​Spiritual Minimalism:
Knowing More, Saying Less
 
The major world religions which are with us today emerged during an historical period known as the Axial Age, extending back from roughly 2500 to 2000 years ago, at a time when the human species was developing a sense of epistemological confidence: humanity as the pinnacle of creation, the center of the Universe, and perhaps most significantly, the holder of the key to all knowledge: Reason. And from this confident sense of human epistemological abilities there emerged detailed, complex, confident dogma, doctrines, theologies, and philosophies. Indeed, one could argue that over the millennia that have passed since the emergence of Axial Age religions, our sense of epistemological confidence, derived from the legitimate role of reason in helping us understand aspects of reality, devolved into a sense of epistemological hubris, where reason was seen as an infallible key to explaining and controlling all things, including our knowledge of and relationship to Spirit.
 
But over the past century or so, all that has changed. An honest, informed 21st century sensibility includes a radically altered sense of the context of the human presence in the vastness of space and time. We now recognize humanity as a species which, relative to the 14-billion-year history of the Universe, has only recently appeared, and, relative to the immensity of the Universe, exists on a tiny speck of a planet. Such recognition of the human presence in the vastness of space and time is a profoundly humbling experience. When humanity is spatially and temporally contextualized like this, the notion that a recently evolved creature using a three-pound organ (brain) on one tiny planet should be able to make detailed and definitive statements about the Ultimate nature of existence becomes glaringly arrogant and preposterous.
 
Recognizing the place of the human species in the broader context of the Universe produces what might be characterized as a profound sense of Epistemological Humility, or a sense of the limits of human knowledge, and Epistemological Humility in turn should lead to what we will refer to as Spiritual Minimalism, or a constant awareness of the need to avoid saying too much about the nature of Spirit/Ultimate Reality, which will always exceed the capacity of humans to understand and describe in a comprehensive manner. These concepts of Epistemological Humility and Spiritual Minimalism are important considerations for the nature of religion and spirituality as they evolve farther away from the declining traditional religions and into an as-yet-undeveloped 21st century transformation.  
 
Predictions that the religion of the 21st century will be theologically minimalist are shared by many who are exploring the possible contours of the future of religion. As Sean Kelly has put it, the spirituality of the future is likely to be characterized by a “renunciation of certainty” that stands in marked contrast to the detailed doctrinal positions of existing religions.1 Similarly, Ervin Laszlo, in exploring the religious implications for the evolving global character of human consciousness, suggests that we should attempt no more than a “minimally speculative theology.”2 And J.L. Schellenberg argues that with reference to religion, “We simply need to start thinking more generally than we are accustomed to doing,”  generating religious beliefs that can best be characterized as “thin,” in contrast to the “thick” collections of detailed ideas found in the theologies, doctrines, and philosophies that are associated with traditional religion.3
 
Similarly, we need to recognize that we are only at the beginning of the emergence of a post-traditional, post-Axial spirituality, and hence there will likely be a similar period of creative theologizing in which new words, symbols, concepts, etc. are offered up as the best ways to express the Sacred, and over time, as in the case of Christianity and every other major religion, new preferred expressions will emerge, some acquiring a revered status with which they will function in a doctrinal and theological manner. Even then, however, we are suggesting that Spiritual Minimalism will always be present, given that 21st century humanity has acquired an Epistemological Humility and a historical consciousness which, once attained, will not go away. New insights into the nature of Spirit, both philosophical and empirical, will continue to be sought and achieved, perhaps leading to religious/spiritual landscapes that would be unrecognizable to today’s believers, but whatever form that evolved sense of Spirit takes, it will be rooted in a sense of cosmically contextualized humility that (with a few notable exceptions) the religions of the past 2500 years have lacked.
 
Knowing and intuiting more, while saying less – perhaps this will be the foundation of the religion of the future.
 
 
1See Sean Kelly’s Coming Home: The Birth and Transformation of the Planetary Era and Becoming Gaia: On the Threshold of Planetary Initiation.
2 See Ervin Laszlo, Quantum Shift in the Global Brain.
3 Canadian philosopher J.L. Schellenberg is perhaps the best known “mainstream” figure to write extensively and in great depth and detail about the temporal contextualization of religious thought and exploring the radical implications of the future evolution of religion. Schellenberg proposes “Ultimism” as a replacement for theism, and his concept of Ultimism shares many characteristics of the 21st century spirituality which are explored on the Religion Evolving website.
For non-philosophers, his accessible Evolutionary Religion is an excellent starting point.
 
