As has been said before, the New Age concept (new or not,
this is the name we'll use) is not a sudden revolutionary development. It is
the result of gradual progress in science, philosophy, theology, and human
knowledge in general, that has taken place throughout history.
A complete overview of the history of human knowledge would (and does) fill
volumes. It would be impossible to cover every discovery, subject and
discipline here. Let's just look at a few examples instead.
The way we think about the human mind has been largely influenced by the progress of psychology. The history of psychology is the history of thought about human consciousness and conduct, about reason, perception, memory, and action.
Around the end of the 5th century, B.C., the Pythagoreans first came up
with the idea of a soul as something resident in the body but capable of
existence apart from it. Plato developed this concept further. Traces of
Plato's work have become part of the psychology of Leibnitz, Freud, and
others.
Aristotle also worked from the hypothesis that the body has what he called
a pneuma, animus, or spirit, though he was unclear as to its form. He
appears to have believed that it moved within the blood vessels. Aristotle
also proposed that the soul is, in short, defined as the perfection of
unity toward which the functions of the body are directed. Later
psychologists have used other terms, and recently these concepts have
received more attention with followers of the New Age movement, but the
original idea was Aristotle's.
The functions of the human mind have received much attention from modern psychology. The British and German traditions of psychology were based on the phenomenological approach, which includes the description of immediate experience, directly as it comes to the observing person. It tends to regard mind as separate from the body and to get along with only minor reference to physiology. Meanwhile, the French and American traditions became primarily mechanistic (starting with Descartes during the 17th century), holding that mind and body are an extension of each other, so that mind affects body and body affects mind.
Many of the concepts that are prominent in the New Age community seem to
correspond with the work of Carl Gustav Jung, who worked with Freud between
1907 and 1912. Jung had, and kept detailed notes of, remarkably striking
dreams and powerful fantasies that had developed with unusual intensity.
This led him to develop the theory that these experiences came from an area
of the mind that he called the collective unconscious, which he held was
shared by everyone. This concept has been much contested.
Jung also studied the relation between religion and psychology. He
conceived that the Christian religion was part of a historic process
necessary for the development of consciousness. He was also impressed with
his finding that alchemy-like symbols could often be found in modern dreams
and fantasies, and that the drawings created by psychiatric patients were
often dominated by patterns arranged in circles, or occasionally crosses or
squares, and that these drawings bore a striking resemblance to religious
symbols (mandala's), as used in many different cultures. (Good examples are
the mandala's found in Tibetan Buddhist monasteries.)
Another science that has had much influence on the human outlook on the
universe is astronomy. Astronomy is one of the most ancient
sciences. Ancient astronomy is believed to have been dominated by the
Babylonians, who are thought to have recognized a number of prominent
constellations as early as 3000 B.C. The Greeks added various influential
cosmological ideas. During the 6th century B.C. Pythagoras proposed the
notion of a spherical earth and a universe populated by objects whose
motions were governed by natural laws. During the 2nd century A.D.,
Ptolemaeus proposed a geocentric (earth-centered) universe. This concept
dominated astronomical thought for some 1300 years, until Copernicus
assigned the central position in the solar system to the sun (the
heliocentric system).
The replacement of geocentrism with heliocentrism caused much
opposition from the Catholic church, since the notion of a geocentric
system corresponds with the dogma that earth is the center of Creation,
while the concept of a heliocentric system does not. This
'victory' of science over religion is considered to be a
significant step in the evolution of human thought, because it symbolizes
the change from dogma to observation and thought.
Kepler and Newton proceeded to formulate the natural laws that govern planetary movement, while Galileo introduced the use of the telescope to astronomical observation. Human knowledge about the universe and the position of the earth and the solar system therein steadily increased. Later developments, such as spectroscopy, and the more recent technologies (radio, radar, gamma and X-ray astronomy, and the use of satellites) have been, and are, contributing to this knowledge even today.
Similar developments have been made in physics. The ancient concept of the four elements (earth, water, air and fire) and the misconceptions of medieval alchemy (such as the notion that lead could be converted into gold via chemical reaction) have dominated many aspects of physics for over two millennia. Then, during the 17th century, Boyle formulated the concept of the 'chemical element', and, a century later, Lavoisier discovered the link between chemical reaction and the conservation of mass, which resulted in his conclusion that matter was composed of units with a constant mass. Ultimately, this resulted in the Rutherford-Bohr nuclear model in 1911, which is still in use today.
Meanwhile, Einstein published a thesis on molecular dimensions in 1905.
His Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity in 1916 postulated that
gravity is not a force, as Newton held, but instead a curve in the space-time
continuum, caused by the presence of mass. In fact, he proved that the aspects
of the space-time continuum are influenced by the aspects of the matter therein,
as much as vice-versa.
In his Special Theory of Relativity, Einstein proposed that both space and
time are not the rock-steady constants they were always thought to be, but
are in fact subject to the observer's frame of reference.
