If you read my previous post here, you may recall that I'd searched the Highbeam document database for

narcissism "new age" race

A totally open-ended fishing expedition, to be sure, but the intersection of these three concepts forms the core of the book I'm working on. The Margaret Talbot quote above comes from the first document my query turned up, and I was more than a little turned on to find it. This article touches on many of the topics I've been scoping out for three years now. Here's another bit from the same piece...

Tell a committed recoverer that there might be problems in the world more urgent than identifying the color of his parachute or the precise source of her "issues around owning her feelings," and you were likely to be thoughtfully reminded that you must deal with your own stuff before dealing with everybody else's. Besides, one's own stuff is a pretty spectacular quantity of stuff. The self is not easily appeased. It is jealous and demanding. Who, for instance, has taken the inner journey and not returned with a humbling awareness of all that needs to be done to the outer package? (One might turn one's Fitness Workout into a Quality Meditation, for example.) Anyway, we will not improve our politics until we have improved ourselves, right? And so the romp of narcissism might begin; and might never end.

I'm going to guess Marianne read that review of The Healing of America -- how could she have missed it? -- because the quote below is from the revised edition of the same book, now titled: Healing the Soul  of America: Reclaiming Our Voices as Spiritual Citizens. Emphasis mine.

What we most need to be free of now is our tendency to distract ourselves from the pain of the world, our tendency to isolate rather than join with others, our own selfishness and narcissism... [p.62]

Williamson's first book was a blockbuster, selling over a million copies in the four years between its initial 1992 publication and the 1996 reissue. Oprah bought 1000 copies -- on her show -- which probably didn't hurt any. The book, A Return to Love is based on A Course in Miracles, a pseudo-scriptural channelling of Jesus Christ by a couple of disaffected -- some might say loony tunes -- Columbia University psychologists (pictured at right with a link to their story). The biggest miracle of all, of course, is that droves of New Agers could be gullible enough to read this vapid swill, much less structure their lives around its flaky principles. "The Course takes a sort of Ayn Randish view of the supremacy of the self," notes Talbot in her wonderful New Republic  hatchet job, invoking an example from the Course's Lesson 253: "My Self is ruler of the universe. It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself." (I wonder how they'd explain this blog post, then?)

Given this now US-endemic I-create-my-own-world worldview, it starts to become clear how narcissism just might  be something of a problem. The solution chosen by Williamson and untold numbers of New Age "mystics" is to deny all legitimacy to the Big Bad Ego -- which is never really defined; it's that "Western" thinking, you know? -- and by sleight-of-mind (or mindlessness) redefine all that this selfsame ego desires and demands as unquestioned entitlements of some supreme inner deity.

...a young woman must fly free, away from Mommy and Daddy, away from the dense conventions of the world, away from childhood and into the arms of the Goddess, who awaits her. A hysterical depression can then become a magnificent adventure.

A Woman's Worth, pp. 43-44

Quite conversely, it seems to me, what we're seeing here is hysterical "spiritual" adventurism leading many unsuspecting souls toward a life of magnificent depression. After the Goddess, the Zoloft scrip. Or worse: a racially motivated form of fascism flying under the radar of religious tolerance. Can I prove this? Not yet, but it's happened before. A couple of books I've been looking into are especially instructive in this regard. One is Madame Blavatsky's Baboon. The other, more scholarly, is Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's The Occult Roots of Nazism. Both focus intensively on Blavatsky, whose racialist Secret Doctrine can be found in the New Age section of any Barnes & Noble store. And then there's this intriguing bit I just now dig up:

Common characteristics of fascist movements >
Decadence and spirituality

Some of the ugliest aspects of fascism -- intolerance, repression, and violence -- were fueled by what fascists saw as a morally justified struggle against "decadence." For fascists, decadence meant a number of things: materialism, self-indulgence, hedonism, cowardice, and physical and moral softness. It was also associated with rationalism, skepticism, atheism, humanitarianism, and political, economic, and gender democracy...

