New Age in the modern world: typology, some forms of manifestation

Abstract

New Age in religious literature is regarded as an integral eclectic concept that refers to a person's search for spirituality outside of known world religions in their confessional terms. Conditionally it includes non-religious groups and trends, Gnostic and metaphysical schools, non-confessional spiritual associations, groups and currents of the "alternative" way of life. From the sociological point of view, it can be attributed to the manifestation of deviations in the form of social anomalies. At the same time, for participants in this direction, their own values, knowledge, activities are seen as a gradual approximation to the norm, a model, in assessing the life of the main mass of society as pathological or nearpathological states that also have the chance to change when they realize their true nature. The description of these public phenomena through the concept of "New Age" is seen as an intermediate or transitional nature due to the presence of serious differences in both the vision of the world and their practical activities.