantly in their answers to several questions about their perceptions of the work environment; figure 6 shows some of those. The first is basic: Others may lack meaningful autonomy at work and have a sense that the risk of taking on a new challenge might not be worth the effort.

When we consider the significant differences in responses to questions about work environment, motivation, and opportunity, it raises the question: Are the passionate in our survey simply employed in environments that encourage them to bring out their passion? Or do the passionate perceive the environment and opportunities around them differently because of their dispositions and skills?

We know that not all passionate employees have passionate co-workers although 82 percent of the passionate believe their co-workers are committed to doing good work , but being around others who are passionate is both inspirational and educational.

If you love them, set them free

Some people, by personality or experience, may be more prone to the attributes of passion: They already have a tendency to connect, a desire to learn and challenge themselves, or a dominant area of interest in which they are committed to making a significant impact. For the passionate, these dispositions are strong enough that they can persevere past some organizational deficiencies, inadequate tools, and knowledge gaps.

While they seek out learning more often and report seeking learning from a wider variety of sources, the passionate also have a mind-set to see everything as a resource and look to figure out how to gain the skills and support they need in pursuit of their passion. For the rest of the workforce—the contented and the halfhearted—beyond the disincentives and structural barriers, lack of guidance, skills, and perspective can be significant barriers to taking on challenges with creativity, imagination, and determination. Giving employees tools to have visibility and connect to others in the organization might create only noise and distraction—or, worse, no noise, if no one finds value in it.

Crafting productive experiments, harvesting learnings from failures, amplifying successes into the organization—these are not trivial skills. Neither are finding the most relevant resources, participating effectively in professional forums, or deploying social media tools. And while all workers may have the capacity for passion, the skills to pursue passion might not be so innate.

As the following sections discuss, overbooked schedules, constant pressure to deliver results, and lack of opportunity to work outside of silos prevent workers from getting experiences in which they could learn the tacit skills of being a questing, connecting, committed worker. Taking on a difficult new challenge almost by definition means deviating from the standard, the accepted, and the proven. Actively pursuing these challenges, and acquiring the resources and perspectives to address them, requires some degree of autonomy and flexibility.

While the appropriate degree of autonomy depends on the nature of the work, the experience of the worker, and the complexity of the organization, the survey reveals that contented employees are far less likely than the passionate to believe that they have sufficient autonomy to achieve their goals.

A hierarchical organization that focuses on process compliance, reporting, and getting things right the first time implicitly denies permission to experiment or share and learn with others outside the chain of command. Micromanagement, a side effect of this culture, at a team or unit level can also frustrate the impulse to seek and experiment, irrespective of broader directives.

Punitive measures or a perception that deviation is not accepted can also get in the way. Consider that only 27 percent of the contented and 5 percent of the halfhearted believe that failure is acceptable if they are trying to improve or do something new. Given that only 12 percent of middle managers and 11 percent of frontline managers have passion, it is easy to see how those who work for and with them might not feel they have the latitude to take risks.

And keep in mind that a culture of overscheduled calendars and frequent fire drills is its own confinement. No amount of autonomy matters if workers lack the time to consider a challenge or opportunity and address it in any way other than the standard response. Creating new approaches and uncovering new opportunities require motivation and commitment to making an impact.

Belief in the potential impact can create higher expectations—of self and others—and help individuals persevere past setbacks and past the comfort of the tried-and-true to achieve better performance. In a heads-down, pressure-filled workplace, workers often lack visibility into the impact of their efforts that would help them find meaning in a challenge. Especially in a large organization, individuals may have trouble seeing how their own work or the work of their group affects how the organization delivers value.

Passions (philosophy)

Specialization and silos further prevent employees from gaining perspective to even be aware of challenges that have significant implications for the organization or its customers. In these environments, employees are unlikely to gain the information or insight to recognize the significance of the challenges they encounter, which is critical to developing and acting with passion.

