The Fad That Would Not Pass

The religion of the "new age" is "spirituality." For years I persisted in believing that "spirituality" was the immediate successor to EST, a controversial movement of the 1970s. I was sure that the spirituality fad, too, would soon disappear, to be succeeded by some other cult that promised serenity and enlightenment.

But I was too optimistic. The search for spirituality has become broad enough so that it now includes visits to the Dalai Lama, and more recently, a growing breed of self-appointed kabalistic masters who promise to open the doors of ancient Jewish esoteric knowledge in a few hours. Sometimes when I read accounts by those who have visited with the Dalai Lama in his headquarters in North India or who have read some pages of the kabalah--and are thus able to enlighten the lesser breed who seek inner peace--I find myself humming a song of my youth. The call went out some fifty years ago that one could learn the new, exotic, and sexy South American dances by taking "six lessons from Madame La Zonga." It is that easy.

So what is the new hunger for "spirituality" really about? What does it represent? At the very root of modern sensibility is the quest for nourishment for the "hungry I." That is the name that was given, prophetically, to a nightclub in Haight Ashbury, the swinging neighborhood of San Francisco in the 1960s. It defined the contemporary illness: men and women wanted to realize themselves by feeding the deep hunger that they felt in their lives.

The adult generation of those days thought that it had found the answer. This generation had grown up in the era of the Great Depression and of the Second World War. It was sure that happiness meant material achievements. Those were the days when the larger house, or the larger car, was proof that you had arrived and that you were happy. In a decade or two, their children realized that the larger kitchen or the house with the swimming pool was not enough to make them content, and so they looked for other ways of feeding their hunger. The focus moved to the soul, to the inner self. Possessions could not make you happy if the soul was empty.

The new generation was convinced that it had rejected the shallow materialism of its parents and exchanged it for the much more honorific "spirituality." It is not so. The obsession with the self has remained the same.

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