 
 
 

Evolutionary Religion: Some Clarifications
 
Describing various aspects of life as “evolutionary” has become quite popular these days, with evolution being applied as an explanatory scheme to such diverse areas as psychology, aesthetics, political systems, entertainment, and countless other fields that extend the notion of evolutionary development far beyond its origin as an explanation of the development of life. Observing this proliferation of the application of the evolutionary process rooted in natural selection being applied to areas far beyond its original intent, philosopher Raymond Tallis has coined the term “Darwinitis” to describe what sometimes seems to be an over-reaching misapplication of Darwin’s model.
 
Lest we be accused of suffering from a case of this Darwinitis, in this post we would like to offer some clarification regarding our use of the term “evolutionary religion,” especially in light of the rather recent appearance of this concept and the consequent lack of a shared definition among those who use “evolutionary religion” as a category of thought.
 
Specifically, to clarify what we mean by evolutionary religion:
 
1.Evolutionary religion means that religion changes over time.
To describe religion as evolutionary simply means that religion changes over time, in a generally progressive direction of a fuller understanding of spiritual reality. Over time, human spiritual awareness appears to have moved in the direction of a more expansive sense of Ultimacy and an accompanying morality that reflects that evolved sense of Spirit. Human sacrifices are no longer commonly practiced. Moral obligations are less likely to be understood as applicable only to our kin/tribe/species. Spirit is less likely to be understood in terms which reflect parochial prejudices and the projection of flawed human traits such as rage, jealousy, capriciousness, etc.
Obviously, we are only describing trends here, and (unfortunately) it’s still quite easy to find expressions of contemporary religious belief and practice that do not reflect such progressive development. But in the big picture, human spiritual awareness clearly has changed in a positive direction over time.
 
2. Evolutionary religion is not an assertion of religion as the product of natural selection or “survival of the fittest.”
To say that religion has evolved is not meant to imply that it has done so in accordance with the same process of natural selection that has occurred in biological development. This is an important and easily misunderstood point. The multiple expressions of “evolutionary” development in various fields as referenced above typically do argue that such and such aspect of human culture has acquired its current form as the result of its successful adaptations, such that it has been “selected” over other alternatives for its survival value.
One could analyze religion in such a manner, but that is not what we are doing here. Our purpose is simply to explore how religion has changed in a progressive direction, without speculating on the process through which this has happened.
 
3. Evolutionary religion recognizes that, in the short term, the evolution of religion is not one-directional and resistant to regression.
As evidenced by current political developments in certain pockets of the human population, there can be periods of retreat to tribalism and its various cultural expressions, including a type of religion that tends to return to exclusivism, anthropomorphism, literalist fundamentalism, etc. But as with biological evolution, short term regressions must be viewed in the context of long-term progressive development: exclusivist tribalistic religious fundamentalisms might currently be increasing in tandem with comparable political developments, but such regression will be temporary.
 
4. Evolutionary religion is not naïve.
Some argue that an evolutionary understanding of religion is naïve, in the sense that its model of progressively fuller consciousness of Spirit fails to recognize the everyday reality of human suffering as well as the ever-present possibility of a catastrophic and sudden end of the human species. To the extent that an evolutionary religion model is sometimes embraced by New Age thought and popular philosophers such as Ken Wilber, that criticism is not without some merit, and even among more sophisticated philosophical expressions of evolutionary spirituality the problem of suffering tends to be downplayed.
 
However, it would be inaccurate to suggest that an evolutionary model of religion is incompatible with recognition of not only the everyday suffering of the present moment but also the brutality and wastefulness of the evolutionary process itself. Teilhard and Aurobindo, for example, both acknowledge that the presence of profound pain and suffering throughout all living species tends to dampen the otherwise enthusiastically hopeful perspective that both of their evolutionary models express. Unfortunately, neither Teilhard nor Aurobindo provide even a remotely adequate account of how to reconcile this presence of suffering and evil with an evolutionary view of spirituality, but then again neither do traditional theistic theodicies provide an adequate reconciliation of the simultaneous existence of an omnipotent/omnibenevolent deity with a cosmos, created by that deity, which is rampant with crushing pain, suffering, and evil. The problem of theodicy, in other words, remains a thorn in the side of traditional theism as well as evolutionary religion, but it does not follow that either traditional theists or adherents of the evolutionary model do not recognize the presence of suffering and evil and the challenge that it presents, both existentially and cognitively.
 