Consider that only 39 percent of the contented report being encouraged to work cross-functionally versus 71 percent of the passionate , and only 36 percent say that their company collaborates with customers versus 67 percent of the passionate. Shared service and agency models can also often remove the personal connection with internal customers and partners that traditionally provided a line of sight to impact and strengthened the emotional component of meaning.

Building a more passionate future workforce | Deloitte Insights

The increased number of permanently remote and geographically removed workers can also weaken that connection to the downstream impact of our efforts even while engagement metrics derived from connection to team members might be strong. For example, our own data analysis colleagues were supporting a visualization initiative for the Center. In a recent recruiting video for Transport for London TfL , the government entity responsible for the roads, rails, and transit of the greater London area, employees from the data analytics group talked about what got them excited about TfL.

With a rapidly growing population and changing transit needs, the organization operates with a sense of urgency, speed, and opportunity. Despite not interacting directly with the average transit customer, employees have a strong sense of having a tangible effect on the daily lives of 8 million Londoners. Given the constraints, TfL had to focus on making the challenge—the enormous task of moving an ever-growing population smoothly—meaningful to make the job compelling. Taking on challenges and facing uncertainty with enthusiasm also require a degree of confidence, in oneself and in the organization, that the outcome will be worth the effort.

Without that belief, if the potential personal risk outweighs the perceived benefit—or if the organization has not demonstrated that it has the resources, capabilities, and commitment to take advantage of successful new approaches and to learn from unsuccessful attempts — employees may become cynical.

Passionate workers generally perceive greater benefit and support from their organizations than do their contented co-workers. The passionate are motivated intrinsically, learn more quickly, and tend to perceive personal benefits more broadly in the context of opportunities to learn and lack of punitive measures; 88 percent of the passionate believe that the organization supports their developing new skills to help them achieve long-term goals.

The second part of deciding if a pursuit is worth the effort depends upon whether the group or organization has demonstrated the will or ability to act on it. Yet while the passionate were more likely to express this optimism, it is also strongly associated with engagement. Returning to the idea of failure, researchers have found that the more we have riding on our judgments, professionally or psychologically, the more likely we are to ignore, reinterpret, and redirect our failures rather than learn from them, to question anything that casts doubt on our assumptions rather than question the assumptions themselves.

The problems are related and point to three ways in which executives can change the dynamic to begin to activate the latent passion in their workforce. Conveniently, these actions may also bolster those who are already passionate in your organization and will likely create a more encouraging environment for the halfhearted as well. If you act with passion, people will notice. This serves two purposes: First, by making your own passion visible, through action, you begin to create a culture that encourages others around you to embrace difficult problems and take risks.

More than words or mission statements, workers learn how work gets done by observing how their managers and leaders work. Perhaps more important than making experimentation and risk-taking acceptable or even expected is the practical value of providing examples for workers in real time. Second, your actions will start to attract other passionate workers. Find and connect with others who are behaving with passion in the organization, and connect them with each other as well. Shine a light on their efforts, and your own, to demonstrate risk-taking, experimentation, and failing productively.

Make their efforts more visible to your organization so that they, too, can lead by example. Drawing on your unique experiences with questing, connecting, and making an impact, brainstorm ways to spread passion, and work to build a culture of taking on challenges and learning. Learn from the way they approach problems and opportunities. What would motivate me the same way these people are motivated?

What would inspire this same level of commitment from me? How do you identify the passionate? Besides acting with passion yourself, which will tend to draw out other passionate workers, look for where someone is making waves or leading the charge, regardless of whether she has the title or role to do so. The passionate are not likely to be the ones on official task forces, seeking approvals and buy-in and navigating the formal structures of the company. Others in the organization who are closer to the challenge will tend to know who is deeply interested in and committed to it, even if they view those people as obstacles or nuisances.

