New Age Inner-Conflict
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I consider most new age ideas to be half-delusion because most people involved seem to know it's false, or likely to be incorrect, yet get comfort from the ideas. They'd love to have blind faith, they crave an assured world view, yet are unable to accept everything. So they pick nice things and just remain uncritical, as to not cause offence. The average new ager might well be a person who hungers for the illusions they wish to believe, rather than the truly deluded wide-eyed mystic.
They want to believe in angels, fairies, god and energy, they want to swallow the stories that should comfort them, and yet, they know it is a matter of believing in something they desperately want to be true. The beliefs are important features to them, the idea of a greater meaning and a never ending story across the endless meadow of eternity. It's catchy and desirable. Yet, they often know it is not true, or, should I say, as untrue as to be unreal, since the level of evidence is personal, questionable, or the same kind of nonsense we see from conventional religious beliefs.
When a belief claims truth and the proof the faithful think they have a cast-iron value to their intangible irrationality, even if the best they have is a series of fallacies, hearsay and hyperbole. The new age believer picks the least demanding kind of religious belief and refuses to take it too seriously, effectively helping to spread nonsense to those who might well be more vulnerable to the methods of the con artist and/or cult leader.
The average new age spiritualist might well be one who has beliefs, they might well have faith, yet they know how they started the journey. Through a need for comfort, they grasped at a collection of ideas that offer great support while not dealing with real world issues, and even avoiding reality and all of its troubles. So in some cases, rather than admitting real world issues need actual solutions, they pick denial over rationality, and they hope by their act that they troubles will melt away if they believe an archangel can help. Rather than coping with a dead in their family, they pick a fantasy, that we never die, that we go on and even reincarnate, and we have ever been alive because you cannot destroy energy.
Fantasy has some value, it can stop people from being depressed, from suffering hardship, from being consumed by fear, and yet when you think clearly you know fact from fiction, you know the fairies aren't at the bottom of the garden. It takes many years of being misguided and misdirecting yourself to become truly deluded, and even then the plotholes in the tale remain.
Maybe it is only the truly psychotic who believe to the absolute degree as their minds break from reality??
