"Let us not walk the path of life in darkness but shed your light upon the path so that we may clearly see the power of your glory forever." Those words of prayer are the last spoken by Bob Johnson, 54, a gentle, white-haired man who practices his spiritual arts in a modest apartment in midtown New York City. Now his eyes are half shut, unseeing, and when he next speaks, in a strangely clipped Irish accent, he represents a "tutelage" of spectral beings from Alpha Centauri, the nearest of the stars.
"Greetings from the almighty form of God," says the celestial tutelage. "Do you seek our counsel?"
"Yes," says TIME Correspondent Mary Cronin.
"Do you have an art?"
"I'm a reporter."
"That is an art of sorts. Do you feel the vibrations now? It may be starting now."
"I'm trying to find out more about the New Age."
"Always the New Age!"
"Is all this interest in channeling and crystals a passing fad or something more?"
"It is both: a fad to some, a way of life to others. We would say there are more true spiritual seekers today."
"What is my mission in life?"
"We feel you will be involved in the process of bringing the written thought about spirituality to man. This is a mission. People say there are accidents, but this is not an accident."
"Can you tell me about one of my past lives?"
"You have been a sailor. A man. You understand the Spanish Armada? You tried to attack England! You considered it to be a heathen country because they dropped Catholicism."
"What did I learn from that life?"
"To swim very well. You almost lost your life. Your ship was broken up around the northern coast of Ireland. You were in the water for days. It was very painful."
"How do you live up there on Alpha Centauri?"
"We don't have a day, a night. We have never been a human body. We don't speak like this. What is coming through is not our persona. We don't have a personality you could relate to. We manifest a personality so that you may relate to it. You see?"
So here we are in the New Age, a combination of spirituality and superstition, fad and farce, about which the only thing certain is that it is not new. Nobody seems to know exactly where the term came from, but it has been around for several decades or more, and many elements of the New Age, like faith healing, fortune-telling and transmigration of souls, go back for centuries. (Ages, in general, are an uncertain affair. The Age of Aquarius, celebrated in the musical Hair, may have started in the 1960s or at the turn of the century or may not yet have begun. Once under way, such astrological ages are supposed to last 2,000 years.)