Winston wrote: ↑May 7th, 2014, 9:02 am
Have you noticed that gurus of the New Age/Personal Transformation movement such as Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, Anthony Robbins, Bruce Lipton, etc. hold fallacious assumptions, such as:
1. People are the same everywhere. Location doesn't matter. Cultural differences are trivial and insignificant. Only your thoughts matter. If you change your thoughts, you will change your life and experiences. Thoughts create reality. (This is aka "The Law of Attraction" which has some truth to it but is greatly exaggerated by New Agers.)
2. No one is a victim. Your experiences are the result of your thoughts, attitude and choices. External factors are not to blame because they only mirror your own thoughts. You create your own reality. You draw and expand whatever you think about. Thus whatever happens to you is a result of what you create with your own mind and attitude.
3. Changing your location or environment will not solve your problems or change your experiences. The solution is to change yourself, work on yourself, and improve yourself. If you do, everything else will fall into place and align with your improved self.
These New Age teachings are greatly exaggerated and inaccurate in many ways. They defy common sense too. I can give many real life examples that do not fit into the precepts above. And I have in my article at:
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/LawofAttraction.htm
What's more, none of these New Age principles can account for all the proof on my website of the MANY differences between America and most other countries described above. All the evidence I've collected over the years proves that LOCATION does matter, and that as in real estate, it's all about "location, location, location!" Thus this proves that these New Age precepts do not apply to many situations.
Of course, thoughts and attitudes do matter and have influence. But they do not have the unlimited God-like power that New Agers ascribe to them. And they do not control all the many factors in your external reality. In reality, some things are controllable and some things aren't. That's life. Everything is situational.
Also, it is not true that there are no victims. There are real victims in life who did not attract the bad things that happened to them with negative thoughts. For example, the passengers on the Titanic or on TWA Flight 800 did not die because of their negative thoughts or bad choices. They were simply unlucky. Many ships and planes operate everyday, and people cannot know when an accident like that would occurr.
The Native Americans were real victims as well. They lost their land to the Americans and their people were nearly wiped out, not because of their negative thoughts or beliefs, but because they were VICTIMS of more powerful aggressors, such as the US cavalry and their guns. Before the American colonization, these Native Americans were mostly living in harmony with nature and respected the land as sacred. Isn't that a good thing? If so, then how do New Agers explain what happened to them? They can't, so they don't even try.
So you see, there are real victims in life. I don't understand why New Agers deny this, as their ridiculous philosophies do not match with reality. Perhaps they are delusional and refuse to believe in an unjust universe, so they assign blame to the victims of misfortune. In doing so, they are very cruel.
These New Agers ought to read the Book of Job in the Old Testament Hebrew Bible. In the story, when Job lost everything, his peers used "New Age" victim-blaming logic and told Job that he must have sinned or done something wrong to deserve what happened to him, because God is a just God. It turned out they were wrong in the end, just as New Agers are wrong today to blame victims and claim that there are no victims.
New Agers also claim that if women reject you, then you must have low self-esteem, low confidence, or a negative attitude. Female New Agers are especially prone to do this. But this is ridiculous and doesn't make sense. In reality, women reject men who are not THEIR TYPE. But if you are her type and she is attracted to you, then you can be an asshole, dickhead, and be as negative as you want, yet she will still cling to you and come to you. If you are not her type, you can have many wonderful qualities, and she will still reject you, or she will "friend zone" you. That's how it works.
Confidence or self-esteem has very little to do with it. Confidence alone does not create attractiveness to women. It only enhances attractiveness if she already perceives you as desirable. If you are "her type" then your confidence will validate her attraction to you. This is basic psychology. Only if she likes you, will your confidence be seen as an attractive attribute to her. Otherwise, if you're not her type, then it won't matter. An ugly guy who tries to act confident will still be perceived as a creep. That's how it works.
Looks are everything in America. The dating culture is very shallow. People are not judged by their inner qualities in the dating scene. We all know that.
Thus, for a woman to reject a man claiming that "he lacks confidence" is a mere shaming tactic, to hide the fact that she isn't attracted to him physically, because she does not want to appear shallow. I've seen American women do this countless times. It's very dishonest and cruel.