Over time, connecting and elevating the passionate can create a positive feedback loop. The passionate draw in more people, and from this growing group, you can pull examples of efforts, successes, and failures and make them visible to the organization. Others will begin to exercise their own passionate behaviors. With the majority of executives and management neither engaged nor passionate, commit to making a personal change, not just an organizational one.

Understanding what matters not just to the customer, the product, or the company but to our partners, collaborators, and society and where to direct our efforts to create an impact is a prerequisite to finding meaningful challenges and making effective use of autonomy. This is important given that most survey respondents see their workplaces as siloed.

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Cross-functional work and more direct collaboration with internal and external customers help workers to understand not only what the formal goals are but how smaller impacts add up to bigger ones. They get a better sense of why their individual projects matter, which can result in increased commitment; more importantly, seeing the bigger picture allows them to think about what they know and how to apply it to a potentially bigger issue. There are many ways to encourage workers to work cross-functionally, but creating special teams to address specific challenges, such as a particular product constraint or a unique customer issue, is one way to kickstart that behavior in a way that is relevant and rewarding.

Leaders can help employees frame powerful questions by being explicit about challenges and setting stretch goals.

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Meaningful challenges might be aligned with specific company goals. They might attack a key operating metric that drives cost; they could aim to drive revenue in a market or segment the company has targeted for growth. In high-growth companies, high-impact challenges might address constraints or other obstacles to rapid growth. Setting useful context around significant challenges and providing clear overarching goals is critical in a company that still maintains much of the move fast, break things ethos it adopted as a start-up.

For example, when the logistics company mentioned earlier reorganized its dispatchers to align with either groups of drivers or groups of customers rather than regions, the sense of impact and accountability changed. To support the growing business that was now serving external customers in a tight labor market, the leadership implemented new metrics focused on operations and profitability as well as customer service and driver satisfaction.

In their expanded role, the dispatchers also get to know the drivers or customers they are supporting and have better visibility into the impact of decisions both upstream and downstream. New Age is a term applied to a range of spiritual or religious beliefs and practices that developed in Western nations during the s. Precise scholarly definitions of the New Age differ in their emphasis, largely as a result of its highly eclectic structure. Although analytically often considered to be religious, those involved in it typically prefer the designation of spiritual or Mind, Body, Spirit and rarely use the term "New Age" themselves.

Many scholars of the subject refer to it as the New Age movement , although others contest this term and suggest that it is better seen as a milieu or zeitgeist. As a form of Western esotericism , the New Age drew heavily upon a number of older esoteric traditions, in particular those that emerged from the occultist current that developed in the eighteenth century.

Such prominent occult influences include the work of Emanuel Swedenborg and Franz Mesmer , as well as the ideas of Spiritualism , New Thought and Theosophy. A number of mid-twentieth century influences, such as the UFO religions of the s, the Counterculture of the s , and the Human Potential Movement , also exerted a strong influence on the early development of the New Age. The exact origins of the phenomenon remain contested, but there is general agreement that it developed in the s, at which time it was centred largely in the United Kingdom.

It expanded and grew largely in the s and s, in particular within 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 highly eclectic nature, a number of beliefs commonly found within the New Age have been identified. Theologically , the New Age typically adopts a belief in a holistic form of divinity that imbues all of the universe, including human beings themselves. There is thus a strong emphasis on the spiritual authority of the self.

This is accompanied by a common belief in a wide variety of semi-divine non-human entities, such as angels and masters , with whom humans can communicate, particularly through the form of channeling. Typically viewing human history as being divided into a series of distinct ages, a common New Age belief is that whereas once humanity lived in an age of great technological advancement and spiritual wisdom, it has entered a period of spiritual degeneracy, which will be remedied through the establishment of a coming 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 a New Age approach to science that seeks to unite science and spirituality. Centred primarily in Western countries, those involved in the New Age have been primarily from middle and upper-middle-class backgrounds.

