The aim of this paper is to tease out from the New Age religion and religious transpersonal psychology a more relational spirituality. Humanistic and transpersonal psychologies were important forces in the emergence of the social phenomenon of the New Age. New Age transpersonalism leans toward a restrictive non-relational spirituality because of its historical affirmation of individualism and transcendence. Relational spirituality, which is central to the emerging participatory paradigm, swims against strong and popular currents in New Age transpersonal thinking which tend (...) to see spirituality as an individual, personal, inner pursuit, often into Eastern/Oriental nondualism. Whatever the merits of impersonal Advaita Vedanta or Buddhism—and there are of course merits—these are categorically not relational spiritualities. (shrink)

In contrast to other approaches, `modernity' in this article is not dealt with as a historical concept but as a normative-aesthetic term and as a mythical narrative in the sense of Nietzsche's `eternal recurrence of the same'. Paradoxically, there still exists a semantic shift between different historical concepts of modernity beginning in late antiquity and the Middle Ages up to the present confusions about `postmodernity'. However, the aesthetical bias of the discourse of modernity prevents any serious interpretation which is able (...) to refer these semantic shifts directly to some clear and incontestable socio-structural facts and developments. In its contemporary sociological form this discourse overlaps on the contrary with some main trends in aesthetic theory and practice: the exchangeability between `old' and `new' and the permanent suspension of the boundaries between `art' and `life'. Consequently, aesthetics as well as sociology are describing modernity as a cultural system which is `playing' with its own fundamental differentiations between `in' and `out' or self-reference and other-reference. (shrink)