LYCOS RETRIEVER 
New Age Movement: Experiences
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The New Age Movement is extremely humanistic. Since each person believes he is a god and in charge of his own universe, it follows that he can "work out his own salvation", and has no need of a savior. He is therefore continually "turning in" with meditation, and striving to become part of the godforce. While missing the true Jesus Christ of the Bible, he tunes in various "spirit guides", and accepts the experiences they give him as "truth". He imagines he is making progress towards salvation, or self-realization. The Bible, once again, presents the opposite view.
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New Age groups are quite eclectic; drawing from several different sources but one of the more prominent unifying themes of the NAM is their experiences which bind them together. Absolute truth is replaced by subjective experiences. All is relative and interpreted by each individual.
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Commitment to Christ may not result in experiences that are as immediately intense as the "altered states of consciousness" experienced through New Age magic arts. After all, commitment to Christ requires no mind-altering drug or technique. For the Christian, the mind isn't altered, it's transformed by God's grace. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, the mind of Christ progressively takes control of the Christian, who experiences peace, assurance, wisdom, and harmony with God and His purposes.
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While other genres like psy-trance/goa trance are not associated with New Age in their philosophies they can in some ways be likened to a New Age perspective. Psy-trance, especially, suggests a fusion of transcendental feeling and the individual's connectedness with the cosmos. This experience and the dance culture surrounding it may carry cultural memes about technology, parapsychology, artificial intelligence, as well as a view that thoughts may in fact determine reality.
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The emphasis on subjective knowledge and experience is a link between New Age beliefs and postmodernism. In addition, some New Age practices and beliefs could make use of what British anthropologist Sir James George Frazer termed magical thinking, in The Golden Bough(1890). Common examples are the principle that objects once in contact maintain a practical link, or that objects that have similar properties exert an effect on each other.
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