New Age spirituality has become a cesspool of garbage

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I don't feel it's "destroyed"-----it's all redeemable......

There's an obviously large cesspool of cargo-occultism which is almost a carbon copy of prosperity doctrine Christianity or belief in Santa-Christ where God is this big guy in the sky and if you don't have something and you want it you pray to him and he'll deliver it! (my view on that might not be quite as dim when it's a critical item for survival rather than a vanity or status symbol but it all gets rolled up together).

When I was in Hermetic orders starting almost a decade ago what I ran into is the imperial white light that turned everything to fluff with guard rails. IMHO this stuff really can't work well for self-development if it doesn't account for all aspects of reality, including the really challenging aspects like Darwinian game theory and multipolar traps that we wish we didn't have to deal with.


My take on where you're at - I think it's important to remember that there's a lot more to these questions than 'what social group do I want to be a part of?'. You can maybe take a pass on being a part of various movements or groups on that basis, ie. not fitting in, but I don't know that I'd stake reductive materialism vs otherwise on social factors. Your best guess or understanding of the ontology of the cosmos, what's real and what isn't, shouldn't be governed by whose disappointed you lately, it needs to be approached on first principles.

What I found a lot safer and more durable than white light Rosicrucian or Hermetic doctrine, even if I met lots of quite lovely people, is the neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers who are reinvigorating things like absolute idealism and Russellian monism in very technical ways. I think both of these are promising models for giving pathways for the unexplainable - like stupidly strong synchronicity to the degree that apophenia can't begin to explain or people having NDE's and bringing back information about the physical world - from distances - that can't be explained other than that the cosmos isn't dead unconscious matter.

I don't know if it'll work for you but maybe take a shot at some of these discussions on Curt Jaimungal's Theories of Everything, or check them out on Lex Fridman or Louis Razo Bravo's podcasts (some of the people to look for would be Donald Hoffman, Bernardo Kastrup, Tom Campbell, Karl Friston, Michael Levin, John Vervaeke, Stephen Wolfram, Chris Langan, and Andres Gomez Emilsson). Another podcast worth checking out is metaRising / Waking Cosmos who has a similar blend of cognitive scientists and science-informed metaphysicians and philosophers.

What the above give me is a baseline frame of what I can expect of reality and the world around me.

I also look back at my early days with this stuff where I could be persuaded that my life could completely change if I took up serious spiritual practice (it gave me some benefits but clearly didn't change how dangerous the world was). I think the only reasons I was persuaded as such seemed to be just how lazy and sloppy people seemed to be with their thinking, their all-too-easy dismissals of things, ie. that arguments on these topics were all social pissing and dominance contests with little coherent thought, and I figured if I'd been pulled toward Neoplatonism for much of my life and the world was a tree of apes sh--ting on each other that it was just a bright gleaming gem hidden from consummate narcissists. Having spent the time that I did there I understand that it's a lot more complicated than that.

The Internet is full of people with personal agendas. Many of which has nothing to do with universal truths.

I believe one can trust the people you actually meet in person more than people on the Internet.

You Brits had the Blitz-----that certainly bought you folks together, for sure!

The people who lived during the Blitz generation would probably think of at least some young people as entitled folks who were given everything in life, but never appreciated it.

^You're the OP; you have the right to veer your thread "off-topic."

Frankly, I feel like diversions from the topic at hand often enhance the topic at hand.