Today's New Age Hippie Counterculture Revolution

By Thomas Ivan Dahlheimer

Caryl Matrisciana (1947-2016) was one of the leading Christian opponents of the New Age. She wrote a best-selling book titled "Gods of the New Age." There is a popular Caryl Productions Youtube video about the New Age. It is titled "Yoga Uncoiled - Christ Centered Yoga False Christianity - Documentary." The video includes an introductory documentary about how the New Age spiritual philosophy entered the mainstream by way of the Beatles' promotion of the yogic Hindu, 1960s hippie spiritual revolution. In this video a narrator states that the 1960s spiritual revolution that the Beatles began to promote-continued to spread throughout the '70s and succeeding decades-and that it "is still rapidly gaining global acceptance today."

The Beatles promoted the spiritual philosophy of Paramahansa Yogananda and his line of Gurus. Yogananda's book Autobiography of a Yogi has been called the New Age Hippie Bible.

In the Oxford Research Encyclopedia there is a paragraph in an article about Paramahansa Yogananda and his book Autobiography of a Yogi. It reads: Paramahansa Yogananda arrived in the United States, propagating a unique hybridized theology that blended Hindu and Christian ideas and practices. ... In 1940, he published his most famous writing, Autobiography of a Yogi, which combined the personal account of his own yogic path blended with an account of the most extraordinary and miraculous yogis of India. The book was lauded among his followers initially, but it became a countercultural sensation only in the late 1960s when it was widely regarded as the “hippie Bible.”

Kriyananda (1926 - 2013) was a direct disciple of the Paramahansa Yogananda, and the founder of the Ananda, a worldwide movement of spiritual intentional communities based on Yogananda's World Brotherhood Colonies ideal. Kriyananda produced a Youtube video titled: Paramahansa Yogananda: Avatar of the New Age.

Yogananda wrote:

In titling this work The Second Coming of Christ, I am not referring to a literal return of Jesus to earth....A thousand Christs sent to earth would not redeem its people unless they themselves become Christlike by purifying and expanding their individual consciousness to receive therein the second coming of the Christ Consciousness, as was manifested in Jesus....Contact with this Consciousness, experienced in the ever new joy of meditation, will be the real second coming of Christ—and it will take place right in the devotee’s own consciousness.

There is a distinguishing difference of meaning between Jesus and Christ. His given name was Jesus; his honorific title was “Christ.” In his little human body called Jesus was born the vast Christ Consciousness, the omniscient Intelligence of God omnipresent in every part and particle of creation. This Consciousness is the “only begotten Son of God,” so designated because it is the sole perfect reflection in creation of the Transcendental Absolute, Spirit or God the Father.

Kriya Yoga: No other science has detailed the descent of the individualized consciousness of God as the soul into man and its evolutionary and spiritual ascent back into Spirit. In this modern age, Kriya Yoga has been brought forward after being lost in the dark ages, as a definite method to hasten the spiritual evolution of human consciousness and open the inner cerebrospinal pathway of ascension, releasing the soul through the spiritual eye into the kingdom of the Holy Ghost, the Christ Consciousness [in creation], and the [transcendent, beyond the creation] Cosmic Consciousness of God the Father.

God the Father is the Absolute, Unmanifested, existing beyond vibratory creation. God the Son is the Christ Consciousness existing within vibratory creation; this Christ Consciousness is the “only begotten” or sole reflection of the Uncreated Infinite. Its outward manifestation or “witness” is Aum or Holy Ghost, the divine, creative, invisible power which structures all creation through vibration.

Christ has been much misinterpreted by the world. Even the most elementary principles of his teachings have been desecrated, and their esoteric depths have been forgotten. They have been crucified at the hands of dogma, prejudice, and cramped understanding. Genocidal wars have been fought, people have been burned as witches and heretics, on the presumed authority of man-made doctrines of Christianity. How to salvage the immortal teachings from the hands of ignorance? We must know Jesus as an Oriental Christ, a supreme yogi who manifested full mastery of the universal science of God-union, and thus could speak and act as a savior with the voice and authority of God. He has been Westernized too much.

There is a Youtube video of a United Church of Christ pastor's homily that generally presents Yoganada's above message. The video is titled "Steve Jobs, Yogananda and Jesus."