The Old New Age

My friend Anja is organized. It’s one of the things she does well. It comes natural to her. It’s deliberate and doesn’t seem to be an effort. She’s a writer and has kept journals for decades. Newly retired, she’s continuing a process started a few years back to transcribe and organize her journals. Inspired by her, I took out a few of my own journals and leafed through the pages. Interesting. I found a journal this morning that I started two days after my spiritual awakening (which occurred on November 15, 1975).

Yesterday I stumbled upon the “Chrystalized Ahava528 Water” video (see 8-7-10 post). Throughout the day, I thought about my journey as an awakened being. In the beginning, in 1975, I thought the New Age was bursting through into reality instantly. Every day was like a lotus flower blooming in my heart, revealing greater spiritual understanding, and revealing the mysteries of the ages to me.

Gradually, as ten years passed, I came to think the New Age would manifest within individual people and not en masse. I lived my life with consciousness and continued my inner unfoldment, but I gradually dropped out of the New Age scene. I moved away from active outward communion with awakening beings, believing all beings awakening, conscious or not. I focused instead on my emerging art business. In 1999, while living the artist’s life in Ashland, Oregon, I attended a weekend festival and camped out with the other artists and festival goers and was amazed to experience the New Age was alive and well in the hearts and minds of the young people. A year later I moved to the SF Bay Area and opened my Heartful Art Gallery in Sausalito which felt, for the six years of its existence, that it was the perfect blend of the outward manifestation of my inner spiritual awakening.

Now, another decade has passed, and the mysteries continue to unfold, both within myself and in the outer world. I am pleasantly surprised to notice the attention to frequency and sound in the mainstream society. I think about how it was for me to live as the essence of the blooming lotus flower in those early days in the late 70s when I lived at Aurora Ashram with 18 like-minded souls on a spiritual journey. I’d like to recreate the freshness of thought and enthusiasm for possibility I had then. Sometimes it is easy for me to slip into the cliché of “been there, done that” when I hear about people discovering things we were doing thirty years ago as if it were new today. However, rather than stand in separation, I’d like to join in the celebration and participate again – on more than an inner plane. I’d like to, once again, embrace wonder and joy as a constant state of being. As I approach the coming days, I open my heart and mind to a fresh, new experience of the New Age now manifesting.

-Raphaella Vaisseau