It is very important to realize that “New Age” is not an organized movement. It is the most not-organized thing you can imagine. It is so based on individualism that it is more or less a do-it-yourself method for not only creating a new religion, but also for tailoring your present mainstream religion to yourself. You like unicorns? Great, incorporate some unicorns. Lots of colors? Fine. Whatever. If you pray better when you burn something that gives your house a funky smell, then go ahead and burn something.
Part of this doesn’t come from a bad place, necessarily. It comes from things like the 12-Step programs telling people to rely on “God as you understand God” or “your Higher Power”. Twelve step programs aren’t places to discuss theology, but rather places to quit trying to run your own life before you kill yourself with your addictions. If you have even a slight, foggy idea of who God really is to you, that will do far more to keep you clean and sober than all the ideas and ideals in the world. Recovery is not the time to quibble over theological principles. If it takes a crystal to get you to hand your life over to God or you can’t pray without looking up at the lefthand corner of your bedroom ceiling, then go with that. Getting a clearer view of God will come in time.
Part of it, though, comes from an infatuation with novelty, sensuality, and emotion. If something was “discovered” recently or only a few people know it, or it was dug up in some remote corner of the globe where they don’t have electric lights yet, then it must be more true. This is why you’ll get New Agers wearing rosaries like necklaces. To them, a rosary is just a tradition that needs a new twist. If something makes you feel good or engages more of your senses or makes you pay attention to your senses, if it gives an experience beyond words, then it must be more spiritual. God gave us our senses to use in worship, prayer, and sacrament, but prudence must be exercised. If a “spiritual practice” leads to or cements an enslavement to the senses, deadens the intellectual component of ones’ conscience, or makes a created thing into an idol or a magical talisman, then it is very bad.
How priests let stuff like this into Catholic liturgies and sanctuaries, though: that is what makes a person scratch her head.