"Discover how the New Idealism ignited a literary and cultural revolution" ~Crystal Wind

From the Beats to Huxley, Ginsberg to Kerouac — the New Idealism traces how the New Physics ignited a literary and spiritual revolution that changed western consciousness forever. This combined chapter examines three key aspects of the New Idealism before diving deep into its profound impact on 20th century literature, aesthetics and the counterculture movements that reshaped the world.

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Parts 10 & 11: This combined chapter from THE NEW IDEALISM introduces three key aspects of the New Idealism before examining how it shaped 20th century literature, aesthetics, and the counterculture movements that changed the world.

Part 10: Three Important Aspects of the New Idealism

a: The New Idealism in Literature and Aesthetics
b: The Debate Within Naturalism and the Impact of the New Idealism
c: Applied Philosophy and the New Idealism

The following parts examine what I regard as being extremely important to further understanding major issues of the New Idealism. The first area will concentrate on literature and how the New Idealism has impacted on literary movements and associations. This will obviously examine the scientific impact of the New Physics on creative writers. Many of the major writers of the 20th century prided themselves on their scientific understanding. This area will also detail some of the debate within which the New Idealism would have on aesthetics. Again, this would cross over into the area of literature.

Then the huge area of naturalism will be examined and its relationship to the New Idealism. Naturalism has been dominant in many 20th century philosophic communities and is still in a very powerful position. The New Idealism obviously throws further light on this debate. The last area will examine some of the issues facing applied philosophy and the New Idealism. This is an extremely controversial area because it crosses into medicine. But it does not just cover medicine. The area of applied philosophy is now gaining new ground in our community and I believe the New Idealism will further add to the development of this area.

Part 11: The New Idealism in Literature and Aesthetics

The New Idealism can be particularly felt in a great deal of the literary landscapes of the 20th century. The impact of the New Physics was already being felt by the 1920s. The great minds of the early 20th century were increasingly becoming bedazzled with the implications of the New Physics.

The first half of the 19th century saw an increasing interest in experimental ideas. This was an extension of the modernist tradition of the 19th century. This is an extremely important point. Many of these extreme experimental movements came out of Europe in the last few decades of the 19th century.

During this time the amazing experimentors of the modernist tradition exploded into the consciousness of the world literary community. The French writers particularly caught the imagination of the time. French poet Arthur Rimbaud was hailed as an authentic voice of this new movement which was to shape taste, culture and intellectual thinking through into the 20th century. Amazing intellectual movements blossomed during these times. The Dada and Surrealist movements exploded onto the European landscape. Writers were actively introducing concepts of transcendentalism into their own literary consciousness. And in music Jazz screamed behind this new consciousness as the avant garde realised that indeed the notion of spirituality and mind may be essential, and philosophers used literary devices to further their philosophy. This is what they believed the 20th century to be about — the final great expression of Romantic theory put into practice. This is what makes the 20th century so exciting from a literary point of view. And I would like to stress the strong emphasis that the idealism followed by the great writers of the 20th century is a new form of Idealism. As the 20th century progressed further many of the ideas of the writers was in fact based on science and scientific critical thinking.

It is also important to point out that as philosophy became increasingly hostile to the notion of philosophical idealism, the literary writers of the 20th century carried the flag of Idealism and along the way invented and reinvented different forms of Idealism. And this occurred right across the world, from Europe to Latin America. The notion of spirituality and Gnostic structures of thought often lay in the background of these literary traditions. Many people who essentially wanted a philosophy career had been inclined to enter literary fields because they knew that the notion of philosophical Idealism was far more accepted in these areas. This is an extremely important point as our universities preached the New Materialism which came from Logical Positivism and other materialist philosophies.

Arthur Koestler and the Holon

Often prominent and famous novelists simply called themselves philosophers even though they may not have worked in philosophy. A good example of this is the extraordinary writer Arthur Koestler. Koestler was one of the early 20th century's most original political and scientific thinkers who used literature to further Idealist philosophy and the New Age in general. His books and many articles profoundly influenced intellectual opinion and were instrumental in popularizing what was essentially a mystical viewpoint. Born in Budapest in 1905 and educated at the University of Vienna, he took up journalism as a career and became foreign correspondent for a number of German and British publications. In the Spanish Civil War he was captured by the Fascists, imprisoned and condemned to death. He had a lengthy incarceration and his execution was a constant threat. Nevertheless, it was this experience that made him undergo a mystical conversion and was to change the course of his life. Koestler was eventually saved from execution through British protests and he then went on to become one of the most interesting and dynamic personalities on the world literary scene. His novel Darkness at Noon was translated into 32 languages and possibly ranks with Orwell's 1984 as the most widely read political novel of our times.

