Update:

I rethought what I wrote about dogmatic belief not being conducive to morals. I think that was an exaggeration of my position and I corrected it:

1. Mentalism (everything is driven by the mind)
2. Correspondence (things are fractal)
3. Vibration (everything is a packet of energy)
4. Polarity (everything oscillates between two opposites)
5. Rhythm (everything has a pulse or cyclical aspect)
6. Causation (all effects have causes)
7. Gender (everything has a negative/passive and positive/active/ aspect)

(I can hear the yowls about sexism/misogyny/mentalism/fraud already but they move me not a whit… nor, I should add, rereading this, are they true. You could, for example, see the active-passive polarity as part of any interaction — not just of a relationship between a man and a woman, but of any exchange. You could also hold quite “progressive” positions, on some social issues – as I do – without necessarily being bound to hold them either, and accept these principles as analytical tools).

According to many esoteric traditions, the seven principles are fundamental principles of the organization of the world around us. This would be anathema or obscurantism to many social scientists — and surely, there is a lot of pre-scientific mythologizing, woolly-headed fluff, wishful thinking, Panglossian smugness etc., etc., in what is called New Age thinking….which is really age-old and better called neo-Hindu or neo-Buddhist (available in the west also as the wisdom or esoteric tradition of Christianity and Judaism).

(For instance, I think the first principle – mentalism – isn’t properly defined and devalues the body/materiality).

But when people argue that religious teaching is largely pre-scientific and that its most valuable component is its ethical teaching, I dissent. Ethics is not dependent on religion. And may often be hampered by it. Some of what we take to be the result of religious values may be at least as much the humanizing effects of the sciences and the arts – especially literature – on culture. I take the minority view that the most valuable part of religion, hidden in mythology and symbolism, lies in its empirical observations and even in its “pseudo-scientific” descriptions…

The teachings in the Gospel, for instance, are most interesting to me as “descriptive” rather than “prescriptive” — they are very useful assessments of the world around us. (Of course, I’m in sympathy with the prescriptions, too, in a general way. I’d just hate to be the final arbiter of how and where they should be applied to anyone but myself).

Now, that descriptive component of religious thought is precisely what critics of the New Age do not understand and which New Agers (and I confess to being in sympathy with them) do. The New Age probably will teach you nothing exceptionally useful about ethics and might even tend to corrupt anyone who didn’t already have clear values – because it’s essentially a set of tools —  that works.
Still, anyone who doesn’t grasp the extent of the cultural renaissance arising from the interaction between Western science and Eastern religion and the numbers of advances in science and medicine that come out of that interaction, is ignorant of one of the most important currents — perhaps ,the most important — of the last century and a half.

Time for the social sciences to come to grips with all this.

And they are. Even if it hasn’t filtered into punditry. But in academics, there is plenty going on in a number of fields, from the life sciences to the organizational sciences that take the new (it’s not that new, except to die-hard positivists and materialists) approach.

Update:

I was thinking about stock-charts, for instance, which fascinate me as very beautiful examples of the intersection of emotions and numbers. The typical chart exhibits all the seven Hermetic principles (the choice of the number seven, is fraught with metaphysical and symbolic significance, even though from our standpoint today it might be considered arbitrary…. more on that at another time).

The stock chart is driven by fundamental or technical values ascribed to the underlying stock by the investors — as well as by their irrational moods (the former being active and the latter more passive); it oscillates between resistance and support at a variable rate (the beta); it’s traded at varying levels of intensity and energy (trading volume); it exhibits fractal patterns (compare intraday and weekly/monthly patterns); and it exhibits greater and lesser cycles (eg. Elliot Waves).

You’d only expect it of any human activity, but it’s still food for thought..and makes me regret not knowing more statistics.