The opposite of decadence was "spirituality," which transcended materialism and generated self-discipline and virility. The spiritual attitude involved a certain emotional asceticism that enabled one to avoid feelings of pity for one's victims. It also involved Darwinian notions of survival of the fittest, a belief in the right of natural elites to upward social and political mobility, and accommodation with members of the upper classes.

"fascism" Encyclopaedia Britannica
from Encyclopaedia Britannica Premium Service
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?tocId=219379

And finally, this eye-opener regarding the famed comparative religionist, Mircea Eliade...

The conclusion that Eliade's work is deeply enmeshed in its fascistic roots is a difficult one to put forward. After all, he founded an important field, the history of religion. He wrote many important and influential books, not only Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, but also Yoga: Immortality and Freedom; The Sacred and the Profane; and Cosmos and History, among many others. He edited the monumental Encyclopedia of Religion and founded important journals (one with the former Nazi sympathizer Ernst Junger). These books form part of the basis for the intellectual claims of New Age religions and the revivals of nature religions. If Eliade's claims are racist and fascistic in origin -- while, as we know, these new forms of spirituality claim to be apolitical and ahistorical -- then we need to reflect profoundly on both New Age assumptions and the forms in which they are expressed. [emphasis mine]

from: Fascism's mythologist Mircea Eliade and the politics of myth
by Tony Stigliano
source: ReVision, 1 January 2002
via: HighBeam Research
Copyright © 2002 Heldref Publications

All this mystical princess blatherskite may seem on the surface to offer nothing more than simple wish-fulfillment fantasy, but lately it's taken a distinctly political turn. Williamson's bio mentions that she "co-founded The Global Renaissance Alliance (now called The Peace Alliance), a worldwide network of peace activists." I've got nothing against peace, but check out some of the rhetoric from her Healing the Soul of America [p. 263, emphasis mine]...

If you are interested in ways to take part in the mystical revolution  of American political consciousness, contact the Global Renaissance Alliance U.S.A.

Founded by myself and author Neale Donald Walsch, the Alliance provides every citizen the opportunity to engage democracy with soulfulness and love. Our national network of Citizen Circles is an exciting field of political possibility, and we hope you'll join our efforts to turn harmony, cooperation, sharing, and reverence for Life into dominant political values.

Just more New Age hooey, you say? Check out the members of the United States Congress who are endorsing this play for a "Department of Peace" -- and be afraid. At the renamed Peace Alliance Foundation, I read this: "The Alliance will identify and create a national database of these groups, organizations and individuals, thus bringing forward the components of the new culture that already exist." That national database link is in the original HTML. Click it to see the kind of demographic data this group is collecting -- and be very afraid. One day soon, the U.S. could have its very own New Age Christian Taliban -- if it hasn't happened already.

If you opt to join Williamson's Miracle Matrix, you'll get -- among other mystical goodies -- "My audio blog, where I'll be periodically posting my thoughts from the road." Spiritual podcasting. I suppose it was inevitable, as is so much else in these desperate End Times. But, now I can die happy, assured that I have indeed seen everything. if you click through to that page, be sure not to miss the mp3 "free sample download." Then you can die happy too!

Oh yeah, and here's her blog. The XML even validates; this is no amateur-hour effort. Of course, I immediately subscribed. Predictably, a recent entry says, "Mary Oliver is one of my favorite poets." One of these days, I'll write my own review of Mary Oliver, but probably not here. CBO is a Family Blog and I wouldn't want to saddle it with an NC-17 rating. So let me end instead with this inadvertently classic line:

"This is an all-hands-on-deck kind of moment on earth. It's not okay to be stuck in the smallness of our narcissism when our greatness is so needed."

Marianne Williamson
The Gift of Change:
Spiritual Guidance for a Radically New Life
November, 2004, p. 19