The New Age Movement has origins that can be found in older religious traditions. But the movement also contains elements of mysticism, psychology, science and science fiction, and the counterculture of the 50s and 60s.  And underlying all these influences is the New Age understanding of the human mind.

     The Zen Buddhist view of reality, for example, is that higher cons-ciousness, or the true self, is none other than the Buddha-Mind.  For the Zen practitioner, distinctions are mean-ingless.  There is no 'internal' or 'external.'  Nothing exists outside the true self.  Things that appear to be external are only stirrings within the Buddha-Mind. In other words, the Buddha-Mind includes everything.  It is not a thing, but paradoxically, nothing has existence apart from it.

     Buddhism's influence on New Age thinking is indisputable.  So is that of Buddhism's parent religion, Hinduism, which predates Buddhism by thousands of years. Hinduism and Buddhism teach that the inevitable birth-death-rebirth cycle can only be broken by eliminating karma, which ties one to the illusions of the material world and makes liberation impossible.  In Buddhism the state of liberation is called nirvana, the cessation of suffering and the  In Buddhism the state of liberation is called nirvana, the cessation of suffering and the enjoyment of perpetual bliss.

     Zen (a Japanese word meaning religious meditation) has also directly shaped New Age thought and bears the marks of the ancient Chinese religion of Taoism.  Fundamental to Taoism is the belief that in and behind the phenomenal world lies the Tao, the eternal unchanging principle.  The Tao is the original source of everything in the universe; it spontaneously produces everything through a harmonious interplay of two forces - yin (the principle of passive receptivity) and yang (the principle of activity).

     Gnostic influence on New Age thought is supported by many New Age teachers who freely embrace what they call Gnosticism. Gnosticism  existed long before Christianity.  There are many forms of Gnosticism but, basically, it maintains that humans are destined for reunion with the divine essence from which they sprang.  Those who have experienced the Gnosis, or  (literal meaning knowledge) of our divine nature and destiny have moved up a notch on the ladder of spiritual evolution. Salvation to a Gnostic was a personal experience in the inner workings of the cosmos, which then provided an understanding of the riddles of heaven and earth.

     The practice of gaining answers to questions or foretelling the future by various techniques—can be found in all civilizations, both ancient and modern. The New Age Movement is involved even more-so in the form of horoscopes, astrology, crystal gazing, tarot cards, and the Ouija board. Establishments that sell information and equipment used in astrology and other forms of divination are almost universally known as New Age stores.

    Spiritually, the New Age will expand human consciousness as is illustrated by our growing interest in outer space and the inner man.  The New Age will further promote individual freedom.

    In an article printed nationally, a religion columnist said of the New Age religious movement, “A1though many observers describe the movement as the religion of the 1980s, {it is not, for the} New Age has no church or denomination, no pope or high priest unless you count Shirley MacLaine.

   The author here reveals his ignorance. The Hindu faith has no pope nor high priest and its doctrines cover a range of beliefs and practices, but it is certainly recognized as a religion though it may be, as the author described, “a melange of beliefs and practices.”

    The New Age Movement is a non-unified set of beliefs and practices built upon both eastern and western religious traditions, and the belief system involves ideas from self-help books such as The Secret and the Law of Attraction, a holistic approach to health, motivational and positive psychology, and scientific principles such as those explained in quantum physics. “New Agers,” as they are called, don’t limit their belief system to one particular doctrine. From its initiation, the New Age Movement has been involved in various aspects of Spiritualism, i.e. channeling, etc.

    The roots of the New Age can also be found in .the transcendental religious movements of the last century that came into being in response to Eastern mysticism.

    Guy Ballard a.k.a. Godfre Ray King (1878-1939) further promoted ascended masters through his I Am movement.

    Though Ms. Bailey coined the term “New Age”(it appears in page nine of her 1948 book Reappearance of the Christ), the expression did not become popular until it became associated with the 'Age of Aquarius,' the title song in the 1960s hit musical, Hair.

