From Mystics to Holistics : Seekers of Self Now Herald the ‘New Age’

In what seems like a former age, Dr. Richard Alpert experimented with LSD at Harvard with fellow professor Timothy Leary. They were kicked out, but their work launched the psychedelic ‘60s.

In the ‘70s, Alpert studied with Indian guru Neem Karoli Baba, wore sandals and beads and was named Ram Dass, or Servant of God. He wrote numerous books, including “Be Here Now,” which guided members of the “Me” generation in search of spiritual awakening through Indian mysticism.

Today, Ram Dass’s hair is silver, and a neat mustache has replaced his sagely beard. He still practices Buddhist meditation and now also attends trance channeling sessions, a popular new form of parlor seance in which spirits supposedly talk through humans. But Ram Dass, who lives in Boston, is also very much in this world. He trains volunteers to help AIDS patients. He lectures for the Seva Foundation, a worldwide service group that runs an eye clinic in Nepal and a Native American health clinic in South Dakota, among other things.

‘Still a Mouthpiece’

“In the ‘60s, I learned how to be, but not how to do, “ he said, noting that his focus is now on what Hindus call karma yoga--using service to others as a path to transformation. Recently, while attending a channeling session, he asked the spirit Emmanuel what he should be doing. “He said, ‘Why don’t you try being human?’ I had never thought of my humanity as a practice. I was too busy trying to become divine,” he said, laughing.

Ram Dass’s trips--as drug researcher, guru, searcher of self through service--reflect the journey that America’s human potential movement has taken in the last 25 years. Aware of the ironies, he said:, “I’ve been waiting to become an anachronism. . . . But instead I’m still a mouthpiece for the process.”

The human potential “process” these days is nicknamed “New Age,” and it is proliferating at an astonishing rate, sociologists say, especially in trend-sensitive California.

Where once believers stayed in the closet, today the new mysticism claims a burgeoning clientele of yuppies who mix moneymaking with their mantras and who are as concerned with working for the planet’s future as they are peering into the future via crystal balls.

Attempt to Find Balance

The New Age movement takes myriad forms. In essence, experts say it involves an attempt to find balance in a changing world while still preserving commitment to values and personal growth. Its philosophical base is founded in the East. Deviating from Christianity, it espouses reincarnation and unity in the universe, sees man’s potential as limitless because God and man are one and embraces all manner of the supernatural.

“The issue for everyone I talk to, whether it is college presidents, farm wives, congressmen, or artists, is that they are trying to cope with change,” said futurist Marilyn Ferguson, a popular writer on New Age philosophy. “They aren’t sure what is needed, they hope they are up to it and they are looking for inspiration in a lot of different directions.”

This has spawned a dizzying variety of ways to get in touch with one’s self and the world. Some seem genuinely spiritual, some solemn, others silly. And at first glance some accouterments appear rather Old Age: Tibetan singing bowls, Tantric statues, Tarot cards.

But there are new fads, too. Angelenos, including actresses Jane Fonda and Jill Ireland, are wearing crystals to “energize” themselves. Some New Agers are taking therapeutic baths in water spiced with chips of California’s old eucalyptus trees, or touting colonics because, as one ad says: “Life begins with a clean colon.”

Other believers shun overseas vacations for weekly soul traveling sessions through the universe, or at least back to another era to study their last reincarnation. A few are content to stay in town and attend “warrior woman” seminars where they reach back into Native American spirituality by making medicine shields and finding their animal protector.

Fad or movement, New Age thinking is coursing through business, education, the arts, Madison Avenue, even politics.

‘New Human Agenda’

Some educators are focusing on students’ self-esteem. Hip politicians are striving for a “new human agenda.” Businessmen are using computer software that sends subliminal messages to inspire workers; others are chanting to become visionary on the job. Corporations such as Pacific Bell, IBM and Ford are sending employees to consciousness-raising seminars--which, it is hoped, will raise corporate profits as well.

While many in business are getting spiritual, others are getting rich selling spirituality. Author Gita Mehta calls this New Age marketing “Karma Cola.”

