ANDREW COHEN: Gentlemen, the question that we are looking into for this issue of WIE is very simple: What is a truly relevant spiritual path for our times? But the issues it raises are multifaceted. For example, will the religious traditions, in their current forms, be able to meet the needs of the awakening human in the twenty-first century? Will they be able to serve as catalysts for the much-needed response to the emerging multidimensional crisis we find ourselves in the midst of? Or do we need a new (or improved) approach to this whole topic? So this is the direction of our discussion. But before we go into these questions, I think it's important to speak a little bit about what our current crisis actually is. Many feel that we may be on the verge of a civilizational war, that the growing stress on our natural environment is creating a worldwide emergency where the very survival of life as we have known it is at stake, and simultaneously, many of our institutions seem to be failing dramatically to meet the demands of these changing life conditions. So to begin, could you each please describe simply and clearly for our readers from your own vantage point what this crisis is?

DON BECK: I think we're in what could be called the "Age of Fragmentation"— fragmentation as a result of the end of the Cold War and the breakdown of the simpler bipolar world it represented. With the melting of that metaphorical ice sheet that covered the planet, the deeper value systems and cultural forces that have been bubbling and boiling for generations are suddenly revealed. And now we're seeing tribes, empires, holy "ism" orders, crusades, jihads—we are subjected to unbelievable change because there are billions of people who are passing through different levels of development simultaneously. Many people are now moving into zones of societal development that we, in the Western world, vacated three hundred years ago. So, instead of our species moving in a singular advance along a horizontal line, there are multiple changes happening up and down the developmental spiral. Which means that all the ancient wars, conflicts, revenges, and grudges that have characterized human history from the very beginning, are now reappearing—all at the same time. And simultaneously, we are witnessing new versions of the historic continental drift as our economic, political, technological, and social worlds are, indeed, being pulled closer together. So we are presented with a world of complexity like we've never had before. Unhappily, none of our institutional forms or coping systems can match this complexity. We are searching frantically for organizing systems that can handle these new conditions; we are searching for cohesion in this Age of Fragmentation.

BRIAN SWIMME: Yes, exactly. To describe the nature of the crisis, I guess I would put it this way: We have given birth to these powerful forms of institutions—by which I mean corporations and large organizations, as well as nation-states, and even, to a certain degree, whole civilizations—and we have shaped these with our various different worldviews or mentalities. So we've given birth to all of these institutions, and we happen to be in a moment when the limitation of the mind that gave birth to these has become apparent. In my thinking, that limitation is a very specific one: the form of mind that shaped these institutions was what I would call microphase—which means it was only dealing with the dynamics of a part in relationship to a whole. This form of mind has its roots very deep in our evolutionary past. It has come to us from a long history of learning how to survive.

Now, that mentality was fine as long as the human species was just one species among many. But over the last several decades, we have actually become something far more. In terms of our impact on the planet, we've become something comparable to the atmosphere or the hydrosphere. We have become planetary. We've become a planetary partner to the atmosphere and the biosphere. But we don't live in institutions that were designed to carry out that larger role. These institutions were designed to deal with problems that are smaller than the entire planet. So our challenge is to give birth to institutions that are shaped by a mind that is planetary, or a mind that is holistic. So this is how I'd sum up the situation: We've given birth to a planetary power but we've shaped it with a microphase wisdom. So the challenge right now is to give birth to what I would call a macrophase wisdom, a wisdom that is responsible to the entire planet.

BECK: That's true, Brian. Let me add a couple of points here. We might ask: Why don't we just sit back and let the process continue? After all, so far, we humans have survived and landed on our feet. But what makes it extremely dangerous today is that we have billions of people who are poised to experience a quality of life in the so-called first world—materialism—at a time when many of us are realizing how limited that is and that we need to live more lightly on the land. How do we persuade almost a billion Chinese that they can't have two motor cars, indoor plumbing, and a popcorn popper all at the same time? They're ready to enjoy the "good life" that they've seen on CNN and in American movies. They're demanding their place in the sun. So this is one of the serious problems.

Another problem is that because of advances in technology, we have people with less complex thinking capacities, that is, with neither guilt nor shame, who can now access weaponry (like nuclear-tipped bombs or various forms of biological weapons) created by people with more complex capacities. In fact, they can make these at home as they read the recipe on the internet. So our technology has outstripped our capacity to handle that technology. I'm sure that's happened in the past, but not, as Brian says, at this level of being lethal and being global. What is under threat today is not just one tribe, or one belief system, or even one nation. What is under threat today is life as we know it on the planet. And that should be a very serious wakeup call for all of us.

