The idea of a quest for meaning of life and inner power has gained increasing currency in our contemporary age. Pay a passing visit to your local book shop if you doubt this and you can't escape seeing large number of books by New Age motivational gurus occupying prominent space in its book shelves waiting to be picked up by readers seeking inspiration, solace, comfort and healing.
These wisdom-packed inspirational best-sellers seek to fire up an urge for self-search for meaning and inner spirit in the minds of individuals, presenting their motivational skills as a spiritual exercise that they think can deliver people from their overarching sense of a reality that is chaotic, drab and ordinary. The New Age spiritual fad appears in different shades in different authors and in their different self-help and inspirational titles, but they all target an expanding segment of consumers in the market of success and happiness. The motivational techniques of most of these self-help gurus rely on their sexing up of the term 'spirituality' to make it nice and perhaps more attractive than what organised religions make of it.
The demand for such books has increased in India over the past few years so much so that 20 to 30 per cent of books sold by book shops belong to what is known as the mind, body and spirit category. The best-sellers such as Robin Sharma’s The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, Deepak Chopra’s The Ageless Body Timeless Mind and How To Know God, Shiv Khera’s You Can Win, Living With Honour and Freedom Is Not Free, Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and The Eighth Habit are selling like hot cakes in the country. Many of these books are now available in regional languages across the country. Alternative New Age therapies and healing practices such as yoga and meditation are also attracting growing number of people.
While most of the so-called New Age masters parade concepts culled from Eastern mysticism, some like Chopra even use jargons of quantum mechanics to invoke notions of well-being, balance and control in life. In their own different ways, they offer tools for 'megaliving' where ‘Perfect Life’ is described as an achievable goal, “a life filled with joy, accomplishment and pure bliss”, provided we realise our inner potential which is “slumbering deep inside, waiting to be tapped and tested.” Generally speaking, god-power is replaced by mind-power in the New Age teaching: "Will is the king of mental power. When you master your mind, you master your life. Mental mastery starts with being able to control every thought that you think." (The Monk, p. 150). Every goal of an individual is achievable if she changes her thoughts and thus changes her life. The motivational teachers tell us how our thoughts have the power to change reality if we follow the techniques they provide. They hammer home the message that we have infinite and limitless powers which we have to unlock to get out of our ordinary life lived in ordinary reality.
They thrive because they present themselves as having mastered the techniques to overcome one of the greatest difficulties that individuals often experience: making major decisions of life. Every choice has a meaning and there is no coincidence in life, they suggest. Deepak Chopra’s empowerment workshop titled ‘SynchroDestiny’, his official website says, teaches us “how to harness the creative power of coincidence”. Coincidences are shown to be just messages that, if understood properly, allow us to live life at a deeper level.
One of the prominent features of the New Age spirituality is the soothing language its proponents use. It is a language that also attracts people disillusioned with traditional religion and its personal god. If you are part of an immortal cosmic mind, what is the point in believing in a god who lives out there in the sky? The modern preachers of New Age variety alleviate our fears with false comforts that are equipped to trigger a feeling that we are worthy of being infinitely happy. The New Age spirituality also plays with the counter-culture narrative that modern science and technology has brought about “alienation, fragmentation and isolation” (Deepak Chopra in an interview). They blame modern science and its ‘arrogance’ for everything that went wrong in the modern world and project quantum physics as something that justifies their version of good-looking spirituality. To them, quantum mechanics validates ancient Eastern wisdom that human mind is part of a cosmic universal consciousness.
Gary Zukav has already popularised this idea with his 'attacks' on the Newtonian physics and its perception of the universe as a great machine set into motion from the moment it was created. Everything has been pre-determined in the Newtonian physics, he says. “The status of men is immeasurably more dismal than it was before the advent of science. The Great Machine runs blindly on, and all things in it are but cogs.” (The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of New Physics, p. 26). Contrary to Newtonian physics, he says, quantum mechanics tells us that our knowledge of what governs events on the subatomic level is not nearly what we assumed it to be. Its philosophical implication, according to him, is that not only do we influence our reality, but, in some degree, we actually create it.
In the 2004 documentary What the Bleep Do We Know that promotes the New Age spirituality, one of the interviewees says: “It [science] says we are outside of our universe, that we are alone, that we are separate and that we are a sort of lonely mistake on a lonely planet on a lonely universe…And we are now realizing that this view, this view of separateness is one of the most destructive things. It is the thing that creates all the problems in the world.” Physicist Victor J. Stenger, author of Quantum Gods, calls this New Age fad ‘quantum spirituality’ which is nothing but use of jargons from quantum mechanics to argue that there is a cosmic mind and that human mind can affect the material world. Even on the quantum level, he says, human mind doesn’t make things happen.
The very idea of an inner quest for the meaning of life is infectious in our age thanks to the popularity of the New Age spirituality which claims to offer us a new view of the world and of ourselves. The notion of self-fulfillment and meaning the New Age masters market in attractive packages to reach their target audiences informs much about our age that tells us we can all become who we want to be. The sensuous appeal of their best-sellers is hardly veiled as they flaunt techniques of fulfilling our dreams and highest desires, restoring balance in our life said to be disturbed by modern work culture and way of life, and nurturing the leader in us. Central to the self-delusion they inflame in the minds of individuals is the idea that we can be better than what we are and do greater things than what we are doing as there are no limits to our goals and achievements.
Many of these modern fantasies of success, according to Alain de Botton, British philosopher and author of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, are “the products of a democratic, optimistic world that insists that everyone might be a great writer and a happy worker – and yet does very little to create comfortable conditions for those who aren’t able to measure up to such lofty goals.” In reality, he says, it is work that gives us “relatively achievable smallscale goals”, and frees us from the thought of death and eternity
In a way, the New Age motivational gurus amplifies whatever disillusionments the modern age has brought with it and puffs up our normal desire for achievement by fulfilling “relatively achievable small-scale goals”. They speak of empowerment by asking us to delve deep into our inner self and power to overcome a life lived in absolute waste. They induce fallacies with their placebo pills of wisdom, comfort and console and make the individual think that she is much loftier than she is and is therefore entitled to have a greater personal happiness and enrichment.
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