Madison Avenue sells everything from shoes to lottery tickets using New Age lingo. Neiman-Marcus is pushing fetish dolls described as “representatives from another dimension.” A Club Med ad features a student telling his yoga teacher that he is going on vacation: The ad concludes, “Perfect climate for body and soul . . . but hurry--Nirvana won’t wait.” Creator Lynn McGrath of N. W. Ayer Co. in New York got the concept from her yoga instructor.

New Age Book Division

The demand has grown so fast that Bantam Books created a New Age book division in 1980, publishing such titles as “The Way of the Shaman” and “The New Physics.” Stuart Applebaum, a Bantam vice president, noted that metaphysical books “have been one of our strongest categories and is getting even stronger.” He published actress Shirley MacLaine’s spiritual journey books, after another publisher turned them down. The best sellers are credited with spurring even more interest in the New Age.

The arts, too, are awash with the New Age. The “Star Wars” and “Star Trek” movies traffic in extra-terrestial spirituality, and the music industry’s Grammy Awards this year included a New Age category. The mystic music popularized by Windham Hill Records is heard everywhere and has been called “Yuppie Muzak.” In the hit play, “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe,” Lily Tomlin portrays a bag lady who befriends outer space aliens and wonders: “What’s reality anyway? Nothin’ but a collective hunch.”

While the term “New Age” has been used to describe various historical periods, astrologers coined its most recent usage to define the spiritual awakening that they say is being influenced by the solar system’s shift from Pisces to Aquarius, a phenomena that began at the turn of the century.

Resurgence of Mysticism

Proponents say this resurgence of mysticism is a healthy turning away from the material world, even if getting rich is sometimes a side benefit. But critics contend that while New Agers espouse a philosophy of self-responsibility, they are actually being subjected to subtle mind control.

Louis J. West, director of UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, who calls much of the movement “New Age confidence games,” says such activities can, in some individuals, aggravate psychiatric illness. Schizophrenia, for example, can manifest itself in a growing preoccupation with the mystical.

“Trance channeling may be a harmless diversion for one person,” West said. “But for the next person it might be a force drawing him further away from his already poorly grasped relationship with reality.”

Fundamentalist Christians have been especially critical of New Age ideology.

‘A World of Evil’

“They are becoming involved in a world of evil and ultimately in the whole realm of Satan’s jurisdiction,” F. LaGard Smith, a Pepperdine University professor of law, argues in his book “Out on a Broken Limb.” “Fashionable Southern Californians would protest that it’s not witchery to consult their clairvoyants, astrologers, healers, metaphysical counselors and mediums. . . . Sometimes I wonder if people in America’s leisure set aren’t simply playing mind games for the terminally bored.”

Others note the historical roots of New Age ideas.

“The (‘60s) counterculture emphasized Eastern religions and alternative Western spirituality before. But this phenomena is more domesticated,” said Dr. Robert S. Ellwood Jr., a USC religion professor. “The motifs are still there--meditation, affirmation, reincarnation--but it is now fitting into everyday life.”

Spiritual Pioneers

Americans have always been spiritual pioneers, Ellwood noted. The liberal metaphysical strains that feed the present movement included mesmerism and transcendentalism, which stressed human potential and mind powers, he said.

The “inner-directed” values of the ‘60s have grown to become the dominant value system of the ‘80s, according to some opinion researchers. Menlo Park-based SRI International estimates that 34 million Americans are concerned with inner growth, including mysticism.

“They want money, but they don’t want to give up their values to get it. The movement is an attempt to put balance in lives,” said David H. Thorne, publisher of New Age Journal in Massachusetts, whose circulation has boomed tenfold in three years. “And it is making a lot of changes in the way they do business, politics, education, the way they view the world.”

Contact With the Dead

Catholic theologian Andrew Greeley, who wrote surveys conducted by Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center in 1985, found that four in 10 Americans say they have had contact with the dead and 60% have experienced extrasensory perception. This compared with 25% in 1972 who said they contacted spirits. The movement is becoming mainstream, he thinks, because well-known people have been willing to talk about it.

“What was paranormal is now normal,” Greeley wrote. “The figures are out of sight. . . . They indicate an almost common experience in American society.”

Ruth Andersen, who studied psychic arts while working on a University of Pennsylvania doctoral degree, said she was skeptical when she began her research. “But I visited hundreds of psychics and always left feeling better. Contrast it to a medical clinic. You wait. The doctor is often impersonal. But a psychic sees you right away, focuses on you as a complex being who wants help on many levels--psychological, spiritual, health. They are in essence folk therapists.”

