Global Spirituality Overview

The spiritual life does not remove us from the world, but takes us more deeply into it. - Henri Nouen

Not very long ago most of us lived in self sustaining local villages, albeit frequently besieged by famine, disease, ignorance and localized violence. Few of us travelled very far from where we were born. We had our own set of religious, cultural and familial beliefs protected from the intrusion, or even the awareness, of novel ideas that challenged our way of life. Most people lived a self protective life, taking care to protect only their family and those like them. Early in our history that meant our immediate kin, later it meant our ethnic or religious community, still later it came to mean our nationality. Each group generated a set of beliefs and a series of practices that made sense of their experience and that set the boundaries between “us” and “them”. While the great spiritual traditions at their heart increasingly included a universal understanding, it was generally interpreted as the “one right way”, with the right to save those outside the fold by convincing them to “see it our way”, even if that meant killing them in the process of saving them.

Today we live in a global village where we are exposed to a panoply of competing ideas, information and misinformation. Our capacity to influence the natural world has grown large, but our ability to understand the limits of that activity, as highlighted by the April 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, are quite inadequate. We live in a time of crisis, at the precipice of a sea change that most of us are only dimly aware of.

Western society today is based on an ethos of individual achievement that has provided more of us with the basic necessities of life then at any time in human history. Since World War II, Americans have experienced unprecedented wealth, never before have so many people had the opportunity to advance themselves. However since 1970, and in particular since 1980, we have been taken over by an almost virulent form of hyper individualism. The gap between rich and poor has accelerated and the availability of opportunities for the middle class eroded while our overall happiness has declined.

The best trained and most highly compensated members of the global community brought the entire system to a halt in the fall of 2008 and destroyed many of the organizations they spent their life serving. One reason this happened is because the deep religion of these leaders (the inner membrane that filters our perceptions, interprets our experience and provides input to our actions) was not sophisticated enough to create a vital capacity for life today, the capacity to take multiple perspectives or to consider the long term implications of our actions.

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