REDEFINING THE SELF IN NEW AGE

Abstract

There is an increasing number of people in Singapore and worldwide who believe that the world is entering a new age characterised by a higher state of human consciousness. The focus of New Age is the search for a True Self that is intrinsically valuable and deinstitutionalized because it is irreducible to social or occupational roles. Many of the New Agers tend to be well-educated, middleclass, autonomous individuals, who are attracted to the New Age redefinition of the self as empowered, autonomous, relativistic, re-enchanted, intuitive and expressive. They want the best of both worlds, seeking experiential satisfaction in mystical states of consciousness, yet pursuing the scientific and philosophical rigor that New Age discourses offer. An increasingly routinized and rationalized modernity has produced an "iron cage" society, whose discourses New Age has problematized as anthropocentric, utilitarian and dogmatic. In contrast, New Age constructs a sacralized, re-enchanted social reality in harmony with nature as being desirable. It also discourages the management of impressions and emotions for an expressive, affective ethic to be extended to public life. In this study, I shall explore the social construction of reality in New Age, the problematization of mainstream discourses, the redefinition of the self and the social conditions under which the New Age discourse arises. As this is an in-depth study of New Age social constructions, there are a lot of ethnographic details that have to be described in endnotes and appendices due to the word limit. Their perusal will greatly give this study the substantive empirical support that is needed.