She added that man has always had several levels of belief. “They might have a standard institutionalized religion and science, but also believe in horoscopes and self-healing. The attitude is that it can’t hurt to hedge their bets.”

The following is a glimpse at some of the popular ways people are hedging their bets, integrating New Age thinking into their lives, from the modish to the more mainstream. REINCARNATION

Students in the past lives class listen intently as Bettye Binder conducts lessons for those who want to find what lives they lived before. “When you believe you were a famous person in a past life, watch out. It’s probably your imagination,” warns Binder, who stresses intuition instead at three of these well-attended classes at Learning Tree University, a continuing education school in Chatsworth.

Binder, who has degrees from Barnard College and Columbia University in political science and public administration, worked in several businesses before becoming a reincarnation teacher. In this life, she writes books and teaches people to regress to their past lives by using meditation, journal writing and art. Last time around, she says, she was a Native American.

Binder says her interest was spurred when she met someone she was sure she had known before. The next weeks, during meditation, she had spontaneous memories of their life together as tribal members.

‘Reincarnation Rang True’

Karen Joye, 35, who owns a plant business, was drawn to Binder’s class after a friend died and she wondered what happens to a person’s soul: “I found reincarnation rang true.”

Joye has had several regressions where she saw herself as a 17th-Century English housewife, an Indian woman, an African woman. In the latter, she was angry because her chieftain husband gave her baby to another wife. “The chief was my father-in-law in this life. The baby was my husband. The woman he gave the baby to was my mother-in-law,” she says.

“I’ve always felt distant with my in-laws, but because of this insight, I’ve concentrated on acting differently. Of course, I can’t prove reincarnation is real, but the emotions, the memories brought up are real and help me work on things in this world.” CRYSTALS

Master Ho paces to and fro. On a table are crystal clusters and a backlighted crystal pyramid. He holds a slender stone in his hand. It gleams in the firelight.

“These are not merely rocks. These are living things and demand respect,” Ho says to the crowd gathered in West Los Angeles for a program sponsored by Conscious Connection, one of many New Age clubs that have sprung up. “But they are not magic stones. You are not going to possess the psychic powers of Nostradamus.”

However, as tools crystals are powerful, he adds, noting that for centuries man has used them for psychic healing, meditating and in technology.

Ho’s audience buys piles of crystals after running their hands over them to find ones that have the right vibrations. They will purify them by placing them in moonlight, smudging them with sage or covering them with sea salt. The crystals will then go in toilet tanks, drinking water, refrigerators, purses and pockets--to calm, energize and purify.

Emit Minute Charge

Scientists say crystals do emit a minute electrical charge when squeezed, and emit precise vibrations in response to electrical currents. These qualities have made them valuable in radios, computers and lasers. They are valued because molecularly they tend to develop shapes that are in harmony with their internal structure. Believers reason that if they wear crystals those qualities will rub off.

The craze has driven prices into the cosmos, mineralogists say, as buyers pay 1,000% more than 10 years ago. Prices for the rocks, which are mined in such places as Arkansas and Brazil, range from $2 to $200,000 for museum quality.

Alan Talansky, owner of a Manhattan investment company, fell in love with a 600-pound crystal four years ago, even though at the time he could ill afford the $9,000 price tag. Today it sits on a lighted pedestal in his office. “I can’t ascribe miracles to it, but I look at it and it makes me feel good and that gives me energy,” he says.

While recovering from breast cancer surgery, actress Jill Ireland began holding crystals to focus her thoughts during meditation. Her doctor suggested that besides chemotherapy to battle cancer, she should try holistic healing to combat stress. “I’m not saying crystals cure cancer, but when you have the disease, your peace of mind is damaged as well, and that’s where they work for me,” she says.

Ireland wears a crystal necklace and ring. Clusters are on tables and in the gardens of her Malibu and Los Angeles homes. She bought her children crystals for Christmas. “Crystals represent to me what the universe wants for us--to be happy, healthy and to trust.” THE NEW SHAMANS

Thunder rolls in the distance of the rustic Beverly Hills canyon cottage, where animal hides hang from the rafters. Shelves are crammed with dream shields, sand paintings, fetishes, sacred pipes, leather pouches filled with pungent tobacco leaves.