He used this literary career to catapult himself as a popularizer of science and in later years became profoundly interested in psychical research and his Roots of Coincidence became extremely well known. In his The Yogi and the Commissar, he argues that there were two essential psychological types: the "Commissar" who believed the world should be changed by influencing others and the Yogi who believed the world should be changed by influencing oneself.

An area which Koestler greatly made popular was the area of eastern philosophy and in a sense he was one of the first westerners to show how eastern philosophy is Idealist in tradition. It is because of this that Koestler is very much a part of the tradition of the New Idealism because he was an innovator and his mind grabbed Idealist notions that had not been discovered before by western scholars but of course had been part of the eastern tradition for thousands of years. Nevertheless, eastern philosophy continued to divert in new and exciting ways, a fact that is often overlooked by western scholars of eastern philosophy.

Koestler also coined the term "Holon", a critical aspect of the New Idealism, particularly in physics. He used the term in the context of the General Systems Theory which is outlined by Fritjof Capra. A holon is an entity which functions at once as a whole and as a part, and which manifests properties of independence in the one function and dependence in the other. In normal usage the term whole and part imply something incomplete or complete, fragmented or finished and contained, yet in reality we do not find parts of wholes in this absolute sense — rather we find that there are ascending orders or levels of complexity, with each level of order being at once a thing in itself and a component of a larger or more comprehensive entity.

Koestler went on to designate this dual nature of holons the "Janus principle" which implies that holons, like the Janus legend, have two faces, one turned downward and preoccupied with the self, with the other one turned upward and concerned with its relation to the next level in the hierarchy. This means that holons have two purposes, the self-assertive on the one hand and the integrative on the other hand.

Aldous Huxley and the Perennial Philosophy

Another major fiction writer of the first half of the 20th century to have a huge impact on the world stage and in philosophy in general was Aldous Huxley. The role of Huxley cannot be understated. Huxley was mentioned briefly earlier on in this book in regard to his promotion of Hinduism throughout the western world. He and fellow British novelist Christopher Isherwood championed Hinduism as early as the 1940s. Isherwood is now regarded as the father of modern gay and homosexual writing and is seen as a top prose stylist.

Huxley used his fiction to promote his philosophy. An entire generation — the hippies, born between 1932 and 1955 — all worshipped Huxley. Even world famous musical bands were named after books Huxley had written with such titles as The Doors of Perception. Huxley is very much an early New Age pioneer and throughout the first part of the 20th century established a top reputation as one of the English world's truly great novelists. He and George Orwell became virtually household names in a time when quality literature could still make an author a household name.

One of Huxley's novels, Brave New World, is widely considered by literary critics as being one of those universal novels of the modern era. The novel itself describes a world ruled by control and fascism, with Huxley of course using the book as a metaphor of the 20th century. In the book Huxley predicts birth control pills and many other medical scientific breakthroughs that later came during the 1960s. Huxley came from a long line of famous British scientists and had excellent scientific knowledge including that of physics.

Huxley used a very famous expression — that of perennial philosophy. The term was actually coined by Leibniz to describe the "highest common factors" of religions and spiritual and perennial philosophies. This is religion divested of doctrine, the time-honored and quintessential wisdom and knowledge vouchsafed by the religious experience. Huxley describes this as the basis of a major philosophical Idealist position. "It is the metaphysic that recognises a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being," writes Huxley.

Huxley also suggested that the brain acts as a reducing valve on the mind, which had been an idea that he came to through his own experience and the influence of the philosopher C.D. Broad. In his book The Doors of Perception, Huxley quotes Broad as saying: "Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe."

Broad believed the role of the brain was to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of knowledge — that the function of the brain is mainly eliminative and not productive. Huxley concurred with this view. "Each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet… The various other worlds with which human beings erratically make contact are so many elements in the totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large."