COHEN: Yes, this is all so true. Terrifyingly true. And from what I've observed, most people just don't seem to be awake to this crisis. I mean, it's not that we haven't heard about it, but maybe we're choosing to avoid facing the truth about all this because the implications are just so overwhelming!

PETER SENGE: Yes. I think that the degree to which people perceive that there's a crisis varies a great deal depending on where they stand in the world today. I think the sense that "there really is no big crisis" is probably strongest in the United States—even after 9/11. You know, it's a pretty understandable human reaction to put our heads back in the sand and just assume that the war on terrorism will get taken care of by somebody, somewhere. There's clearly a lot of dis-ease under the surface, but on the surface there's an "eat, drink, and be merry" kind of mindset, which we work hard to maintain. I think there are two reasons for this. One reason is the traditional isolation and insulation of American culture. Relative to most of the world's "advanced" or industrialized countries, we're probably the most isolated. Perhaps Japan is the only other one that's close—and that kind of highlights the point: we're as isolated as an island.

The second reason is that we're the world's biggest perpetrator of a lot of the problems. There was an old cartoon ecologists used to use, where a person goes to a zoo and looks at all the animals, and finally he gets to the last cage where it says, "The Most Dangerous Animal in the World," and there's a mirror. That kind of says a lot about the U.S. Clearly, the U.S. is the world's largest consumer of raw materials, and the world's largest believer in the mainstream globalization of capitalism. But it's very hard for us to look in the mirror and imagine that we might be the most dangerous country in the world, which I think, without question, we are. And therefore, it's very hard to name these crises in ways that people will agree to because the perceptions are so different around the world. Even in Europe, there are different perceptions from here. And certainly the rest of the world, by and large, has a very different take on the challenges that we face, which do, in my opinion, revolve around the ecological and social imbalances that are getting worse and worse.

There is, of course, plenty of data on both of these issues, but with any data there is always a question as to how to make sense of it. And right now, our media and political mainstream do not want to make sense of the data. Probably the simplest, most tangible example you can look at—and it's not comprehensive, but it's illustrative—is the data on global warming. The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been growing dramatically for 150 years. If we just accept the fact that carbon dioxide is in fact a greenhouse gas—and I don't know anybody in scientific circles who thinks it isn't—and the fact that, so to speak, the rate at which the bathtub is filling up is a lot greater than the rate at which it is draining out, then any kid could tell you what that's going to mean. Yet it befuddles our politicians, who say, "Well, we don't know if global warming is really occurring or not." Most people in the world don't even ask that question. They ask the question, "What are we going to do about it?"

So that, to me, really summarizes the essence of the crisis, which is a crisis of perception. Somehow we can't look at the most basic evidence and come up with a consensus as to what it means.

COHEN: So the second question I'd like to go into is this: What are the different capacities and kinds of responses that will be required from us in order to be able to meet these life conditions?

SWIMME: I'd say, as I was suggesting before, that the nature of our moment is that humans have become this planetary power. Yet we're operating with an understanding that is microphase, or partial, or fragmented. So in terms of the practical capacity we need, it would be something like learning how to think like a planet. The practical challenge is to become a mode of a complex planetary community.

I like an idea of Peter's that I've heard: that these institutions we've created, these large corporations, are something like a new species. I think that's a great way to think about them. They are very new and very young. So the capacity we need right now is like a new form of natural selection. We need to develop the skills of understanding complex systems so that we can hone, reinvent, and reshape these institutions so that they build an integral Earth community.

BECK: And if we start from the premise that we have a fragmented, divided world, then I think the issue is, How do we address the gaps? "Haves" and "have-nots," first, second, and third worlds, developed and developing countries—all these are euphemisms for the fact that the planet is cursed by differing levels of access to "the good life"! So where are the integral, cohesive principles and processes that can bridge these great global divides?

I've been to all kinds of conferences on themes like globalization and redistribution, but I think what's been missing is the understanding that we have to redistribute not just the resources but the coping mechanisms to handle more complex issues. External approaches designed to improve the human condition are faulted unless they also include, as parallel and simultaneous tracks, the essential steps and stages in interior social development. Economic, political, and technological efforts must correlate with the levels of complexity of thinking within individuals and entire cultures—otherwise they will make things worse, not better. If we just pour money on problems, it ends up in Swiss bank accounts. We've tried the egalitarian approach, assuming that everyone is at the same level of thinking and therefore will act in a responsible fashion, and it doesn't work. So because people are at different levels of development, we have to think in terms of constructing the habitats. If we can think in those terms, I believe there's a real possibility that we can stitch together this wounded world.