"The third millennium will be dominated by the 'religion/spirituality paradox': the decline of organized religion on one hand coupled with a growing interest in spirituality and wisdom on the other. . . . This demands a reordering of priorities in terms of the spiritual, and an urgent need for a relevant faith. . . . By relevant, I mean a faith that speaks to the current and future concerns of our time."



"The devastation taking place cannot be critiqued effectively from within the traditional religions or humanist ethics. We find ourselves ethically destitute just when, for the first time, we are faced with ultimacy, the irreversible closing down of the Earth's functioning in its major life systems. Our ethical traditions know how to deal with suicide, homicide, and even genocide; but these traditions collapse entirely when confronted with biocide, the extinction of the vulnerable life systems of the Earth, and geocide, the devastation of the Earth itself. . . . The human is at a cultural impasse. . . . Radical new forms are needed."





ANDREW COHEN: It seems that the unprecedented complexity of the time we are living in demands from many of us a profound reevaluation of the spiritual context and direction of our lives. The world is changing faster than it ever has, and this rapid pace of change is simultaneously thrilling, frightening, bewildering, and overwhelming. It is increasingly difficult to sustain perspectives, worldviews, and spiritual and philosophical beliefs that are not broad enough to embrace the enormity of our circumstances. I can definitely tell that many of the people that I come in contact with are searching for new answers. It suddenly seems that for many of those who are, as you would say, at the leading edge, satisfying answers are no longer being found in the great traditions. It really seems that a new spirituality with a higher reach and a deeper embrace is necessary at this time, one that will enable us to discover our true identity, the timeless source of our being, while simultaneously compelling us to face the actuality of the world context that we're living in. Indeed, it would seem that now, the spiritual path must free the individual in a very specific way, a way that would cultivate enough strength and maturity to bear the incredible emotional and psychological urgency of the life conditions we're in the midst of. We need a path that will free the awakening human in the face of fear, despair, and self-doubt, a path that will make it possible for him or her to respond with a worldcentric passion and God-centered devotion to the evolutionary needs of the life process at this point in time.

So I thought it would be great if we could speak together about what this new spirituality might be like. To begin, maybe you could briefly describe what an integral perspective on spirituality would be.

KEN WILBER: First, it would be good to talk about what the meaning of "spirituality" is because it can get very confusing. An integral spirituality, I believe, would be a conception that would take into account, and attempt to honor, all of the different meanings of spirituality, and also draw some conclusions about what happens when you stop using a merely partial approach to spiritual potential. I'll give you three of the main ways that people use the word spiritual. I'm not saying any of these uses are right or wrong—actually, I'm saying they're all correct. But it's important that we know what we're talking about.

One very common definition of spirituality is a "peak experience." Somebody actually has a spiritual experience. It can be a satori, it can be an experience of nature mysticism, it can be a revelation from the Divine, it can be luminosity or light. It's some sort of a peak experience that has a beginning in time, confers a great deal of meaning and value, and sometimes includes overwhelming emotion—bliss, love, gratitude, humility, compassion. These things tend to be so overwhelming that the separate self is blasted to smithereens in the moment of the experience and has some deep and profound understanding or realization about the world and his or her place in it. If you look at a lot of the world's great religious traditions, they all started when their founder had one of those experiences. So that's one definition of spirituality—a direct, immediate realization or experience.

Another way people use the word spirituality, and this can be a little more scholarly, is to mean the highest levels of development in any line of development. There are about a dozen major lines of development—cognitive, emotional, moral, interpersonal, psychosexual, and so on. So, for example, people tend to call the highest type of cognition spiritual. Lower types of cognition, like a word or an image or a logical concept, people don't generally call spiritual. But if you have a transrational awareness or a higher intuition or something that's transverbal, people will tend to call that spiritual. Or in the emotional line, for example, if you have low levels of emotion like hatred, anger, or greed, people don't generally call that spiritual. But highly developed emotions, like universal compassion or love or bliss, people tend to call spiritual. Higher levels of moral development are called spiritual. Higher levels of interpersonal development are called spiritual. This definition is very common. And you can start to see how there's tension between these definitions as well.