One of Huxley's most important works included a book which he edited. The book, VEDANTA for the Western World, is now a classic in Indian Idealist philosophy. Vedanta is the wisdom of the Vedas, the perennial philosophy distilled over centuries in India from the oldest known religious writings. Huxley believed that there was an intimate connection between Christianity and Hinduism.

Huxley made a great point that all religions are essentially the same and that all of them can be united through the concept of philosophical Idealism. This was a very radical theory at the time he was propounding it. In all the higher religions the doctrines about eternal Reality, and practices designed to help worshippers to render themselves sufficiently timeless to apprehend the Eternal God, bear a close family resemblance. Huxley in a way catapulted Indian philosophy into the consciousness of the western world's literary and creative intelligentsia. Huxley at the end lived in Hollywood in California during a time when the West Coast of America had attracted much alternative views and thinkers. Huxley was one of the most clever writers expounding Indian thought and its relationship to western philosophy and religion. This laid the groundwork for later movements which greatly respected Huxley's work.

The Beat Generation and the New Idealism

The explosion of literary activity at the middle of the 20th century cannot be understated. And this is clearly related to the New Idealism. I believe that the New Idealism is also part of a new feeling, a new mood, a new way of thinking that spread out to the mass of humanity within the Anglo American world.

The role of the Beat movement in bringing about a radical change of consciousness throughout the planet is of vital importance. The Beats were a highly eclectic collection of writers, poets, novelists, mystics and scientists who radically challenged the status quo of the Cartesian-Newtonian world. The Beats also started a movement that has not stopped to this day. They are now being heralded within the New Age community as the early pioneers. It is now clear that the philosophies of the Beat movement also influenced and was embedded in both the hippie and punk movements which were in fact later generations.

The Beat movement became world famous. Many critics are now declaring that the Beats started the new anti-racist and civil rights movement of the 1960s within America. The Beats have also been behind the rise of the worldwide gay movement and feminist movement of the 1970s and 1980s. And even more importantly, they were behind the Spiritual Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s that gripped the world.

The New Idealism is very much the belief that something new is in the air. It does of course embody the belief that Consciousness and Mind creates Matter. But up to the 1950s throughout the world Idealism had been abandoned by academic philosophy departments for materialism.

Thus, when super poet Allen Ginsberg performed his famous poem in San Francisco in 1955 called Howl, the beginnings of the Beat Movement moved into action. Howl would eventually go on to sell millions of copies and has become one of the biggest selling books of poems in the Anglo-American world. Ginsberg, who died in 1997, was an extraordinary figure, a visionary with amazing skills in drawing in and creating a movement. His poem Howl was a spiritual statement against American fascism during the 1950s. It was a call to stop the military-industrial complex that was threatening the world with mass extinction through nuclear weapons. The poem spoke out against a deeply anti-spiritual America that had become completely materialist. This form of Materialism reached right into the heart of the American Academic community. Ginsberg believed that writers and thinkers had to return to their spiritual heritage. By the turn of the 1960s Ginsberg had increasingly become a Buddhist and actually lived in India with his boyfriend in the early 1960s. They were some of the first white people on the planet to grow their hair.

From the mid 1960s and until the mid 1970s Ginsberg's poetry continued to become a best-seller not just in America but throughout the world. He became the father of the counterculture and very much saw his role as that of a general guiding the troops into battle. And of course the massive civil unrest throughout the western world because of the Vietnam War and many other issues did create a war. THIS was the New Idealism in action. This is clear evidence that the New Idealism certainly has a political side that must be considered in any analysis of the New Idealism.

The war that was waged in the western world between two clearly opposing forces cannot be underestimated. When the hippies went to protest and when the civil rights campaigners went out on a limb THIS was war. And by the late 1960s there were literally tens of millions of hippies throughout the western world. The American Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 plus the major demonstrations in Paris were seen as watersheds. In Chicago in 1968 Allen Ginsberg was leading the way. By the early 1970s Ginsberg had become a practicing Tibetan Buddhist. This is a very important point because much of the early New Age movement had been influenced by Buddhism during the 1950s and 1960s. Because Ginsberg was so famous and on the lips of every alternative thinker and writer by the 1970s, this clearly gave good publicity for Buddhism and the New Age movement in general.