The degree to which New Agers are involved in the milieu 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 established Christian organisations as well as modern Pagan and indigenous communities.

From the s onward, the New Age became the subject of research by academic scholars of religious studies. The New Age phenomenon has proved difficult to define, [2] with much scholarly disagreement as to its scope. The scholar of religion Paul Heelas characterised the New Age as "an eclectic hotch-potch of beliefs, practices, and ways of life" that can be identified as a singular phenomenon through their use of "the same or very similar lingua franca to do with the human and planetary condition and how it can be transformed.

The scholar of religion Wouter Hanegraaff adopted a different approach by asserting that "New Age" was "a label attached indiscriminately to whatever seems to fit it" and that as a result it "means very different things to different people". Chryssides called it "a counter-cultural Zeitgeist ", [13] while the sociologist of religion Steven Bruce suggested that New Age was a milieu ; [14] Heelas and scholar of religion Linda Woodhead called it the "holistic milieu". There is no central authority within the New Age phenomenon that can determine what counts as New Age and what does not.

While acknowledging that "New Age" was a problematic term, the scholar of religion James R. Lewis stated that it remained a useful etic category for scholars to use because, "There exists no comparable term which covers all aspects of the movement. The New Age is also a form of Western esotericism. The New Age has also been identified by various scholars of religion as part of the cultic milieu. Through their shared marginalisation within a given society, these disparate ideas interact and create new syntheses.

Hammer identified much of the New Age as corresponding to the concept of " folk religions " in that it seeks to deal with existential questions regarding subjects like death and disease in "an unsystematic fashion, often through a process of bricolage from already available narratives and rituals". The first, the social camp , represents groups that primarily seek to bring about social change, while the second, the occult camp , instead focus on contact with spirit entities and channeling.

York's third group, the spiritual camp , represents a middle ground between these two camps that focuses largely on individual development. The term new age , along with related terms like new era and new world , long predate the emergence of the New Age movement, and have widely been used to assert that a better way of life for humanity is dawning. Between the s and s a small number of groups and individuals became preoccupied with the concept of a coming "New Age" and prominently used the term accordingly. According to scholar Nevill Drury , the New Age has a "tangible history", [44] although Hanegraaff expressed the view that most New Agers were "surprisingly ignorant about the actual historical roots of their beliefs".

As a form of Western esotericism, [47] the New Age has antecedents that stretch back to southern Europe in Late Antiquity. Scholars call this new esoteric trend occultism , and this occultism was a key factor in the development of the worldview from which the New Age emerged. One of the earliest influences on the New Age was the Swedish 18th century Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg , who professed the ability to communicate with angels, demons, and spirits.

Swedenborg's attempt to unite science and religion and his prediction of a coming era in particular have been cited as ways that he prefigured the New Age. A further major influence on the New Age was the Theosophical Society , an occult group co-founded by the Russian Helena Blavatsky in the late 19th century.

In her books Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine , Blavatsky claimed that her Society was conveying the essence of all world religions, and it thus emphasized a focus on comparative religion. Hanegraaff believed that the New Age's direct antecedents could be found in the UFO religions of the s, which he termed a "proto-New Age movement". From a historical perspective, the New Age phenomenon is rooted in the counterculture of the s.

In Britain, a number of small religious groups that came to be identified as the "light" movement had begun declaring the existence of a coming new age, influenced strongly by the Theosophical ideas of Blavatsky and Bailey. All of these groups created the backdrop from which the New Age movement emerged. Gordon Melton point out, the New Age phenomenon represents "a synthesis of many different preexisting movements and strands of thought".

By the early s, use of the term "New Age" was increasingly common within the cultic milieu. He noted that as this happened, the meaning of the term "New Age" changed; whereas it had once referred specifically to a coming era, at this point it came to be used in a wider sense to refer to a variety of spiritual activities and practices. The counterculture of the s had rapidly declined by the start of the s, in large part due to the collapse of the commune movement, [80] but it would be many former members of the counter-culture and hippie subculture who subsequently became early adherents of the New Age movement.