AC: Definitely.

KW: Because that second meaning is based on a developmental process, so only someone who is highly developed would have those kinds of spiritual experiences. Whereas, in terms of the first definition, anybody can have a spiritual experience—a two-year-old, a five-year-old, a ten-year-old, an elderly person, and so on. People in the field argue about which definition is right, but I think they're all right.

The third common definition is that spirituality is neither a state nor the highest level in a line, but is its own developmental line. And therefore, you can be at a low level of development in the spiritual line, you can be at a medium level of development in the spiritual line, or you can be at a high level of development in the spiritual line. There has actually been some very respectable scholarly work using that definition. So there we have three major definitions, and there are others that I've outlined in some of my writings.

If we look at spirituality as a line of development, as a series of unfolding levels—for example, archaic, magic, mythic, rational, and integral, then you could say there's archaic religion, there's magical religion, there's mythic religion, there's rational religion, and there's integral religion. A lot of people are implicitly using that third definition—including both Thomas Berry and Caleb Rosado, whom you quoted. And what they're both saying is that magic and mythic religion no longer protects the earth, so therefore, we need an integral or higher spirituality. And I agree. But what they're saying is also very partial. It has to be balanced with these other types of understanding.

I also think that in addition to looking at those three different definitions, we also need to understand a kind of broad orienting generalization, which is that a lot of the traditions, past and present, and a lot of the realized teachers, past and present, make an important distinction between the manifest world of form, the unmanifest world of emptiness, and then their nonduality—the union of emptiness and form. I think that we have to be careful, when we talk about spirituality yesterday, today, and tomorrow, to find a balance in those three domains as well. So, for example, both Thomas Berry and Caleb Rosado were, in essence, just talking about the world of form. Both of them left out an experience of the unborn, or the pure emptiness before the big bang. And unless you have that emptiness as your fundamental background, then you're basically just talking about the manifest world itself and playing in finite forms. Then your idea of spirituality is merely saving that finite form: "We don't want the earth to croak." Well, that's fine. But who were you before the earth was born? Who were you before the big bang? What is this emptiness that never enters the stream of time? Spirituality, integral spirituality, certainly has to include a profound realization of the unborn, the unmanifest, the timeless, the spaceless, combined with a reverence for the world of form—all of it, ecological, personal, global, and so on. My experience is that people tend to err on one side or the other. Either they get into this transcendental purity that doesn't care about the earth and Gaia, or they merely identify with Gaia and they forget the unborn. What we want to try to do, of course, is include both. So that's my overview on some of the essentials that we would want to include in an integral approach to the topic.

A REASSESSMENT OF OUR FAITH

AC: So I think we agree that the religious traditions, because they emerged at a very different time in history, generally do not appear to be equipped to appropriately deal with and respond to the fast-changing life conditions that we find ourselves in the midst of. Therefore, it would seem that this extraordinary time we're living in demands a radical reassessment of our faith.

KW: I think that's exactly right. Most of what we call the world's great religions were born in the magic and mythic eras. They were born about fifty thousand years ago, all the way up to about two thousand years ago. And it's not that the great shamans, saints, and sages of those periods weren't realized. They could, all of them, be plunged into that vast emptiness—because emptiness doesn't change. So a great saint, like Gautama Buddha, for example, could plunge into nirvana and be just as in touch with that emptiness as anybody can be today. But the world of form, the actual manifest world, is evolving. So they didn't fall short of the mark in terms of their own realization of emptiness. It's just that the world of form has so dramatically changed that they are short of the mark on that side of the street, so to speak. So that's where they definitely need updating. And both of those two people whom you quoted are quite right, in my opinion, that the rules of the manifest domain that were developed in the magic and mythic eras are really inadequate for today's world. So in that sense, the great traditions are woefully inadequate.