After Ginsberg read Howl at that amazing poetry reading in San Francisco in 1955, the literary side of the New Idealism really began in earnest. San Francisco went on to become the Paris of the New Age and counter culture movement and remained so right up into the middle of the 1980s. Publishing houses such as City Lights, which was started by another Beat writer called Lawrence Ferlinghetti, became the symbol of the radical side of the New Age and the symbol of the New Idealism. This publishing company is at the very heart of the New Idealism and Ferlinghetti published many extraordinary books of poetry himself which sold in the millions.

Burroughs, Kerouac and the Literary Revolution

The Beat movement produced some of the best and most important writers of the 20th century. William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac introduced novels that changed a generation. Both of these writers were deeply influenced by the new spirituality that had been evolving. Both were extremely well educated in science and literature. Both were also well acquainted with esoteric knowledge. I personally believe that William Burroughs is perhaps the most important writer of the contemporary English novel. Burroughs was also deeply influenced by Chinese Taoism.

Burroughs was one of those rare figures that investigated any knowledge that furthered the pursuit of pure knowledge. He lived in various places around the world from South America, Tangiers, Paris and London. He was another father of the international counterculture and became a famous symbol for the growing gay rights movement. His novels dealt seriously with the concept of aliens and many of his novels were set on alien planets that had been infected with a virus that was killing the population. He wrote these novels before the advent of AIDS. He also wrote these novels before the evolution of the UFO and alien movement which is now firmly entrenched in the New Age movement and an area of the New Age movement that is now taken very seriously.

Nevertheless, William Burroughs sharply criticised the overly materialist nature of our institutions and cultures. His novels were a savage indictment of the Newtonian-Cartesian world. Burroughs was educated at Harvard University and went on to do post-graduate work in medicine and anthropology. Burroughs was also very well versed in the New Physics and clearly saw the relationship between David Bohm's work and the revolutionary aspects of quantum theory. Burroughs was essentially an Idealist. Burroughs also wrote extensively of the relationship between the South American Indian communities and their unique relationship with spirituality.

Jack Kerouac was another Beat novelist who championed the notion of philosophical Idealism. He was a committed Buddhist Catholic and consistently wrote of the relationship between all religions but especially his beloved Buddhism and Catholicism. His extraordinary ability to show how Consciousness was producing matter was constantly depicted in his beautiful novels, most of which became best sellers throughout the late 1950s and 1960s. One of his most famous New Age novels and a novel that would eventually become a classic for Buddhist spiritual philosophies was The Dharma Bums. The novel contains many dialogues between characters expressing their desire to explain the Idealist notion behind Buddhism and of the quest for the Void, for higher consciousness, for the mental world.

Kerouac also wrote an extraordinary book of philosophy which is now a New Age classic in esoteric circles called The Scripture of the Golden Dawn. This work of philosophy examines esoteric Buddhism, something that hardly any western scholars had done in the early 1950s. Kerouac had a unique understanding of both Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism but became extremely knowledgeable about the Pure Land School and its close ties with Zen Buddhism. Kerouac was one of the first writers in the western world to see the relationship between this form of Buddhism and Christianity, but especially Catholicism. His distain of academic materialist philosophy was overwhelmingly denounced in his writings. By the time the hippies started to flex their muscles Kerouac had been elevated to the status of a God. Many say that he was one of the first writers to speak eloquently about the major environment issues of the future. He strongly deplored the materialist America of the 1950s and called for a Spiritual Revolution based on Jazz, Buddhism and tantric sexuality. This aptly sums up Kerouac's position in his novel The Dharma Bums:

"The attitude for the Bard, the Zen Lunacy Bard of old desert paths, see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I sees a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands of even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of them Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and all living creatures."

Here of course Kerouac is pre-empting the entire Hippie movement because this was written in the late 1950s.

The Hippie Generation and the New Physics

As the Beat movement became more famous it joined with other progressive movements and even eventually linked up with the Frankfurt School philosophers such as Herbert Marcuse who was by the 1960s teaching at UCLA in California. The Beat Generation was born between 1910 and 1932. Those born in that generation can be said also to be the War Generation. The Hippie Generation, or the Woodstock Generation, are those people born between 1933 and 1955. The next generation, the Punk Generation or Generation X, were born between 1955 and 1977.