    Contemporary roots of the New Age can be found in the counter-culture movement of recent decades. The beatniks of the 1950s were ascinated with Zen.  A few years later the hippies arrived with their acid dreams and Eastern gurus, flower power and utopian idealism.

    Though the New Age began astrologically in 1981, the national periodical, East-West Journal, a quarterly of comparative philosophy, was first published in 1971, along with the first truly New Age book, Be Here Now, written by Baba Ram Dass, a.k.a. Richard Alpert. A former psychology professor, he found his personal guru in India and re-emerged as Ram Dass, preaching a new, hybrid message of spiritual ecstasy and 'nowness.'

    Alan Watts, an erstwhile Episcopal priest and chaplain at Northwestern University died in 1973, after writing 24 books on Eastern thought, including the influential Way of Zen.

    This compressed history highlights the earliest development of the New Age movement, and reminds us that a diversity of organizations such as neopagan, metaphysical, and spiritualist

churches as well as the Theosophical Society and Unitarian-Universalism have both molded mainstream American religion and have been shaped by it.

     New Age motifs are being openly embraced by some aspects of liberal Christianity.  At the same time, New Age metaphysical groups often co-opt the language and trappings of the traditional Christian churches, thereby making newcomers feel more com-fortable in their transition to alternate forms of belief and practice. For example, the Institute of Metaphysics in Los Angeles, founded in 1976 by James Thomas, could advertise itself as a New Age Center and at the same time hold a fund-raising jamboree with the rousing music of the old-time Gospel

    The Reconstructionist wing of Judaism has also been receptive to New Age ideas.  And Bahai, an independent world religion that teaches the spiritual evolution of human society and the oneness of God and all religions, picked up on New Age thought in the realm of mystical science, and promoted it at conferences and in dialogues between scientists and Baha'i scholars.

    Not even the Roman Catholic Church is immune to the influence of ideas and theologies from the New Age movement.

    One of the most controversial links between Eastern mysticism and Christianity is 'creation spirituality,' developed by Dominican priest Matthew Fox of Oakland, California. 

Fox, who says “98% of Bible scholars agree with me, that we need to go back to 'original blessing' - not 'original sin," frequently refers to God as 'She', and affirms a belief that everything is in God and God is in everything.

    Perhaps more than any other work, what has opened more people to New Age thinking is the 1200-page  channelled book A Course in Miracles.  Within a dozen years, what began as an obscure manuscript, became a teaching phenomenon, sparking sales of more than a half-million copies and spawning nearly a thousand study groups across America.  Kenneth Wapnick, a Catholic monk, wrote several books expounding the teachings of the Course. He has established a foundation to disseminate it's message.  Wapnick is candid in saying that the Course is incompatible with biblical Christianity, but that “in the end, all theologies will drop away and what's left is only the love of God.

    “The Course says that you forgive your brother for what he has not done to you, not for what he has done,” Wapnick goes on to explain. “The crux of the whole thing is that our relationship with God has never been impaired.  It's only in our thinking that it was.  For The Course, sin never really happened.”

    Though the course is promoted in a low-key way, it has been translated into eleven languages and its teaching aids are distributed to an ever-growing informal worldwide network of teachers and study groups.  Church groups - particularly Unity and Religious Science, and some Episcopal, Methodist, and Presbyterian - are among these. It is not a cult-like operation.  The  organization eschews a high-profile marketing campaign and a power-laden hierarchy, for they feel such things are contrary to the way Helen Schucman would have wanted it.

    Metaphysician Alice A. Bailey coined the term “New Age” in 1948, but the expression did not become popular until it became associated with the 'Age of Aquarius,' the title song in the 1960s hit musical, Hair.

    The Unity focus on health and wealth was expressed in the New Age Movement and, in January 1987,  Rev. Blaine Mays, president of the International New Thought Alliance (INTA) Unity put forth that Unity was a New Age organization.

      In 1970 American theosophist David Spangler moved to the Findhorn Foundation, where he developed the fundamental idea of the New Age movement. He believed that the release of new waves of spiritual energy had initiated the coming of the New Age.