 Friday, April 1, 2005
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This discussion is reposted from What is Enlightenment? website.
The Challenge of Our Moment
Discussion with Don Beck, Brian Swimme, & Peter Senge
Moderated by Andrew Cohen
When it comes to predicting the future, uncertainty seems to go
with the territory. But if there is one thing that all of the
futurists and visionaries we spoke with for this issue seem to
agree on, it is that whatever course our collective destiny
takes, navigating the years ahead is going to be a challenge. As
the unpredictable forces of change transform every sector of
planetary life and culture—societal, technological,
environmental, geopolitical—the terrain of our global
village is morphing beneath our feet, bringing with it an
increasingly complex, interwoven web of problems requiring our
attention, demanding a response. But what sort of response will
truly meet the challenges ahead? To whom can we look for a
vision all-encompassing enough to embrace the complexity of the
conditions that confront us at the dawn of the twenty-first
century? If Einstein was correct in his assertion that "problems
cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created
them," then what sort of new thinking and what sorts of new
thinkers are going to take us beyond the existential conundrums
of tomorrow?
Now, if you've been following the evolutionary trajectory of
What Is Enlightenment? over the past couple of years,
you may have noticed that a new kind of thinking has indeed been
finding its way onto more and more of our pages. Call it
integral, second tier, holistic, or systemic,
this new thinking is the hallmark of a growing wave of
visionaries with the eyes to look beyond the surface turbulence
and grapple with the multilayered complexities undergirding our
global dilemmas. Challenging us to face the elaborate interwoven
forces that are shaping our destiny for better or worse, these
evangelists of higher-order thinking offer what many feel may be
the best chance we have at meeting the demands of the years
ahead.
So, in attempting to come to terms with our uncertain future,
and particularly with the role that religion will play in it,
for this issue we decided not just to speak with a number of
these leading-edge thinkers but to bring them together and have
them speak with each other. As firm believers in Plato's
assertion that the highest form of knowledge is that which
emerges in dialogue, we couldn't imagine what could give us a
better chance of seeing the biggest possible picture than a
roundtable discussion between some of today's brightest integral
minds, who are each attempting, in their own way, to forge a
more evolved course through our present and future world.
Those who read our last issue will remember Don Beck as the
psychologist and geopolitical wizard behind Spiral Dynamics
(for a quick intro to Spiral Dynamics
click here), a
revolutionary model of human values development that is finding
its way into the offices and toolkits of an ever-increasing
number of global and organizational leaders. Drawing on the
pioneering work of psychologist Clare Graves, Beck's theory
presents a comprehensive picture of the progressive stages
through which individuals, organizations, and cultures evolve,
and in so doing provides a key to understanding and untangling
large-scale conflicts. By showing that most major conflicts boil
down to a clash between different "memetic codes," or core value
systems, Beck has played a key role in such major undertakings
as the ending of South African apartheid and the societal
restructuring of Singapore. Founder and CEO of the National
Values Center, and Spiral Dynamics Group, Inc., Beck has most
recently teamed up with integral philosopher Ken Wilber to form
Spiral Dynamics Integral (SDi), a joint initiative aimed at
"managing large-scale interventions, change, and
transformation."
Large-scale transformation, it turns out, is also at the core of
Brian Swimme's work, and in his case, large is the operative
word. A mathematical cosmologist with the heart of a nature
mystic, Swimme has spent the past two decades bringing to life
the awe-inspiring tale of cosmic evolution that has been
unfolding as our universe since it exploded into existence some
fifteen billion years ago. Author of The Universe Is a Green
Dragon, The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos, and The
Universe Story (coauthored with his friend and mentor
Father Thomas Berry), Swimme has dedicated his life to awakening
others to the wonder of our cosmic heritage and the unique role
and responsibility of the human in carrying evolution forward.
In his speaking and teaching work, conducted through his Center
for the Story of the Universe, he implores people to consider
the profound implications of being conscious and to embrace our
uniquely human potential to express a "comprehensive compassion" for all of life.
Changing the world means changing institutions, and there are
few who have explored the territory of institutional
transformation like "management giant" Peter Senge. Widely
regarded as "the world's most extraordinary thinker on creating
learning organizations," Senge shook the foundations of business
thinking with the publication of his 1990 book The Fifth
Discipline, in which he transformed the abstract ideas of
systems theory into practical tools for grappling with the
complexities of large-scale organizational change. A senior
lecturer at MIT and founding member of the Society for
Organizational Learning, Senge speaks extensively throughout the
world, calling leaders in business, education, health care, and
government to bring vision, purpose, reflectiveness, and systems
thinking into their organizational culture. Today, thirteen
years after he burst onto the management scene, Senge is still
leading by example, evolving his own ideas, and most recently
teaming up with others to explore what the world's corporate
leadership might be able to learn from the spiritual wisdom of
the East.
