New Age

Most of the great (and "lesser") mystics spent half their lives fearing for their sanity and suffering every hardship. And for the genuine student, as opposed to an imagined one, there is never any concern as to applying spiritualism to the earthly life because the two can never be separate. Higher consciousness has nothing to do with gushing over each other's crystals, looking dreamy, being a sanctimonious "do-gooder," dabbling with ethereal visualizations or speaking psychobabble.

Last weekend, thousands of Americans participated in an event called the harmonic convergence. Millions more read about it . It was all part of the blossoming New Age spiritual movement that has spread across the country. View asked actress Shirley MacLaine, who has written four best-selling books about her own quest for spirituality and has a fifth ("It's All in the Playing") coming out this month, to explain what's happening.

It was a dark and balmy night. A perfect night to lock into the energies associated with the full moon, in company with members of metaphysical movements deeply rooted in Los Angeles' past. A dark night because the moonlight was blurred by overcast. To the strains of a Shakuhachi flute, about 140 adults, old and young, silently took seats arranged in circles in the Sepulveda Unitarian Universalist Society's bulbous wooden sanctuary nicknamed "the Onion."

Even as I was reading Jeremy Tarcher's "New Age as Perennial Philosophy" (Book Review, Feb. 7), my wife called my attention to the many mentions of a "New Age" in the 1922 novel by H. G. Wells, which she had just finished. "Secret Places of the Heart" is assuredly not one of Wells' better novels, but its central thesis has a certain interest and relevance today. It would also seem to validate Tarcher's assertion that "New Age" attitudes and aspirations are not exactly new . One of the principal characters, a Dr. Martineau, is at work on a book to be titled, "The Psychology of a New Age."

Shirley MacLaine's statement that the New Age movement is not a new religion ("MacLaine's Guide to the New Age," Other Views, Aug. 19) doesn't harmonize very well with her assertion that "New Age consciousness doesn't believe these things. It knows them." Sounds like doctrine to me. And a doctrine that supposedly embraces perceptions that are not logical and places trust in the "whispers of the soul" sounds like a fancy excuse to believe in anything one chooses. Intuition plays an important role in understanding, certainly, but reason must always remain the final arbiter.

Roger Kellaway laughs openly when he says he could be the father of New Age music, the genre that supposedly popped up in the late '70s, founded by such artists as guitarist Will Ackerman and pianist George Winston.

English art-rocker Eddie Jobson extols it as "the sound track for the movie of the mind." Others derisively refer to it as "audio Valium" or "yuppie elevator music." It is called New Age music and consists mostly of soft, breezy instrumentals with meditative titles like "Deep Breakfast" and "In Search of the Turtle's Navel." It has made overnight stars of studio hermits like Mannheim Steamroller and Kitaro.

On a summer afternoon in Moscow, shortly after Sputnik circled the Earth in 1957, American astronomer Al Wilson was attending a series of meetings with Soviet geophysicists. On the final day of the meetings, a Soviet professor, G. Tikhov, gave a garden party in Wilson's honor. After many toasts, Tikhov strolled over to a tree in the middle of the garden. It was a ginkgo, one of the most ancient species of plant life on Earth.