Blog: I Went to a New Age Expo (Stranger in a Strange Land) – Why are There so Many Kids Here? And What’s with Reincarnation?

Welp, it’s that time of year again. The birds are chirping, the flowers are coming up, the dang mosquitos are back for no other reason than to spite us, and the weather is as indecisive as Taylor Swift where it can’t decide what it wants to be. In other words, its spring, and that means that my local New Age expo is back in town, which means y’all get to hear about the madness.

This expo is one of four this year, with two happening in spring, one happening in mid-summer, and the last in early fall. However, from what I’ve heard from the people who went in previous years, the one we went to was the biggest one of the year. That said, I wasn’t surprised about the sheer number of people who were there. The convention hall was super crowded, but one of the things I wasn’t expecting about the crowd was how many kids were there. The majority of the crowd was female, so it was only natural that there would be some moms, but I wasn’t expecting the moms to bring their kids, ages ranging from babies to pre-teens. I saw one little boy holding a crystal wand in each hand as he sat and meditated at a booth, for crying out loud.

I can’t tell what’s worse: kids running around at Sephora, or kids running around at the New Age Expo. At least Sephora doesn’t have several booths selling psilocybin.

But besides the absurd number of kids there, the main thing that my family’s conversations with people revolved around was reincarnation. Now, I’ll stick to the three most interesting conversations we had with the people there for the sake of brevity, but all three are weird.

The first person we talked to was a lady who identified as Roman Catholic and believed in various Masters of Wisdom, particularly that Jesus is the Master of Love and Buddha is the Master of Wisdom. Further, she believed in perennial wisdom, which is the belief that there was once an ultimate truth or religion that got turned into the various beliefs and religions held by everyone today. Thus, everyone is on their own path to the ultimate source of everything as they gradually figure out and accept that they have the divine spark within them and reach enlightenment over the course of thousands or millions of reincarnation cycles.

She also believed that since everyone gets reincarnated, they basically have infinite attempts to get it right. If the planet blows up in the meantime, that’s fine. You’ll get transferred to a different planet. And if you do get it right and become some sort of super enlightened spiritual master, you can get transferred to another planet to help other people reach their enlightenment. Doesn’t that sound fun?

Now, for those of you who have read the Bible, you might be slightly confused about who the heck Jesus is to this lady and how He fits into her belief system. After all, she was saying that he’s one of the various Masters you can follow while the Bible says that He’s your only shot to Heaven. Well, when I brought up John 14:6 when Jesus says, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me,” she said that Jesus is essentially the most enlightened person ever. He’s the gatekeeper to reaching God, so as the Master of Love, He’s the highest standard for everyone to follow to reach their divine spark.

Of course, that is not at all what Jesus meant in the Bible, but this is how she was interpreting it to fit with her worldview.

But that leaves the question of how Jesus reached such a high enlightenment status that He could claim to be God. According to her, it was through being unconditionally loving, thus reaching His full potential through the divine spark within, because God is love, whatever that’s defined as. It’s not like according to the Bible, while God is loving and merciful, He’s also just and must rain down His wrath on those who break His law or anything.

Overall, the path to the ultimate truth according to her was by being unconditionally loving and by following whatever truth fits you…which is entirely subjective and contradictory.

Another interesting conversation I had was with a member of what’s possibly the most obvious pseudo-Christian cult I’ve ever seen. This cult is called the Church of Shambhala Vajradhara Maitreya Sangha, and its leader is a dude who calls himself Buddha Maitreya and claims to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. As such, he believes that it’s his job to restore the Noosphere through Christ consciousness, amongst other things.

But what is the Noosphere? I’ll let him explain:

The Noosphere is the planetary sphere of mind or thinking layer of the planet Earth. To grasp the idea of the Noosphere, we must elevate our consciousness and open ourselves to the most general, elemental, and cosmic principles of life on Earth.