Hanegraaff terms the broader development the New Age sensu lato , or "New Age in the wider sense". Not everyone who came to be associated with the New Age phenomenon openly embraced the term "New Age", although it was popularised in books like David Spangler 's work Revelation: Healing Self and Society. Erhard , a transformational training course that became a prominent part of the early movement.

Several key events occurred, which raised public awareness of the New Age subculture: The Convergence attracted more people to the movement than any other single event. Knight Ramtha , Neale Donald Walsch Conversations with God note that Walsch denies being a "channeler" and his books make it obvious that he is not one, though the text emerged through a dialogue with a deeper part of himself in a process comparable to automatic writing contributed to the movement's growth.

New Age ideas influenced the development of rave culture in the late s and s. By the late s, some publishers dropped the term "New Age" as a marketing device. Melton presented a conference paper in which he argued that, given that he knew of nobody describing their practices as "New Age" anymore, the New Age had died. Other scholars disagreed with Melton's idea; in Daren Kemp stated that "New Age is still very much alive". In , the scholar of religion Hugh Urban argued that New Age spirituality is growing in the United States and can be expected to become more visible: The New Age places strong emphasis on the idea that the individual and their own experiences are the primary source of authority on spiritual matters.

New Age religiosity is typified by its eclecticism. Hess noted that in his experience, a common attitude among New Agers was that "any alternative spiritual path is good because it is spiritual and alternative".

As part of its eclecticism, the New Age draws ideas from many different cultural and spiritual traditions from across the world, often legitimising this approach by reference to "a very vague claim" about underlying global unity. A belief in divinity is integral to New Age ideas, although understandings of this divinity vary. Most New Age groups believe in an Ultimate Source from which all things originate, which is usually conflated with the divine. Cosmogonical creation stories are common in New Age sources, [] with these accounts reflecting the movement's holistic framework by describing an original, primal oneness from which all things in the universe emanated.

MacKian argued that a central, but often overlooked, element of the phenomenon was an emphasis on " spirit ", and in particular participants' desire for a relationship with spirit. New Age literature often refers to benevolent non-human spirit-beings who are interested in humanity's spiritual development; these are variously referred to as angels, guardian angels , personal guides, masters, teachers, and contacts. Although not present in every New Age group, [] a core belief within the milieu is in channeling. Prominent examples of New Age channeling include Jane Roberts' claims that she was contacted by an entity called Seth, and Helen Schucman's claims to have channeled Jesus Christ.

New Age thought typically envisions the world as developing through cosmological cycles that can be identified astrologically. A common belief among the New Age is that humanity has entered, or is coming to enter, a new period known as the Age of Aquarius , [] which Melton has characterised as a "New Age of love, joy, peace, abundance, and harmony[ There are also differences in how this new age is envisioned. There are various beliefs within the milieu as to how this new age will come about, but most emphasise the idea that it will be established through human agency ; others assert that it will be established with the aid of non-human forces such as spirits or extra-terrestrials.

Another recurring element of New Age is an emphasis on healing and alternative medicine.

The healing elements of the movement are difficult to classify given that a variety of terms are used, with some New Age authors using different terms to refer to the same trends, while others use the same term to refer to different things. The first of these was the Human Potential Movement , which argues that contemporary Western society suppresses much human potential, and accordingly professes to offer a path through which individuals can access those parts of themselves that they have alienated and suppressed, thus enabling them to reach their full potential and live a meaningful life.

Hanegraaff identified the second main healing current in the New Age movement as being holistic health. This emerged in the s out of the free clinic movement of the s, and has various connections with the Human Potential Movement. The inter-relation of holistic health with the New Age movement is illustrated in Jenny Butler's ethnographic description of "Angel therapy" in Ireland. According to Drury, the New Age attempts to create "a worldview that includes both science and spirituality", [44] while Hess noted how New Agers have "a penchant for bringing together the technical and the spiritual, the scientific and the religious".

