“In many esoterics one can sense an obvious difficulty in integrating God into their philosophical system, since in practice there is no place for God in the universe of occultism. This applies greatly to Theosophy and its publishers anthroposophy and the cosmology of Martinus.”

Arlebrand, 1992

This is a turn in an old discussion. About “God” in older and newer spirituality. A lot has been said, twisted and turned around, even before. But since I think the subject touches on the most important thing, here we go again…

“A few years ago I conducted an interview study on New age spirituality from a psychological perspective. Many answers and reasoning were expected, I was familiar with the area before. Nor were the answers I received when my informants would tell me about their view of ‘God’ were completely surprising.
But overall, that piece of the study made a particularly deep, actually unsettling, impression on me. It became almost too clear how the ‘new age god’ can hardly fulfill the psychological function that the usual Christian deity, for example, has been able to do.”

“[It was] a very outlandish god that I got described to me… A god who is both personal and impersonal. Both and neither. Neither bad nor good, but in a good way anyway, but hardly ‘parental good’… One creates one’s destiny oneself, the divine is more like a kind of rounding mark out in the cosmos for one’s own karma waves, it does not interfere. You have to go through your own misery, you have to go through it to learn. God is more a principle of justice, a kind of program that the universe operates with. The lack of warmth and personal care was palpable.

That being said, I’m not claiming that there’s actually a god with this or that set of characteristics, or personality. But psychologically emotionally – for many of the followers of the New Age/Holistic spirituality/Western esotericism, etc. – one must still say the new-age god is a downgrade.”