Thus it is extremely important to realise the impact that the Beats had on the following generations. The Beats laid the groundwork for the New Idealism. The Beats introduced the concept of a mental vision in reality and popularised it and made it famous throughout the second half of the 20th century.

The impact the Beats had on the international counterculture was epic. They virtually single handedly started the counterculture which later espoused Left Wing Spiritual politics advocating feminism, ecology, gay liberation and consciousness expansion. All of this is at the basis of the practical side and the political side of the New Idealism. Other very important Beat writers included Gary Snyder, Alan Watts (an important Buddhist philosopher), Gregory Corso, LeRoi Jones, Diane DiPrima, Ann Sexton, Michael McClure and Neal Cassidy. In the case of Cassidy, there is a clear connection to the latest in New Age thought. Cassidy was a friend of Kerouac and became obsessed with Edgar Cayce, a very famous New Age channeller.

One major impact of the Beats is that their influence not only changed world literature but went right into journalism and science. The scientific community by the 1950s was clearly very interested in spiritual phenomenon as the Beat legacy started to make its grip. This is an extremely important point because the generation after the Beats, the Hippies, were extremely well educated on the whole. Of course, the hippie movement was a worldwide phenomenon that radically altered western consciousness forever.

The hippies were very interested in the rise of scientific culture and much of the hippie generation were extremely well educated. It became the first generation in the history of the modern world to experience mass education as the gains of social democracy started to take their grip. The percentage of hippies who went to university and did high level research degrees was large. By the mid 1960s the flavour of the Beat phenomenon moved onto the university campus throughout the world and the hippies became the first radical students en masse to join together and start amazing protests that became the symbol of the 1960s. Every area of progressive thought became enmeshed in the hippie movement. The university campus throughout all western, Australian and North American campuses became symbols of free thinking and intellectual experimentation. This force radically influenced science. Hippies infiltrated every area of the sciences and a huge number of scientific manuals were produced.

As the hippie explosion became a symbol of an international spiritual awakening, the following of science and Hindu and Buddhist philosophies and religions plus western esoteric mysticism became standard. It became common for poets to also be mathematicians and physicists and the strict borderline between art and the sciences started to break down. Obviously it was during the 1960s that physicists such as Fritjof Capra and Geoffrey Chew started devising their extraordinary insights into physics and started talking about it in encounter groups and the like. Major experimental physicists such as Jack Sarfartti had been credited with starting a radical group of physicists in California to rethink their physics in a spiritual manner. This new vibrant feeling spilled into the entire West Coast hippie scene which had become one of the music capitals of the world.

By the time the New Physics had fully spilled into the hippie West Coast American literary scene an extraordinary amount of new novels and books of poetry spilled into print. The entire structure of the novel during this time started to change radically. This had been anticipated by the Beats and also the French New novel that radically experimented with narrative structure. Time and space in fiction writing all of a sudden became radically experimental. This was a clear result of the new insights of the New Physics.

One of the first major new hippie writers to emerge during this period was Richard Brautigan, an absolutely extraordinary genius who lived in San Francisco during the height of the Hippie era and who gained world-wide fame with more than 10 amazing novels and many volumes of poetry. Although Brautigan was an autodidact he became one of the first novelists in the western world to have extraordinary bizarre philosophical mutations throughout his works. Throughout his work there are references to quantum theory and eastern thought and he came to represent one of the major New Voices of the New Idealism following the Beats. It was very much Brautigan's work that launched many new novelists who followed a similar attitude despite always showing individuality. These other novelists have included such extremely well-known literary innovators as Tom Robbins, Robert Persig, Kathy Acker, and Leonard Cohen to name a few well known ones. All of this type of literary fiction highlighted a new form of literary imagination that concentrated on supernatural, mystical and notions of philosophical idealism.

Never before had this tradition been exercised to the extent that these writers did. Every area of the writer's imagination was taken to the limit. Again, the 1960s was the beginning of this very radical direction in literature. It also made spirituality radical, a concept that had earlier been dismissed by existentialists and materialists.