Appalled by the political developments that led to the first and later the
second World War, Einstein exchanged correspondence with Freud on the
nature of Man. With Tagore, he discussed the nature of truth and (to a
lesser degree) mysticism. He also expressed his belief in a "a God who
reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists".
Much of Einsteins work has been the basis for recent publications by Stephen Hawking, which include theories on the structure of the universe and the ways it might have come into existence. Hawking, though confined to a wheelchair, still continues to publish new work even today.
The developments in quantum mechanics influence the human view on reality
even more. In 1704, Isaac Newton described light as streams of particles.
Christiaan Huygens thought of light as waves. It was clear to anyone that
the two views were mutually exclusive. However, when Thomas Young performed
his famous double slit experiment in 1801, it became clear that light
behaved as a wave, and late in the 19th century the photo-electric effect
was discovered, clearly proving that light behaves as particles.
Researchers were forced to accept that light could in fact have two
apparently mutually exclusive properties, a notion that still seems to defy
common sense. (After all, something is a particle or it isn't, and it is a wave
or it isn't, so how can it be both?) In 1924, Louis De Broglie derived his
formula for mass/wavelength conversion, thereby proving that any mass may be
thought of as a wave and vice versa. One can, for example, calculate the
wavelength of a falling brick.
Heisenberg proposed his Uncertainty Principle in the 1920's, stating that
the observation of phenomena influences those same phenomena, which leads
to the conclusion that some phenomena cannot be observed without disturbing
them up to the point of invalidating the observation.
Imagine a piece of unexposed photographic film. You want to know what color
it is before it has been exposed to light. But in order to observe its
color, you must expose it to light, so that it is no longer unexposed.
Therefore, it is impossible to know the color of the unexposed material.
Likewise, it is impossible to know the exact location of an
electron as it orbits the nucleus, because by observing it we would disturb
it, thereby invalidating the observation.
Erwin Schroedinger proceeded to reduce matter and the spacial
characteristics thereof to a collection of probabilities. It may be
impossible to know the exact location of an atom, he reasoned, but it must be
possible to guess its whereabouts in terms of probability, since we know
it has to be somewhere in the piece of matter of which it is a part.
He devised equations to calculate the characteristics of matter
(and, inherently, of everything else) in terms of probability.
Schroedinger then took this to its logical conclusion in his famous thought
experiment that is now known as 'Schroedingers cat', which was intended to
show that what we think of as reality might also be thought of as a complex
of wave functions and/or probabilities.
Schroedinger, who was very much at home in both philosophy and literature,
published his 'Nature and the Greeks' in 1954, in which he not only
expressed his admiration for the Greek scientific view of the world, but
also his skepticism toward the relevance of science as a unique tool with
which to unravel the ultimate mysteries of human existence. His last
publication in 1961 closely paralleled the mysticism of the Vedanta.
These are only few examples of the developments of human knowledge throughout the centuries. A comprehensive overview would fill volumes. If you want to know more, or if you want to verify the above, you might start with, say, the Encyclopedia Britannica. It covers all the subjects mentioned in this chapter and, of course, much more.
The history of science is long and complex, and many scientists have been right, spectacularly wrong, or just clueless. The common factors, however, are easily summarized:
It seems safe to assume that these developments will continue. We will develop new and better methods for observation. We will formulate new theories to explain those observations. And our outlook on the universe will change accordingly. What we 'know' to be true today may be changed by new points of view tomorrow.
Upon careful consideration, a pattern starts to emerge here. More and more
findings indicate that the universe that we observe is not the whole
picture. When Haldane said that "The universe is not only
stranger than we imagine, it is even stranger than we can
imagine", he was at least half right.
If our imagination is limited by our ability to observe, we can
never learn all about the universe. But if we strive to stretch our means
of observation to fit the limits of our imagination, we can. In other
words: only if we believe that there is something to see, do we start
looking.
As has been proposed, some aspects of the universe and the phenomena
therein may beyond the limits of our observations. Also, our very presence
influences the structure of space, and our observations influence the
phenomena observed, so that we must accept the fact that we are a product
of the universe, but also that the nature of that universe is at least in
part a product of our presence therein.
That does not necessarily mean that we cannot learn about it. However, we
will have to accept the fact that there are phenomena and aspects of
reality that cannot be observed by conventional means, and that hypotheses
and theories cannot be proved or disproved so. We think of atoms as nuclei
orbited by electrons, even though nobody has seen an atom. We accept the
fact that light can be both waves and particles, even though we have never
made observations that showed us why this is so.
One could almost say that in doing so, we create a new branch of science. Not science in the conventional sense of the word, where objective and impartial observation is the basis of any conclusion, but a form of science that is dominated by probability, by subjective observation and by intuition. Many would argue that such a discipline does not qualify as science, but rather as philosophy or even theology. They may have a point. But no matter what,we are forced to conclude that the conventional means of observation are not suited to reveal all aspects of ourselves, of the universe of which we are part, and of our existence.