In this, the milieu is interested in developing unified world views to discover the nature of the divine and establish a scientific basis for religious belief. Despite New Agers' appeals to science, most of the academic and scientific establishments dismiss "New Age science" as pseudo-science , or at best existing in part on the fringes of genuine scientific research. There is no ethical cohesion within the New Age phenomenon, [] although Hanegraaff argued that the central ethical tenet of the New Age is to cultivate one's own divine potential.

According to Hanegraaff, the question of death and afterlife is not a "pressing problem requiring an answer" in the New Age. Sociological investigation indicates that certain sectors of society are more likely to engage in New Age practices than others. Sutcliffe noted that although most influential New Age figureheads were male, [] approximately two-thirds of its participants were female. The majority of New Agers are from the middle and upper-middle classes of Western society.

Heelas added that within the baby boomers, the movement had nevertheless attracted a diverse clientele. The degree to which individuals are involved in the New Age varies. The second consisted of "serious part-timers" who worked in unrelated fields but who nevertheless spent much of their free time involved in movement activities.

The third was that of "casual part-timers" who occasionally involved themselves in New Age activities but for whom the movement was not a central aspect of their life. MacKian suggested that this phenomenon was "an inherently social mode of spirituality", one which cultivated a sense of belonging among its participants and encouraged relations both with other humans and with non-human, otherworldly spirit entities.

Online connections were one of the ways that interested individuals met new contacts and established networks. Some New Agers advocate living in a simple and sustainable manner to reduce humanity's impact on the natural resources of Earth; and they shun consumerism. New Age centres have been set up in various parts of the world, representing an institutionalised form of the movement. Criticising mainstream Western education as counterproductive to the ethos of the movement, many New Age groups have established their own schools for the education of children, although in other cases such groups have sought to introduce New Age spiritual techniques into pre-existing establishments.

New Age spirituality has led to a wide array of literature on the subject and an active niche market, with books, music, crafts, and services in alternative medicine available at New Age stores, fairs , and festivals.

A number of New Age proponents have emphasised the use of spiritual techniques as a tool for attaining financial prosperity, thus moving the movement away from its counter-cultural origins. Embracing this attitude, various books have been published espousing such an ethos, established New Age centres have held spiritual retreats and classes aimed specifically at business people, and New Age groups have developed specialised training for businesses. Given that it encourages individuals to choose spiritual practices on the grounds of personal preference and thus encourages them to behave as a consumer, the New Age has been considered to be well suited to modern society.

The term " New Age music " is applied, sometimes in a derogative manner, to forms of ambient music , a genre that developed in the s and was popularised in the s, particularly with the work of Brian Eno. The style began in the late s and early s with the works of free-form jazz groups recording on the ECM label; such as Oregon , the Paul Winter Consort , and other pre-ambient bands; as well as ambient music performer Brian Eno, classical avant-garde musician Daniel Kobialka , [] [] and the psychoacoustic environments recordings of Irv Teibel.

New-age music evolved to include a wide range of styles from electronic space music using synthesizers and acoustic instrumentals using Native American flutes and drums , singing bowls , Australian didgeredoos and world music sounds to spiritual chanting from other cultures. While many commentators have focused on the spiritual and cultural aspects of the New Age movement, it also has a political component. The New Age political movement became visible in the s, peaked in the s, and continued into the s. Lewis observed that, despite the common caricature of New Agers as narcissistic, "significant numbers" of them were "trying to make the planet a better place on which to live," [] and scholar J.

Although New Age activists have been motivated by New Age concepts like holism, interconnectedness, monism, and environmentalism, their political ideas are diverse, [] ranging from far-right and conservative through to liberal , socialist , and libertarian. The standard political labels—left or right, liberal or conservative—miss the mark. The extent to which New Age spokespeople mix religion and politics varies. He believed that in contrast to the conventional political focus on the "institutional and economic symptoms" of society's problems, his "New Age politics" would focus on "psychocultural roots" of these issues.