The truth is, confidence is a by-product of success. It has to be validated by some kind of actual worth or value for it to matter. Being confident for no reason does not create real value. For example, if I don't know anything about fixing cars and I tell you that "I'm confident that I can fix your car", it will not help or make it true. Such confidence would be baseless. But if I know a lot about fixing computers (which I do) then my confidence in being able to fix your computer will have a real basis. In other words, if I'm really good at something, then I have a right to be confident about it. But if I suck at something, I have no right to act confident about it. Fake confidence does not help and has no value, even in a fake culture like America.
I don't understand why New Agers can't accept that. It's like they have a need to believe that everything is controllable, including looks, attraction and other people. They can't seem to accept that some things are not controllable. But we all know that you can't control what others think and feel. So why don't they accept that? It's very weird. They are obviously out of touch with reality and logic.
Now, New Age teachings do contain great wisdom and spiritual truths, but the problem is that they greatly overgeneralize, exaggerate, and oversimplify everything, like pretty much any belief system does. They also insinuate that there is a simple easy solution to everything. Not true. In reality, real problems do not have simple solutions. If they did, they would not be real problems. Duh.
In real life -- as opposed to the New Age fantasy world -- there are simple problems with simple solutions, complex problems with complex solutions, difficult problems that require out of the box solutions, and unsolvable problems that are meant to be endured, or that can only be remedied with time. That's life. Again, everything is situational. There is no such thing as a simple fix-it-all solution to everything, as New Age authors try to sell.
In the final analysis, New Age teachings and books -- as well as organized religion, spiritual practices, professional therapy, and even meditation -- can only help you in the following ways: They can help you cope with your problems, manage stress, deal with painful memories, feel better, give you some purpose, and achieve peace of mind and mental clarity. Yes, they can do all these things for you. But they CANNOT solve all your problems, at least not the real ones. Even good advice cannot solve all your problems, especially the difficult ones. All they can do is to help you cope with them. Even therapists are taught that their objective is not to solve their client's problems (which they cannot), but to provide them with coping skills.
(In spite of this, many spiritual teachers are right when they say that many of our problems are either created by our minds or greatly exaggerated by our thoughts. Thus one should not take life too seriously in general. After all, what stresses you out today will not even be remembered one week from now, so the sages teach. See "The Power of Now" by Eckhart Tolle and "The Way of the Peaceful Warrior" by Dan Millman.)
Even more absurd is the New Age idea that according to quantum physics, solid matter and physical realities do not really exist and are illusions created by our perception. They argue that if a solid object is unobserved by a conscious observer, it collapses into a wave field of probability. In other words, if you aren't looking at something, it vanishes out of existence and has no solidity! Wtf?
They call this "the observer effect". They even have this weird theorem called "Schroedinger's Cat" which claims that if you put a cat in a box with a cyanide gas pellet that has a 50/50 chance of going off, then until you open the box and look inside, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time! How crazy and unproven! They have no proof of that at all. What are these New Agers smoking?!
(There's this guy named Anthony Peake that rails about it as if it were the most amazing discovery. Look him up. You can listen to his podcasts and interviews on YouTube. He has also written many books. And he has other bizarre beliefs too.)
This "physical matter disappears when unobserved" idea is totally delusional and out of touch with reality. It defies basic common sense. Even simple examples debunk it. For example, if you step over a banana peel or on a slippery floor, you will slip even if you don't see it. Or, if you step on a landmine and do not see it, it will still blow you up! Not seeing it will not change that. Let's suppose I stood behind you and fired a bullet at your back while closing my eyes. Even though neither of us are looking at the bullet, it will still hit you if you are on its path of trajectory. Care to test this? lol. Just kidding.
Ok here's a safer test: Go into a room and start walking backwards without looking behind you. Eventually you will hit a wall behind you, even if you don't see the wall! lol. Try it. lol. Now geez, how can that be, since according to this amazing New Age "discovery" the wall behind you does not exist in any solid matter form unless you look at it? LOLOLOL.
Man I can't believe how dumb this theory is! The fact that so many New Age intellectuals buy into such an outlandish theory does not reflect well on their credibility and rationality at all.