The Punk Generation and the Visual Arts

During the mid 1960s agnostic existentialism, structuralism and the terrible scientific principles of the Vienna School and Logical Positivists had a fairly large impact on the world literary community. Paris had still been seen as a major if not the major intellectual scene of the planet. Irish writers James Joyce and Samuel Beckett had gone to live in Paris in the first half of the 20th century. The literary avant garde had been greatly impacted by existentialism and Left Wing Materialism yet Paris and other centres always had the roots of philosophical Idealism also being strongly felt.

However, during the 1960s, the new world spiritualism captivated the literary scene. Herman Hesse, the extraordinary German Nobel Prize winning author, wrote many novels dealing with these concepts. Hesse went on to become a symbol of the hippies. Also, Hesse was considered a major European novelist who was dealing with major spiritual issues. Even within the existentialist camp there was also a sympathy towards spiritual issues and writing. Although Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre were proclaimed atheists, there was never a total dismissal of what form a higher reality might take, such as a form of Spinoza's monist pantheism — which is not really godless but recognises that god is in everything.

Another very important aspect of the literary explosion of the 1960s was the fact that throughout the western world thousands of little magazines, newsletters and publishing companies evolved. The Beats had initially gotten the ball rolling but by the 1960s the number of new magazines was unprecedented. This trend continued right up into the middle of the 1980s and many small press books never went to large multi-national companies. Thus a war became apparent within the academic community with most conservative materialist books being published by academic publishing houses or multinationals while the new thinking of people such as Fritjof Capra and the plethora of fiction writers and poets became part of a huge underground network of writers, thinkers, poets and scientists who had developed views that were counter to the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm.

The generation that followed the hippies, the Punk Generation or Generation X, were born between 1956 and 1977. This generation had continued mainly in the underground to reveal the astounding implications of the New Idealism. Novels, poetry, music and works of philosophy are clearly being published that support spiritual philosophies. The early punk literature and music of the late 1970s was always peppered with a large dose of Spiritualism which merged into the famous Gothic movements of the 1980s Punk scene throughout the world. This New Wave Gothic Punk movement swept the western world in music and continued the philosophies of the early counter-culture that was started by the Beats in the 1950s.

In recent times some major New Age texts have been published by major multi-national publishing houses. Penguin, for example, recently published A Course In Miracles, which is regarded in the worldwide New Age movement as a major text. But many other major New Age writers such as Joshua Stone, David Ash and others have continued to publish with alternative presses.

Of course the New Idealism also stretched into the other arts and during the second half of the 20th century the visual arts in the counter culture were highly influenced by spiritualism and the concept of Philosophical Idealism. One of the most obvious examples of this is that of Abstract Expressionism whose most famous example is Jackson Pollock. This form of painting freed up the idea of abstraction, or even the notion of the mental. This form of art and other forms of avant garde art certainly captured the hippie and counter culture spirit of the time.

In music another major example can be seen in the explosion of the folk music tradition where such famous performers as Joan Baez and Bob Dylan espoused the spiritual life and again this was reflected in their music. The rock music scene, of course, was deeply influenced by spiritual ideas. A perfect example of this is The Doors, where lead singer Jim Morrison constantly sang about the spiritual relationship between humanity and the earth itself. The Beatles were also all highly influenced by Indian philosophy while John Lennon and Yoko Ono had become Sai Baba devotees. The other Beatles had become devotees of the founder of Transcendental Meditation, the Maharishi.

The world famous singer Michael Jackson was a very strong devotee of Sai Baba. All of the band members of the Rolling Stones have expressed major spiritual concerns as well as most other famous and respected rock acts. The Punk music tradition is full of spiritual awareness and most of the famous punk acts followed some spiritual tradition.

A major creative area that has followed and promoted the New Idealism has been in the film and motion picture area. Many major Hollywood films have had New Age themes or major issues of spirituality. Hollywood has also become famous for promoting films looking at the role of aliens. These sorts of films have been around now for more than 20 years with the most famous first film called ET made by Steven Spielberg. Of course these films have had a huge impact on the public and people now talking openly about the existence of life from other planets. And of course the New Physics would certainly support the possibility that there is life on other planets.

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First published in 2002, The New Idealism has appeared in multiple international print editions and is now available in digital format through the author and at CrystalWind.ca.

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