Something spiritual is something dynamic, it is something that is always becoming, opening, striving to be whole, aching to be free of any falseness, of any forces that thwart wholeness rather that fuel it. Something spiritual is, ultimately, the instinctual and archetypal drive towards liberation. The New Age is liberation-based. If it weren't, it wouldn't be worth anything real at all. This is a question vital to understanding ourselves, and to fixing the weakness and indolence that poisons much of current New Age culture like a grimy film of pollution on the zen-like surface of an impeccably pristine pond.
Spiritual concerns are, in essence, concerns of liberation, of archetypal freedom.
Libera-tion is the fundamental goal of our soul. We must look closely at the human psychological evolutionary process to truly understand ourselves, our internal challenges, and, eventually, to expand the scope of inquiry and unflinchingly address the most deeply rooted fundamental conflicts known to human society. All the world's major religious traditions are essentially spiritual philosophies, notwithstanding the myriad of distortions and falsities that established religious organizations often overlay upon their mystical truths to serve their perverse institutional ends. One valuable function of the New Age is to revive these mystical truths that lie scintillating underneath the slimy, polluted surface of organiza- tions that profess to be intermediaries between the self and God, always at a cost to both pocketbook and soul. But it is often the case that we, as New Agers, bypass the deepest levels of our own empowerment because we simply don't think.