The Noosphere is the next stage in the evolution of human consciousness. As the mental sheathe of the planet, the Noosphere characterizes mind and consciousness as a unitary phenomenon. This means that the quality and nature of our individual and collective thoughts directly affects the Noosphere and creates the quality of our environment – the biosphere.

The historic process is changing dramatically before our eyes … Mankind taken as a whole is becoming a powerful geological force. Humanity’s mind and work face the problem of reconstructing the biosphere in the interests of freely thinking Mankind as a single entity. This new state of the world we are approaching without noticing it, it is the ‘Noosphere’.
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The return of Christ as the fulfillment of the Noosphere as well as the consummation of the universe. According to the Law of Time, the end of linear time begins the time of the Noosphere and the return of Christ Consciousness.

But when will the return of Christ be if this dude is claiming to be the reincarnation of Christ? According to the lady I was talking to, who was a nun for this cult, the first coming occurred when Jesus came in His original body. After He died and was resurrected, she then said that He went to India (where He also spent His early years between 12 and 30), married, and somewhere along the line, was reincarnated in various forms, which is the second coming.

If you’re confused, I am too.

I asked her how that lined up with what the Bible (which she claimed to have read) says about the return of Jesus and how everyone will see Him and every knee will bow. Her response, like with many of the other questions I asked her, was, “I’m just a student.”

Some of the other questions I asked her included:

1). “Do you believe the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are the actual teachings of Jesus during His first coming?”

2). “What evidence is there that Buddha Maitreya is the reincarnation of Jesus Christ?”

3). “If karma is real,” – (they believe in karma) – “then if a woman is raped, then does she deserve it for something bad that she did in a past life?”

4). “What defines good and bad, or your concept of ‘virtue’?”

5). “What happens after we die? Do I get reincarnated or do I get to break out of that cycle?”

6). “If we’re constantly being reincarnated, then what purpose is there in repenting and following this guy if I’m still, maybe, going to get reincarnated?”

The answers to questions 4-6 could be summed up as, “I don’t know,” as she kept telling me, “I’m just a student. It’s better to hear ‘Jesus’ speak.” The other three questions, however, she did try to answer. On the first one, she said that while Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were okay about Jesus’ ministry, but it’s better to hear from Buddha Maitreya himself. Additionally, her group mainly focuses on the “Lost Gospels.” The Lost Gospels are basically a theory that Jesus, in the 18 years that we know next to nothing about between His childhood and ministry, went to India, did some stuff there, and travelled back to Israel to His thing. Of course, there’s no solid historical evidence for this, but this is what they roll with.

On my second question, her response was that some anonymous pastor/theologian in South Africa said that Buddha Maitreya was Jesus after listening to him. And with the third question, she just brushed that off entirely as absurd.

I hope y’all can detect the issues with her apologetic for this cult. If it wasn’t saying “I don’t know” or deflecting, it’s based on completely unverifiable sources or unsupported theories. It got to a point where we were both getting frustrated, her with the questions, and me with the lack of answers. Finally, she directed me to Buddha Maitreya’s YouTube channel, and I may do a deep dive post on him and his cult eventually.

Finally, the last person I’ll mention here is a dude I’m just going to call Wyatt. Originally, we thought he was a Wiccan, but actually, he was closer to a Luciferian. There are different types of Luciferians out there, but in his case, he believed that we are gods who came from some source that we later called “God,” and that we need to realize that we’re God to eventually reach our full potential as god at some point. Thus, Wyatt believed that he’s a god and that he can help other people reach their god-ness.

As we continued to question this belief, though, Wyatt started getting visibly flustered to the point where his neck was so red and splotchy that I was wondering if he was having an allergic reaction to something. Thankfully, we were able to end the conversation when my dad informed Mom and I that he had finally located a family friend who was also doing evangelism there.

So, that was my experience with the New Agers this time around. It’s honestly a depressing look at how easily people are deceived as long as they can feel like they are in control.

Until next time,

M.J.