Many New Agers advocate globalisation and localisation , but reject nationalism and the role of the nation-state. Scholars have noted several New Age political groups. It advocated a change in consciousness — in "basic underlying assumptions" — in order to come to grips with global crises. According to Melton et al. Group decision-making was facilitated by short periods of silence. Lewis counted "Green politics" as one of the New Age's more visible activities. Green Party movement began as an initiative of a handful of activists including Charlene Spretnak , co-author of a "'new age' interpretation" of the German Green movement Capra and Spretnak's Green Politics , and Mark Satin, author of New Age Politics.

Greens' founding document, the "Ten Key Values" statement. While the term "New Age" may have fallen out of favor, [] [] scholar George Chryssides notes that the New Age by whatever name is "still alive and active" in the 21st century. Mainstream periodicals tended to be less than sympathetic; sociologist Paul Ray and psychologist Sherry Anderson discussed in their book The Cultural Creatives , what they called the media's "zest for attacking" New Age ideas, and offered the example of a Lance Morrow essay in Time magazine. Some New Agers and New Age sympathizers responded to such criticisms.

For example, sympathizers Ray and Anderson said that much of it was an attempt to "stereotype" the movement for idealistic and spiritual change, and to cut back on its popularity. Initially, academic interest in the New Age was minimal. Gordon Melton in Sutcliffe and Gilhus argued that 'New Age studies' could be seen as having experienced two waves; in the first, scholars focused on "macro-level analyses of the content and boundaries" of the "movement", while the second wave featured "more variegated and contextualized studies of particular beliefs and practices".

Mainstream Christianity has typically rejected the ideas of the New Age; [] Christian critiques often emphasise that the New Age places the human individual before God. Peretti 's novel This Present Darkness , which sold over a million copies; it depicted the New Age as being in league with feminism and secular education as part of a conspiracy to overthrow Christianity.

An issue of academic debate has been regarding the connection between the New Age movement and contemporary Paganism , or Neo-Paganism. Kelly stated that Paganism "parallels the New Age movement in some ways, differs sharply from it in others, and overlaps it in some minor ways". Various differences between the two movements have been highlighted; the New Age movement focuses on an improved future, whereas the focus of Paganism is on the pre-Christian past.

One of the most contentious aspects of the New Age has been its adoption of spiritual ideas and practises from other, particularly non-Western cultures. The New Age has been accused of cultural imperialism , misappropriating the sacred ceremonies, and abuse of the intellectual and cultural property of indigenous peoples. They see the New Age movement as either not fully understanding, deliberately trivializing, or distorting their way of life, [] and have declared war on all such " plastic medicine people " who are appropriating their spiritual ways.

Indigenous leaders have spoken out against individuals from within their own communities who may go out into the world to become a "white man's shaman," and any "who are prostituting our spiritual ways for their own selfish gain, with no regard for the spiritual well-being of the people as a whole". Toward the end of the 20th century, some social and political analysts and activists were arguing that the New Age political perspective had something to offer mainstream society. Other political thinkers and activists saw New Age politics less positively.

On the political right, author George Weigel argued that New Age politics was just a retooled and pastel-colored version of leftism. Cloud , wrote a lengthy critique of New Age politics as a political ideology; [] she faulted it for not being opposed to the capitalist system , or to liberal individualism. A criticism of New Age often made by leftists is that its focus on individualism deflects participants from engaging in socio-political activism.

Journalist Harvey Wasserman suggested that New Age activists were too averse to social conflict to be effective politically. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article is about the New Age movement. For the astrological age in western astrology, see Age of Aquarius.

For other uses, see New Age disambiguation. Often, the definition given actually reflects the background of the scholar giving the definition.