5. Evolutionary religion does not deny transcendence.
This is a somewhat more subtle philosophical and theological point which we will unpack in more detail in a subsequent post. Criticisms of some of the most popular models of evolutionary religion have argued that divine transcendence is denied by describing Spirit as the on-going product of the evolutionary process of Spirit becoming more manifest in the Cosmos, in effect reflecting a process of the progressive spiritualization of the Cosmos through the progressive self-awareness of Spirit.
 
This is a criticism that applies to what we have previously labelled as “strong” evolutionary religion, which sees evolution as a process in which Spirit itself is becoming more and more present in the Cosmos through the evolution from energy to matter to living entities to conscious beings to self-reflective conscious beings with an awareness of the evolutionary process itself. As often expressed, evolution is the process of Spirit becoming aware of itself through the evolution of matter that is becoming more and more conscious.
 
By contrast, “weak” evolutionary religion adopts a more modest descriptive/phenomenological approach, rather than the philosophical/spiritual approach of the hard model. Hence, the weak model of evolutionary religion simply affirms that an objective observation of the evolutionary development of the Universe reveals an evolving awareness of the nature of Spirit, as evidenced in the progressive development of human spiritual consciousness and its cultural expressions in religion. Whether or not this includes an actual development of Spirit in the Cosmos itself is not the primary concern of this approach, which focuses on human awareness of Spirit rather than changes in Spirit itself.
 
However, even in the most prominent systems of strong evolutionary religion, (Teilhard de Chardin, Aurobindo, and the popularized version of Aurobindo found in Ken Wilber), there is recognition that Spirit exists in its fullness already, or, in a sense, Spirit is simultaneously fully Transcendent while evolving increased Immanence. In Teilhard, for example, the end point of the evolutionary process, which he calls Omega, is also understood as the origin and continued support of the Cosmos. Spirit, in other words, is both transcendent and immanent, with divine immanence expanding in the Cosmos as it evolves. This is sometimes a difficult concept for the more rationally inclined Western philosophers and theologians to buy into, since it asserts the simultaneous reality of what in a sense are opposing qualities of Spirit: If Spirit is Transcendent it can’t be Immanent, and if Spirit is Immanent it can’t be fully Transcendent. But the union of opposites, of course, has an ancient pedigree and is found in both ancient and modern mystical traditions, which set aside the contemporary epistemological bias of positing that the nature of Spirit must correspond to the categories that human thought is capable of grasping. Setting aside that sort of human epistemological hubris, the existence of a spiritual ultimate which is simultaneously Transcendent and Immanent becomes perfectly credible.
 
6. Understanding the evolutionary model of religion requires an appropriately vast temporal perspective. 
All of the above, however, must in turn be understood in the context of what might be considered one of the fundamental assumptions of an evolutionary perspective: the vastness of time and the (relatively) slow pace of the evolutionary process.
 
Appreciating an evolutionary perspective of religion requires an appropriately expansive temporal framework. Perhaps no  contemporary philosopher consistently acknowledges the need for such a perspective as does J.L. Schellenberg, whose work always contextualizes human religious awareness in the context of deep time, not only with reference to the depth of past time during which human spiritual consciousness has slowly developed to its present state, but also the equally deep future time during which human awareness of Spirit might develop in ways that are, to minds still operating with “only” a  21st century awareness, quite inconceivable.
 
         
 
 
         
 
 
 

​Thinking Bigger about God (but with Humility)
 
A basic assumption of the evolutionary model of religion posits that as humanity evolves, consciousness evolves; as consciousness evolves, our perception or sense of Spirit evolves; and as human awareness of Spirit evolves, religion, or the specific expressions of our understanding of Spirit, also evolves.
 
The evolution of religion necessarily takes many forms, including spiritual practices, ritual and worship, ethical guidelines, new sacred texts, new models of religious authority, etc. But these and many other evolving aspects of religion are all rooted in the starting point of how we understand or perceive the nature of the Ultimate Reality upon which everything else is based, or in simple terms, how we conceive of Spirit.
 
