+JMJ+ Welcome to part 3 of the Re-Reading the New Age series. I’m tweaking the schedule a bit. As I mentioned in the first post in this series, I do want to write about other things (and you probably want to read about other things, too) and that will take time. So I thought about it and juggled things around a bit and came up with this.

I’ll keep Re-Reading the New Age on the first Monday of the month, freeing up other Mondays for other current and new series and one-offs. The Weekly Series On the Soul schedule will remain on Thursdays, and I’ll still have my Tuesdays and Fridays free for whatever blog work I need to do, and also have time to prepare and post the Rosary Project Live (aka the Live Twitter Rosary Threads). And, really, one weekly series is enough. My folder of ideas keeps getting bigger and I’m looking forward to actually getting to write about some of the stuff in there.

So today’s post, since it is the first Monday of the month, will be the third post in the Re-Reading the New Age series. Next Monday will be…a surprise to you and to me. I have no idea what I’ll write about. Ah, I like the sound of that. I have to have some room for improv, don’t ya know. The challenge and the thrill of the completely blank page and a folder full of bits and pieces waiting for me to turn them into something. Goodie! :)

Now, on with today’s post, continuing to read Alice Bailey’s Education in the New Age, chapter 1. As usual, notes and links will be at the end of the post. (I referred to part 1 of the series in writing this and I noticed and corrected some typos. Always typos. Oy vey. At least this time most of them were OCR errors.)

Let me begin by recalling what Bailey is working toward in her book and in her groups, such as her Triangles and her New Group of World Servers (see note 2 below): 

“We are laying the foundation for the emergence of a new species of human being—a more highly evolved unit within the human family…”

EDUCATION IN THE NEW AGE, ALICE A. BAILEY, LUCIS TRUST, 1954 AND 1982, P. 14, THE OBJECTIVE OF THE NEW EDUCATION. (See note 3)

You may remember that method of building the Antahkarana was mentioned in part 1. I quoted this then but I want to point it out again now:

“This leads to the overcoming of the limitations—physical and psychological—which restrict man’s free expression of his innate divinity.”

Ibid., 2. Emphasis added.

See that? Man’s innate divinity. I wasn’t aware that man had any innate divinity. Because he doesn’t. This is a rejection of the truth that the Lord has adopted us into His family by means of covenant (which is an exchange of persons, not mere promise or contract), by means of baptism. This innate divinity stuff is typical of New Age ideas and it’s hogwash. Man is man, angels are angels, and God is God, and that is that. Only Jesus is both God and man, God, the Logos, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, Who took on human nature without giving up or losing His Divine Nature. Jesus is not a human person, He is a Divine Person with a Divine Nature and a human nature. We are given as a gift what He does not have to be given because He is God, has always been God, and will always be God. God stoops down to us and divinizes us by allowing us to partake of Him, to participate in His Divine Nature. It’s something He has because of Who He is, and something we participate in because He allows us to and does the divinizing for us. 

In the (Christian) East this is called Theosis. It’s not something new or added onto Christianity by the Catholic Church or the Orthodox, it’s been there all along but we often do not emphasize it enough or teach it enough (or at all) in the West so people tend not to know about it. When I was a Methodist I knew nothing of this. When I was a New Ager I heard the nonsense about the divinity within but it always made me raise my eyebrows until they reached all the way to the back of my head. (Especially when I attended some sessions of A Course in Miracles. OY VEY! But I digress. We’ll get to that one in due time. Oh, yeah, we will. Good grief. Just wait, it’ll be fun. Oh, my. Smh.)

Then Bailey (or the Tibetan or whoever we’re supposed to believe came up with this stuff) says that the new education must be able to bridge the gap between aspects of one’s own mental nature, and that mankind has always known this and called it “achieving unity” or “making at-one-ment” and this is so not what Christians mean by these things. See, now this is a problem, this using the same words to mean very different things, and different words to mean the same thing. We don’t mean “at one” with ourselves. As Christians, we mean “at one” with the Lord. And we seek “atonement” for our sins because we very definitely do believe that there is such a thing as sin and that we have most definitely sinned and that sin must be atoned for. If we’re honest, we do, anyway. In the New Age this is considered a very backward notion from which the typical New Ager seeks to free himself, and he looks upon his Christian neighbors and family members with pity for being trapped in such a primitive and stifling notion. He thinks he has moved further along the path and, indeed, he has. It’s just not the path he thinks it is. He’s got his ups mixed up with his downs. He’s living in the Upside Down. That reminds me. I got a book about the Gospel in Stranger Things that I haven’t even looked at yet. I’ve also only seen season one of the show so far. Not enough time in the day, I tell ya. And, yeah, I’ll write about it here when I finally read it. (See note 5 below.)

Education is therefore the Science of the Antahkarana. This science and this term is the esoteric way of expressing the truth of this bridging necessity. The antahkarana is the bridge the man builds—through meditation, understanding and the magical creative work of the soul— between the three aspects of his mind nature.