So for this issue of WIE, we are more than pleased to
have an opportunity to bring these three pioneering voices of
change together in a roundtable discussion moderated by WIE
founder Andrew Cohen. A spiritual teacher with a planetary
perspective and a passion for evolution, Cohen has spent the
last seventeen years engaged in a living investigation of our
collective potential that is helping to redefine what it means
to be a human being at the dawn of the third millennium. In the
pages ahead, this cadre of visionaries grapples with the
extraordinary challenge our moment in history presents,
providing a real-time demonstration of what it means to bring
the future into the present and a testament to the kind of
shared exploration that may truly reveal the way ahead.
–Craig Hamilton
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.
SWIMME: Could you say a bit more about what you mean by
"constructing the habitats"?
BECK: Well, when I talk about habitats, I mean the social,
political, and economic habitats or
life conditions
that will facilitate new levels of psychological emergence in
individuals and cultures. The system of Spiral Dynamics uses the
image of a spiral to describe the underlying developmental
process through which individuals and cultures progress, with
each upward turn representing a
meme—the
worldviews or value systems within us that form in response to
changing life conditions. [For more information about Spiral
Dynamics, see
www.wie.org/spiraldynamics] My late
colleague Clare Graves identified eight memes or levels of
development through which both individuals and whole societies
pass, and we use colors to differentiate these stages in the
Spiral Dynamics model. These fundamental core patterns, although
expressed in different ways in various cultures and subcultures,
are common themes across humanity, all over the planet. And only
by understanding these deeper value-system currents does it
become possible to develop more realistic big-picture views and
craft practical and appropriate solutions to real problems.
The idea would be that we gently, if possible, and sometimes
with tough love when necessary,
assist humans to emerge
through these layers and levels. A good example of how this can
work would be Singapore, where they built a pretty rigid
authoritarian system (blue), which most of us would see as
unnecessarily punitive. But that's how those folks are dealing
with their life conditions, which include five volatile ethnic
groups (purple-red) that need that structure. And now they need
to move to the next level and create a more scientific, rational
system (orange)—in other words, create "Singapore,
Inc." and begin to compete more openly in the global economy. So
you can begin to see how, as the life conditions problems are
solved at one level, the next political/social/economic package
becomes necessary, which then makes possible a movement to the
next level. And because different cultures are at different
levels on the spiral, there are different futures for different
folks. What's next for Singapore would be something that's
history for us. And the future of the third world will have to
be second world Singapore-type authority before either first
world autonomy or postmodern sensitivity become an option.
SENGE: I agree strongly with what both Don and Brian have said.
And I think what I would focus on is that we have to recognize
the crisis as
collective. For example, there's not a
single individual on the planet who could eliminate a species,
if he or she tried. And yet,
collectively, we do a
splendid job of that, without even making the slightest effort.
The collective is how our actions are mediated through the
network of institutions that has come to span the globe. It's
very important to keep remembering that this crisis is not the
result of individual action; it's the result of collective
action. So the very first step in thinking about what sort of
responses are commensurate with the nature of the crisis is to
see that the responses must also be collective.
COHEN: And what form would you see those collective responses
taking?
SENGE: Well, while I don't think it's sufficient to say that big
corporations are the key, I do think that they are an important
element, and perhaps the highest leverage element. The reason I
say that is twofold. Firstly, they span boundaries in ways that
nations don't. The nation-state is becoming increasingly
anachronistic in the world today. I mean, even crime is global,
let alone the more important dynamics at work in the world. And
the institution that comes the closest to spanning boundaries is
the large multinational corporation. Secondly, it's still
growing, as a totality, and is, in some sense, less constrained
than states or governmental institutions. The problem is, of
course, that the traditional, formal role of the multinational
corporation is to make money—that's all it has been
held accountable for officially. It has no history of having to
have any responsibility at this scale, commensurate with its
impact. But what multinational corporations can do is
set
standards. The quality management revolution has had a huge
impact on business around the world, but it's really because a
small number of companies said, "This is the standard that we're
going to meet, and everyone else has to meet it." I could easily
imagine developing the capacity to consciously set standards on
the social and environmental impact of probably twenty major
multinational corporations, and it would be very hard for
smaller organizations to ignore those standards.
So once again, I don't think multinationals are sufficient in
and of themselves—please don't mishear me. But in
terms of responding to our crisis, the key elements are
awareness and
capacity. I really believe we
all
, individually, have an
intrinsic sense of
responsibility. For example, we all feel a natural sense of
responsibility for kids, even if they're not our own—that's biological. But we don't have that same sense of
responsibility at the
level on which our actions are
having an effect. So I think if we're looking at building our
capacity to respond to this crisis, we need to access the
collective institutional capacity to be aware, and then
access our
natural intrinsic sense of responsibility.
