Lazy thinkers hurl the term "New Age" around indiscriminately and pejoratively, applying it to anything that falls outside the theories about reality that are favored by scientists and intellectuals.
In their ill-informed perspective, the demanding Fourth Way philosophy of self-mastery taught by George Gurdjieff falls in the same category as goofy mediums who channel the prophecies of time-traveling extraterrestrials from the Pleiades.
(Not that I personally have anything against such goofy mediums; I'm glad they exist.)
Paradigm-busting thinkers like Robert Anton Wilson, Sri Aurobindo, and Rudolf Steiner get the same dismissive gesture as those who champion chupacabras, ear candles, and the hollow earth theory.
(Again, please note that some of my best friends are chupacabras, ear candlers, and hollow earth theorists.)
I've even heard ranters and ravers who brand mythologist Joseph Campbell and psychologist Carl Jung as New Agers!
It's downright stupid to be so sloppy in one's thinking.
It's unscientific to be so emotionally biased against, so dogmatically and unilaterally opposed to, viewpoints outside one's own narrow band.
From the mouths of some self-appointed guardians of the Truth and the Way, "New Age" becomes a bigot's slur.
I close this brief message with the words of three notorious New Age flakes, philosopher William James, essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Albert Einstein.
First, James: "The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes."
Emerson: "Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a person thinks, he is free."
Einstein: "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."