On hippies, the Age of Aquarius, New Agers, eastern mystics and self-help gurus and teachers

I was recently confronted with a most fascinating term that set off all kinds of thinking in various directions, leading me down a few interpretive and explanatory byways, or “Rabbit Holes,” none of which I had planned to embark on tonight.

The phrase is Central Mystery of Being. Isn’t that what The Search is all about? The never-ending quest in this life for answers, The Truth?

New Agers I first became aware of in the 1980s are still out there with their crystals, chakras, otherworldly art, exhaustive self-help and rejuvenating nostrums and products, gurus, quacks, and the like. All this surely makes life more interesting, to say the least.

I personally have little interest in those things. One exception being I can come up with my own joyful satisfaction in little things like half geodes exposing tiny crystal caves within. I love to let my imagination fly when looking into those things. Or, I can at least imagine the enchanting world of wee people and fairies and such creatures who inhabit other “parallel universes” of tge mind and imagination that we sometimes are privileged to get brief glimpses of. There is the fairy home at the base of a camphor tree in the park where I so often walk, and which I have photographed, hoping some day to once again catch an image of one of them in pixilated form with my digital camera, similar to the fairy seated on an iris petal in that treasured enlargement I had printed years ago. It astounds me every time I look at it.

To me, The Path is more simple than the Hindu gurus and mystics make it out to be. There are many teachers and wise men and women in India, and elsewhere in all cultures, and on all continents, but they are merely teachers, some more authentic, charismatic, and believable than others. We take kernels of wisdom from them, and the other masters and teachers, saints and prophets down through the ages. I don’t need candles, incense, bells, pan flutes, or psychedelics to awaken me from my secular slumber. I find ways on my own to do that, developed over many decades of travel, writing, photography, and my deeply solitary way of life, particularly now. I have much good instrumental music to listen, to, as well as “Nature Sound” videos that are peaceful and calm, and which help me center my thoughts and retreat from the ceaseless distractions, tumult, and worries of this world.

Everyone who seeks, finds, or is directed to their own path of inner discovery and spirituality. Those who don’t seek, are selfish, don’t think deeply about things, don’t care about the deepest truths of life which are handed down and rediscovered, or wholly conceived anew by patience and an infinite variety of meditative practices, are the same people who are causing the destruction of our environment and other species other than our own, war, barbarity and regression back to baser human life forms. But I should perhaps amend that to say the ancients were perhaps more civilized than we are. They didn’t have the atomic bomb.

I’ve never seen all this revealed so starkly as in the past few years, and I’m 71 now. I ask myself, “What is happening to decency, compassion, refinement of taste and manners, selflessness, intelligence, education and discovery? Why are we regressing instead of advancing as a civilization, despite all the miraculous breakthroughs in science, technology, medicine, art, literature, mind expansion and the Internet?

Call the hippies of the Sixties or the New Age experimenters coming into the 70s and 80s with all their strangely interesting rituals, healing practices, guru seeking, and exotic hybrid beliefs, far out, cultists and sheeplike followers, if you will. And many sadly were and are. But they at least start out with a sincere, if at first misaligned and misguided, effort to know themselves and others as fellow seekers, as human beings who are interconnected and surrounded by all the manifestations of this cosmic mystery called life. The end results are often tragic or farcical, but they at least attempted to find something more, something better than what they see all around them.

There are always going to be New Ages. They begin with a single individual finding a path of enlightenment, freedom from suffering, the peace of God, and/or or the type of life-altering illumination and insights that are not by any means limited to those who have the ability to shout it out to the universe, and which too often becomes for them just another infinite echo chamber.

Seek the Truth, and you will find it.