COHEN: Speaking of a new religious sensibility, that is what my last question is about: What kind of new moral, ethical, and spiritual framework would each of you advocate that would enable more and more of us to meet the great challenges of our life conditions?

SENGE: Well, I don't know if I have a concept of a new framework. I think we know plenty about spirituality, morality, and ethics. But what has shifted totally is the context because, as we've been saying, the context now is global, and therefore it can't be anything less than a global spirituality. I think there is immense innate knowledge in the human, and probably in quite a few other species, that we would all consider to be spiritual knowledge, but the problem is that we don't know how to access it and cultivate it in the present global context. Most of the spiritual "golden ages" in human history, in China and Greece and places like that, were long ago. They were not really able to take root and make it through the last couple of thousand years. We don't have any spirituality for the modern context. The only thing that we can probably say with some confidence is that a modern spirituality would need to be really different from the spiritual practices and institutions that worked in those other contexts.

The one place that I think we can look, to some degree, is science. I think the spirituality of the next millennium will be very tied to science. Because, for all its shortcomings, the development of Western science in the last four or five hundred years is undoubtedly an important development in human society, and many people have pointed to science as kind of the religion of this epoch. I think that's probably a pretty good analogy. Today we look to scientists as people traditionally looked to religious leaders, to tell us how reality really works. And good scientists always cringe at this, firstly, because they know their knowledge is very narrow, and secondly, because they know that science does not produce absolute truths.

The fundamental challenge, though, is that science has been trapped in this fragmentation of the inner world and the outer world. This actually kind of crept into science for political/social reasons. The scientists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had to get the Church off their backs, so they said, "You deal with the inner world; we'll deal with the outer world." And now we've all paid the price, with this great power and influence in the outer world and a total estrangement from the inner world. So I think the spirituality of the next millennium will be one that somehow reintegrates what we would call "science" today, which at its best is about skepticism and an absolutely rigorous belief in experience. I think that is the core of empirical science—in fact, that is what the word empirical means—but it gradually got distorted, and then progressively, that commitment to experience got completely lost. So science is a tricky word to use, and I mean it only in the sense that, as Buckminster Fuller always used to say, "Every human being is born a scientist." So that would be my take on the new spirituality.

COHEN: Don, what kind of new moral, ethical, and spiritual framework would you advocate to enable more and more of us to meet the great challenges of our changing life conditions?

BECK: Well, I think part of it, as I've been saying, will be a recognition that different people at different stages have to embrace different versions of spirituality. And rather than their being the target of our scorn and ridicule, our task is to help them through these healthy, positive expressions of spirituality because these expressions are necessary at different stages of the spiral. So the framework that I'm talking about contains these elements of pilgrimage, of trial and error, of gaining new systems, of leaving ego behind, of doing whatever is necessary to increase the capacity for more complex thinking. We need to build the essential steps and stages into our school systems, into our religious life, into the whole community, so that we create, as Ken Wilber puts it, "the greatest depth for the greatest span." If we can do this, then maybe what will become part of the spirituality in the twenty-first century is a respect for and a focus on the awesome nature of how life itself is evolving. I think it will be a redefinition of spirit, much along the lines of what you and Ken have been talking about. It has much more of a cosmic respect for the force of life itself, and for the fact that some other kind of intelligence seems to be behind it. Think about it—humans could not have just evolved biologically simply with 35,000 genes—there would not have been time for the random choice process to work. Bacteria, viruses, genes, and memes respond to nonlinear dynamics, which means that when their external worlds threaten their internal capacities, they recalibrate their codes. So there is, in all life-forms, a genius, or adaptive intelligence. And I think that this understanding of what life itself is could be part of the basis for the new theology, or the new expression of religion. That's why so many physicists and philosophers now are beginning to talk about God again—not the same kind of God of the Old Testament, but a whole different concept of what is spiritual.

COHEN: Brian, what kind of new moral, ethical, and spiritual framework would you advocate?

SWIMME: Framework is a perfect word because we find ourselves in this moment, at least in the West, of having broken apart all the frameworks. There's nothing we can really agree on, in terms of value. What we're left with is lowest-common-denominator consumerism. That's our world! So what would be a new framework?

As we've touched on in this conversation already, it seems to me that we're in the moment of discovering this new framework of the universe in development itself. As you've mentioned, Andrew, and Peter and Don, it is a vast new historical revelation of life, of spirit, or of the universe. I liked what Peter said—it will be a new science. And I guess I would describe it in two ways. One would be the discovery of evolution, cosmic evolution. We have this amazing vision of the universe, coming from this numinous seed and then expanding out to where we are now. So from this empirically based approach to reality, it's just so evident that we are connected and involved with everything. We're all coming from the same seed point.

So that would be the large-scale discovery. And then to deepen it, in terms of the micro nature of reality, we have the quantum discovery of the inseparability of the inner and the outer. And this goes with what Peter was talking about. Now we realize that this division between inner and outer simply is not viable; it was an illusion that worked for Newton and Descartes, but the deeper understanding is seamlessness. And so we have the discovery of a developing universe that is, from the beginning, seamless. We are everywhere involved with the whole thing.

In this framework, then, our fundamental challenge is this notion of individuality, or we could say discontinuity. We have this illusion that we're not connected, we're not part of, we're separate from, and our entire economic and political systems are based on that premise: the separation between the human and the rest of the world. So one of the great challenges is breaking out of that illusion. And that's why, Andrew, I love your work and your emphasis on the way in which we have to learn how to disappear into the evolutionary process so that we break out of that fragmented ego.

COHEN: That's a great description of it. That's the essence of what I would call "Evolutionary Enlightenment"—transcending ego so that we can literally disappear into and become one with the evolutionary process itself.

SWIMME: So I think that is the framework—we recognize then that we aren't these isolated individuals, but we really are the whole thing; we're a mode of the whole thing. And so we develop the capacity to flow into the whole thing—and I like the way Don puts it—in the service of life. We have this power that no other species has had—human self-consciousness. But it's not for humans. And when that power is put in service of the whole, we become a way in which the whole evolutionary process moves into another phase of its beauty.

So in terms of spiritual development, I would say that our challenge right now is to become what Teilhard de Chardin would have called the "hominized" form of the evolutionary process. Teilhard used the word "hominization" to describe the way in which humans transform previously existing practices and functions of the earth. The earth makes decisions all the time. It makes choices—in a broad sense, this is called natural selection. But when you throw human choice in there, it explodes—look at the impact of all of the decisions we're making all over the planet. Human decision has "hominized" the natural selection process—for good and ill. Natural selection has been surpassed by humans. So in this new framework, we would need to understand ourselves as the way in which the universe is making fundamental decisions about the quality of life that it wants to blossom forth. And these decisions aren't just made for humans or for a particular society but for the whole dynamic, pulsating, throbbing planetary community.

COHEN: That's profound. And so, therefore, this new framework would have to illuminate the fact that it indeed is we who have created the past and who will create the future. It would have to emphasize not only the global context of human incarnation in the twenty-first century but also the evolutionary context. As you so beautifully described, we are all playing a crucial role in a developmental process that, for the most part, we remain unconscious of. So the significant task of a new spirituality would be to oblige us to become conscious of that fact. And most importantly, in this context, the task of a new spirituality would be a perennial one—to awaken as many of us as possible to the ultimate truth that there is only One and that we are all that One. Obviously we have come to a point where the divisions in the way that we think about life and the way we live life need to be urgently questioned. Our very survival depends on it. Indeed, what it means to be a human being in the twenty-first century is one issue at this point! That's what has become loud and clear in this conversation. Thank you all very much.