COHEN: Now I'd like to go into some of the questions I mentioned
earlier. In light of everything you've all just laid out, it's
obvious that in order to meet this crisis, human beings will
have to evolve to a higher level of consciousness and a deeper
level of maturity. Do you think that the religious traditions in
their current forms are equipped to help us recognize, come to
terms with, and respond to the dramatic nature of the changing
life conditions that we're in the midst of?
SWIMME: Well, firstly, I think that the religious traditions
were, generally speaking, set up to accomplish things that were
different than what this crisis is demanding. So for the most
part, they are not focused on this, and most of them don't
recognize the crisis even now, in the terms in which one would
want it to be recognized. But they just were not designed for
that; they weren't
about this crisis. This is new; it's
never happened in the history of the world.
At the same time, there are
resources within all of
the religious traditions that are, I think, essential for our
moment. It's not as if we can just throw them over. I think they
do provide crucial insights and practices. But they have to be,
in a certain sense, shaped and transformed to be appropriate.
BECK: I agree, and I think the question is: What
level
of religious system are we talking about? I think this is
also what Brian was implying. Because when you say "religion," I
tend to think in terms of the levels of development or
memes out of which those religions arose. For example,
many of the great traditions arose out of a mythic, absolutist,
authoritarian meme (blue). And maybe, because of very
conservative elements, some of them will never be able to see
this big picture and therefore will not be able to change. Yet,
they
are very important because they
help people and
cultures to make a particular developmental shift, out of a
lower level (egocentric or red) into a higher level (absolutist
or blue). They understand that transition better than anybody,
but they are not going to understand anything beyond that. So
for example, some of these conservative religious systems are
clearly addressing the needs of a lot of people, even Americans,
especially many coming out of so-called minority communities.
And if we can see the value of that, and at the same time say to
those in these traditions, "Beware of becoming a closed system," then we've done ourselves a great favor. So how we understand
the
verticality or developmental importance of these
expressions of religion, or spirituality, is the key
element.
SENGE: What's the word you're using, Don, "verticality"?
BECK: Yes. When I say "understand the verticality," I mean, see
the importance of different spiritual forms at different stages
of development, rather than what many people do, which is to
discredit earlier forms. The shift that we need to bring about
is from embracing a single expression of religion and
spirituality
to recognizing the evolutionary flow of
religious experiences. If we can do this, I think the whole
spiritual community can play a major role in the kind of
transformation that is needed.
SWIMME: Right. If we can bring forth the central ideas from each
tradition that are helpful, it would really be an amazing
contribution to the transformation we're in. I love the way Don
put it, that some of these traditions are absolute experts at
various aspects of the developmental transitions that are
required. If we can bring those into play in our current
context, it could be very powerful.
COHEN: Yes. And it is indeed enlightening when one recognizes
that human emotional, psychological, and
spiritual
evolution is part of a vast, complex
developmental
process—a process that we are all, individually and
collectively, participating in. The fact that the religious
traditions have played such a pivotal role in that process is
foundational in looking into the question of how the past and
present are going to meet the future.
Peter, I'm curious what your response to this question would be
because with regard to what you were saying earlier, it occurred
to me that the religious institutions span even greater
boundaries than a lot of the multinational institutions that you
were speaking about.
SENGE: That's absolutely right.
COHEN: So, they are potentially, I suppose, in a position to
galvanize an enormous percentage of humanity to respond to this
crisis,
if they were predisposed to do so.
SENGE: That's a very good point. But I think it's going to be
very difficult. Institutions are very much bound up in their
history. And at least the major traditions we probably all think
of when we say "boundary-spanning major global religious
institutions," with maybe to some degree the exception of
Buddhism, historically were certainly not global in their
thinking.
Their roots are, to a high degree, tribal. Islam is probably
the most compelling example of this. Muhammad, for instance, did
a great deal to teach women, and bringing women in as teachers
was one of his major agendas. But within a hundred years of his
death, the
tribal leaders, who inherited his teachings,
had made sure to eliminate that practice in no uncertain terms.
And that's pretty much the case with most contemporary
religions: they have very strong tribal and ethnic identities.
So for me, the more relevant issue today is the
deinstitutionalizing of religion. In all kinds of different
settings, people are having what you would call "religious
experience"—connections, deep connections with one
another, deep connections with life, deep connections with the
transcendent—but not in a religious context! And I
think that's really important. I think there's going to be a
new
religious sensibility that develops in the world—just
as I believe that there will be a new science—and it
will escape the limitations of religious institutions.
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.