Ibid., 6

If your child is doing some form of meditation at school, you might want to inquire as to what kind of meditation it is. I’m sure it won’t be Christian. Protestants think all meditation is alike (there’s that pesky word problem again, using one word to translate different ideas) so they think Catholics are doing far eastern or Hindu or Buddhist things when we do meditation so they want nothing to do with it. And Catholics too often know nothing of their own tradition of prayer, meditation, and contemplation which has been around for at least two thousand years if you ignore its antecedents. So when too many Catholics talk about meditation, they do mean that far eastern or Hindu or Buddhist meditation and that’s a shame. Nothing makes my blood boil more than hearing a priest or religious recommend eastern non-Christian techniques to the gullible laity. Well, some things make my blood boil more than that. A lot of things, actually. 

But my point about this is that by meditation we Catholics are not about getting ourselves aligned with ourselves. We are instead trying to align ourselves with God, or better, we are trying to listen to Him speak to us through prayer and meditating on His Word in Scripture, in the liturgy, in the quiet still voice in our hearts, not because we are God ourselves down in there, but because God is God where He is, and He seeks to live within our hearts when we are in a state of grace, living the sacramental life, and obeying His commandments, His Torah, His catechesis, His instruction, the instruction a Loving Father gives to His beloved child. We’re adopted children but we’re beloved just the same. 

And here follow two critiques of the afore-mentioned and undesirable Piscean Age. (Afore-mentioned in part 1 of the series, that is. Also see note 4 below.)

“The conquests of science, the conquests of nations, and the conquests of territory are all indicative of the Piscean method, with its idealism, its militancy, and its separativeness in all fields—religious, political and economic. But the age of synthesis, of inclusiveness and of understanding is upon us, and the new education of the Aquarian Age must begin very gently to penetrate the human aura.”

IBID., 3

“It might be noted here that this entire exegesis of the mind and of the needed bridge building is but the practical demonstration of the truth of the occult aphorism that “before a man can tread the Path he must become that Path itself.” The antahkarana is the Path symbolically. This is one of the paradoxes of the esoteric science. Step by step and stage by stage, we construct that Path just as the spider spins its thread. It is that “way back” which we evolve out of ourselves; it is that Way which we also find and tread.”

IBID., PG 7.

Nope. I’ll take the One Who is the Way, please, the One Who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life and the Light of the World, the One Who is the Divine Logos, the Word Who became flesh and dwelt among us, the One Who is eternally begotten of the Father, begotten not made, and He isn’t my innate nature or my innate divinity, He isn’t an ascended master living in the Himalayas, writing obscure impenetrable gibberish for gullible guzzlers of a gutless gospel and an utterly false one, at that. 

This is a good stopping place. There’s more in the chapter but I won’t be able to do a line-by-line commentary on the whole thing or even half of it. I highly recommend that you get a copy of this book, the free PDF will do, and read up on what a surprising number of educators (and I use the term loosely) think is a great thing to teach your children, especially the last part of this chapter, starting around page 8. It is with everlasting shame that I think now how into this stuff I was and how ignorant I was about what it really was and is. Back then I really just wanted to understand her “soul-centered” astrology, but that is a whole other subject for some other time.

Thanks for visiting and reading. Until next time, whoever and wherever you are, please stay safe and well, virtuous and holy. May the Lord bless and keep you and yours, and may His peace be always with you. +JMJ+

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Notes and Links

1. Get a copy if you want to read along. Education in the New Age, by Alice A. Bailey and Djwal Khul (the Tibetan), Lucis Trust, 1954 and 1982. Paperback. Kindle. Free PDF. (Affiliate links, see Full Disclosure below for more about that.)
2. I picked up a book this week that may shed some interesting light on the Bailey meditation groups, though, as far as I know, it doesn’t mention them. But I think I see a connection. I’ve only read a few pages but I think it’s going to be interesting. If it means what I think it means, I’ll definitely write about it in an upcoming post.
3. My blog’s theme is responsible for making the citations appear in all caps. I’ll change that soonish when I can mess with the CSS. I miss the days of having complete control over my sites. But to do so now would be terribly time-consuming for me. WordPress makes my brain hurt when it’s self-hosted.
4. I’ve linked these talks before but you may not have seen them: Fr. Mitch Pacwa, SJ, did a series of talks on the New Age that are so good. I’ve been listening to them again and I always hear something I missed before. Here’s a playlist on YouTube of all six talks and here are the titles of each video. Of particular note here are talk 2, “The Age of Aquarius” (as opposed to the outdated and outgoing, as in exiting the stage, Age of Pisces and, oh, yeah, Christianity, as if!), and talk 6, “False Ideas About Christ.” Highly recommended!
   • What the New Age Is and Is Not
   • The Age of Aquarius
   • History of the New Age Movement
   • Some Influences and Effects of the New Age
   • The Enneagram
   • False Ideas About Christ
5. The World Turned Upside Down: Finding the Gospel in Stranger Things, by Michael S. Heiser. Paperback. Kindle. Logos/Verbum format: Book and course bundle. Book only. On the Logos blog.

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