A crow cries harshly outside a window. “He only does that when I have important work,” says Lynn Andrews, who had just talked to a client about balancing male and female energies.

Andrews has told of an apprenticeship to Agnes Whistling Elk, a Cree medicine woman, in four best-selling books, including “Medicine Woman,” in the tradition of Carlos Castaneda’s descriptions of shamanism.

A former art dealer who, to her dismay, is called the “Beverly Hills Medicine Woman,” she says she met Agnes 12 years ago while searching for a marriage basket. When Andrews visited Agnes’s Manitoba cabin, Agnes demanded that she skin a deer and eat the heart. Andrews spent the night in her car, animal blood drying on her clothes.

Life Is a Spiral Path

Agnes taught her life is a spiral path, she says. “You are born in the center of the mystery and as you earth-walk you get further from center. Eventually you must walk backwards, stripping away ego, addictions such as anger and victimization--dying a shaman’s death--as you go back to the source of power.”

Andrews emphasizes that she is not a “white woman trying to teach ancient Indian lore,” but is teaching urban shamanism, how to survive in a hectic world.

Midwest writer Anne Buscovick found her way to Andrews’ doorstep after being distraught after a miscarriage. “I had tried other spiritual practices, but they had a male aspect to them. Lynn taught me to use my feminine consciousness. She told me to immerse myself in the world. Until you make an act of power, the universe will not support you.” TRANCE CHANNELING

Four years ago, Los Angeles real estate agent Elaine Rock didn’t know what a trance channeler was. Today, she is a publicity agent for eight of them, including the one many consider to be the top ghost gabber of them all--Kevin Ryerson, who claims that spirit entities speak through him.

Rock remembers being scared when she and friends went to see him. “We aren’t raised to speak with spirits like we do friends.” Ryerson later asked her to set up classes. She thought she would never fill them, but now the wait for a two-hour, $150 private session is a year, she says.

Some critics believe that channeling is the channeler’s imagination at work, or even a form of schizophrenia. Ryerson says it is the ability to tune into the universal mind. He says he always had psychic abilities, and began channeling after joining a meditation group based on teachings of the late medium Edgar Cayce.

His work reminds people who they are, Ryerson maintains. However, the crowd gathered recently in West Los Angeles seemed more interested in knowing who the spirits were. As Ryerson closed his eyes and breathed deeply, the audience leaned forward.

A voice spoke harshly: “Hail. Please identify yourself and state purpose of gathering.” The voice is supposedly John, who lived in the days of Jesus. Another voice Ryerson emits is Tom, a comic Irishman.

A young man asks, “If we are divine, why are we so stupid?”

Ryerson/John replies, “Because we have lost track of who we are.” He then answers prophetic questions, saying President Reagan might retire early, that there won’t be a big California earthquake until 1996.

Later Rock explains, “He has helped evaporate my fears, especially about death.” She adds: “My son thought I was nuts. But when he met Kevin, the first thing he asked him was ‘Are you alone?’ ” HEALTH GURUS

Anne-Marie Bennstrom, one of many health gurus who are helping New Agers shape up their theology along with their tummies, says: “Until recently, I could only motivate my students with push-ups and leg lifts. But now they are thinking more about spiritual things.”

Thus the health boom of the ‘60s that served up bean sprouts and tofu salads along with exercise has been infused with a sacred side. Bennstrom, who studied medicine in Stockholm and once directed exercise programs at the Golden Door fat farm in Escondido, says her way of looking at the world changed when she spent five months alone in the Guatemala jungle. “I’d stare at a leaf for hours and could feel its life force.”

Bennstrom now owns The Ashram, an upscale Calabasas health spa often called “boot camp without food.” The spa’s living room is graced with crystals, Buddhist statues and a sign that says, “Be still and know that I am God.” The schedule is rigorous. The day includes yoga, a three-hour hike, fruit juice for lunch, more hiking, weightlifting, swimming, a vegetarian dinner. Then clients meet in the meditation hall for health programs.

