If Language is a Game - These are the Rules: A Search into the Rhetoric of the Spiritual Self-Help Book If Life is a Game - These are the Rules

Abstract

Recent years have seen a growing interest in the areas of metaphysics, spiritualism, psychotherapy and the like. New Age concepts such as ‘transcendence’, ‘self-realization’, ‘meditation’ and ‘holism’ (which in the 1960s were restricted to the hippies and their mind-expanding drugs) have now become fully accepted, widely acknowledged and, not least, used by people both inside and outside the New Age community. In the wake of this ‘popularization’ of New Age, a paradigmatic shift seems to take place in our society in general where traditional rationalistic thinking is replaced by, or at least fused with, a more irrational, emotional, and intuitive approach to argumentation. The aim of this article is to uncover the origins of this emotional and intuitive rhetoric. More specifically, I shall analyse the discourse of the spiritual self-help book and discuss the reflex of New Age ideology on language itself.