Hammer (2004, p. 319) have an interesting discussion about whether the new spirituality is modern or postmodern? His answer is that it has traits of both. It is postmodern in its questioning of the authority of the world. Likewise, in the celebration of the individual's freedom to create their own mix of beliefs. But beneath the surface, it is strikingly modern. A true postmodern approach to one's own identity would be to cheerfully affirm the divided, the contradictory, in one's own identity. But within the new age there is instead a strong focus on "finding oneself", "one's true self", etc. Nor is the notion of a world plan, an ever-advancing development, particularly postmodern, Hammer writes. Once again, the extremes meet.

God's consciousness can be likened to the sum of these higher spiritual aspects of our higher spiritual. Man also has "a higher self" or "a higher self" who, while incarnated in the physical world, is on a spiritual level. It is found "in the higher layers somewhere, and is a light being just like Jesus or any other of these great ones" (p1). This relationship is described in a song lyrics by the artist Tomas DiLeva:

I think God is something very big that you can never understand. So you just have to give up. You just have to accept it, you can't understand it. But at the same time, Tomas DiLeva is right when he… I don't know if you've ever listened to him. He wrote a song called Everyone is Jesus (p1).

For many women in middle age, they have long been subordinated to the needs of others:

Only in the middle of life began a process of emancipation, which could involve both a greater trust in one's own inner voice but also a lot of pain … Their desire to replace external authority with an inner compass is matched by the new age environment's emphasis on intuition and subjectivity (Hammer, 2004, p. 29).

According to Hammer (2004), there are two groups attracted to the new spirituality, namely young people and women of middle age, and what unites them is their "intense search for meaning, their own identity and an independent inner voice" (p. 28). Frisk (2000) proposes, with reference to the sociologist of religion Meredith B. McGuire, that it is possible to "see institutionalized religiosity as male-dominated, and the 'modern religiosity' as a kind of female protest" (p. 62).