There Bennstrom tells her students: “Your body is crystallized thought. . . . If you are in harmony and at peace with yourself, it doesn’t matter what you eat, even chocolate cake.” She concludes, “One day food will give you up, and you will live in the fire of your prana (spiritual life force).” BUSINESS

Surrender. Go beyond desire. Practice aikido, draw mandalas, throw the I Ching.

To some it may look like the “to do” list for a Tibetan retreat, but it is suggested homework in the “Creativity in Business” class at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Students are encouraged to tap into their creativity, and if that includes an exotic trance, so be it.

And while not everyone is smitten by New Age marketing (“I’m into the Old Age--accounting, finance, the real stuff that makes money,” grouses a Stanford department head), there is a decided move toward it in the marketplace.

The class started seven years ago when inflation, low productivity and trade problems signaled that “business as usual” wasn’t working, says Professor Michael Ray, who with Rochelle Myers created the class. As industry looked increasingly eastward toward Japan, many executives concluded that American management was too analytical, conservative, unconcerned about people, shortsighted.

Creative Lives

“I think it was a matter of businessmen not thinking that they could lead creative lives, or that work, somehow, couldn’t be included,” says Ray, whose class has a long waiting list.

“Management is learning that you have to deal with all challenges. It’s not success to make money, if personal life has gone to hell, or if you have a heart attack, or if you have great ideas but bulldoze them through and make enemies,” says Ray, whose book “Creativity in Business” chronicles success stories.

One classroom exercise is teaching businessmen that if at first they don’t succeed, surrender. One visiting lecturer, James M. Benham, founder of Palo Alto-based Capital Preservation Fund, explains: “I simply introduce the question to my mind and in time, I always get an answer. I think I must have ‘spiritual friends.’ ”

Another lecturer, Steve DeVore, founder of Sybervision Systems Inc., an Alameda County company that makes sports videotapes, says of his best workers: “One of the characteristics we have identified is a ‘sense of higher self.’ They almost believe in themselves as possessing godlike abilities, that nothing is impossible. It’s not ego, it’s very healthy.”

“It’s fascinating, to see business and spiritual life begin to blur. We’ve tried to do things, not for money, but for reasons of the heart,” says Anne Robinson, co-founder of Palo Alto-based Windham Hill Records.

Windham Hill, whose minimalist but melodic music was first sold in health food stories, started out with a $300 investment. Last year sales were more than $26 million. Robinson, 36, credits success to a “ ‘60s commitment to the individual, and in turn the individuals’ commitment to push beyond self limits.” POLITICS

Assemblyman John Vasconcellos (D-Santa Clara), chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, has been called the “touchy-feely” politician because of his involvement in the human potential movement.

He has authored legislation to regulate home birthing and marriage counselors, increase funding for AIDS research and reform the unitary tax. His legislation that created a state-supported commission on self-esteem drew snickers and one gubernatorial veto, but after continued prodding, the panel is now gearing up. This year, he is pushing to require publicly subsidized college students to perform community service.

Vasconcellos’ “human agenda,” as he calls it, is geared to encouraging people to realize their potential. “We should lower expectations that government will do everything, especially pick up the pieces of our failed human relationships. People must grow healthy so they don’t need government, so they don’t explode into social problems.”

His Philosophy Differs

His New Age philosophy differs from the popularly perceived liberal agenda of “take care of people forever” and the conservative’s “don’t bother’ attitude,” he says. “My philosophy is a deep faith in people’s innate inclination to become responsible. We should work to develop families, schools, workplaces that truly encourage people to realize that capacity.”

The human potential movement, he says, has been a “remarkable and hopeful revolution. We’ve learned much about health, emotions, sexuality, spirituality. But now we must become more globally activated and create a new human politics, befitting our expanding sense of ourselves.”

Vasconcellos says his personal growth began in the ‘60s when “my sense of self came apart.” He says he underwent therapy with priests, psychologists, bioenergetics practitioners.

In 1984, he underwent heart surgery and had seven bypasses. “I was scared of dying and pleased I didn’t. It was a reminder that I had to work harder at living this healthy life I’ve been talking about. I’m not sure what I believe could be called spiritual, but I try to live genuinely, be trusting in relationships and be more playful.

“That’s the choices we all have--to be trustful or cynical, open or closed.”