a newage++ jehovah

The following is from an article titled "Desperately Seeking Spirituality" by Eugene Taylor (more about whom in a minute) that ran in Psychology Today over ten years ago (11/1/1994)... Look beyond the crystals and the seances; this is not some touchy-feely new age fad. author's note: Oh yes it is. Its cuts wider and deeper. It is the engine of a whole paradigm shift in society with the power to heal the mind-body split that has dominated western thinking for centuries, and while we're at it, the new spiritual awakening promises to remake the political landscape as well. Norman Mailer, in a recent article in Esquire, says he sees it in Madonna. The actor Richard Gere believes it is in helping resettle in the United States Tibetan Buddhists whose own country was overrun by Chinese Communists. Singer Don Henley has found it in his effort to preserve Thoreau's Walden Pond as a protected wilderness and to keep it from developers who look beyond the waters and see only condominiums and office towers. Mitch Kapor, cofounder of Lotus software company, sees it in cyberspace, which he regards as a great new spiritual frontier. With a cast like that, how could anyone doubt that, as Taylor says a bit further on, "our conception of spirituality is undergoing enormous change"? In fact, he wrote a whole book about it in 1999: Shadow Culture: Psychology and Spirituality in America. It would constitute an excellent historical overview of how the Mystic Bourgeoisie developed, were Taylor not such an insufferable cheerleader. Here's a picture of him leading a cheer now... Celebrating the One Hundredth Anniversary of William James' Lectures on The Varieties of Religious Experience The Swedenborg Society at Harvard Presents: A Free Lecture Series on The Spiritual Currents of American Pragmatism Dr. Eugene Taylor, Lecturer on Psychiatry Harvard Medical School And gee, I'm sorry I missed this one! The Appropriation of Jung's Ideas Within the American Psychotherapeutic Counter-Culture - Eugene Taylor Abraham Maslow and Anthony Sutich, editors of The Journal of Humanistic Psychology, declared the launching of a new era in psychology in 1961. This new psychology would emphasize self-actualization, interpersonal knowing, transcendence, the study of the whole being. It would draw on varied sources in Eastern and Western traditions and would appropriate "parts of Jung." Since then, Jung -- often represented only as an acolyte of Freud and largely ignored in mainstream academic psychology -- has been enthusiastically embraced by the psychotherapeutic counter-culture. What this appropriation was all about, and its consequences for practice and credentialing analysts in Jungian psychology today and in future will be examined. via the C.G. Jung page The "psychotherapeutic counter-culture." I like that. You like that? Translation: nut cases on bad dope. In any case, as the night is wearing on, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Dr. Taylor for commending Emanuel Swedenborg, William James, Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow and every other god-fearing crack-smoking spiritualist he could dredge up to the attention of a whole new generation: you, as they used to say on the Mickey Mouse Club, the Leaders of the 21st Century!

psychology and spirituality in america

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