Many suggest that, at the beginning of the 21st century, we have reached a point where, for a growing segment of humanity, the traditional understanding of Spirit, or “God,” is no longer adequate or credible. While our general knowledge of the Universe has expanded over the course of the past 3000 years in such a way that we now recognize that we exist in a Cosmos that is unimaginably more vast than that which was conceived by our ancestors, as a culture we have tended to cling to a sense of God that has not changed significantly over the past three millennia. Addressing that issue calls for setting aside the concept of a “small” God and thinking bigger about the nature of Spirit, in such a way that religion and spirituality can again become credible to 21st century humans who are fully informed by a scientific, historical, and critical sensibility.
 
We necessarily use aspects of our experience of the sensory world to construct our understanding of the transcendent realm: the language derived from our empirical experiences is all that we have to use, and to the extent that we have a direct sense of Spirit, it’s indescribable, leading us to resort to that everyday experience for language to describe that which transcends everydayness.
 
But our everyday experience has evolved over the centuries, and yet we hang on to God-language from an earlier time. So what  do we need to change?
 
Setting Aside the Small Concept God
 
To suggest that we need to modify the traditional understanding of Spirit is not to suggest that past ways of understanding Ultimacy were “wrong,” nor is it meant to imply that contemporary humanity has achieved some sort of final enlightened understanding of the Sacred. Rather, we are merely operating according to the fairly obvious fact that any human attempt to perceive, understand, and describe Spirit is necessarily the product of the epistemologically-limited capacities of humans in a given cultural time and place. The indigenous sense of Spirit as something found in nature, or the Abrahamic notion of the one personal God, are not wrong per se, but rather limited to their particular cultural circumstances. Those circumstances have changed for much of humanity, and hence our concept of Spirit should be revised accordingly, along the lines of the “transcend and include” model of Ken Wilber, which retains previous perceptions of Spirit but expands them according to our current mode of consciousness.
 
In what sense, then, does the traditional notion of God that has been dominant for at least the past 2000 years need to be modified?

    1. A less anthropomorphic concept of Spirit
Certainly the emergence of the theistic concept of Spirit as a God who has personal qualities similar to those of humans makes sense as an effort to recognize that certain qualities found only in the human species (moral goodness, justice, love, freedom) should be attributed to an Ultimate Being. Trying to make sense of Spirit by projecting qualities and characteristics of “worldly” phenomena is both understandable and inevitable.
But the theistic God as found in the Abrahamic religions and elsewhere is one which also includes many unappealing, and even revolting, human qualities. Jealousy, capriciousness, vengefulness, partiality, anger, and other human flaws are common characteristics of God as found in the Abrahamic texts, and it is time to simply acknowledge and reject such characterizations (rather than ignoring, rationalizing, or dancing around them, as often is done by theistic believers and theologians). Many contemporary humans recognize that such characteristics are flaws, and hence we should stop accepting them as qualities of what is supposed to be a perfect being.

    2. A less parochial concept of Spirit
Given that we now possess the ability to have a global, trans-cultural view of the world, it no longer makes sense to conceive of Spirit as the God of one specific group of people, one culture, one historical time period, or one geographic area of the planet. One could even argue that conceiving of Spirit in terms of one species on one planet is an absurdly restrictive way of thinking about a transcendent Being who is unlimited by space and time.
 
Eliminating such parochial elements of our notion of Spirit would also mean setting aside the attribution of limiting socio-political labels such as King and Lord, and biological labels such as Father and similar gendered references. We now have a fuller sense of Spirit as so much more than all of that.

    3. A concept of Spirit that is compatible with a modern Cosmology
Conceiving of Spirit in terms of a God of one culture, one species, or even one planet is equivalent to reducing Spirit to a limited demi-urge. We now have an understanding of the physical Universe as something whose existence as a temporal and spatial entity is so vast as to be inconceivable to the human mind. As such, we should not be retreating to limited human notions of space and time in how we think about God:  if Spirit is an entity which is both immanent in every particle of the Universe while at the same time paradoxically transcending the entirety of spatiotemporal reality, our representations of Spirit should not fall back on the notion of a smaller God who rules over one planet in a one-galaxy Universe. Our awareness of a vast Cosmos should be accompanied by a sense of Spirit which is even more vast.

    4. A concept of Spirit that recognizes the role of evolution
If we live in an ever-changing, evolving Cosmos rather than a static completed Cosmos, our sense of the Sacred should be liberated to embrace this sense of constant movement. This entails accepting the notion of a God which is manifesting itself in the Cosmos in ever-fuller expressions, rather than a static deity whose essential nature should be restricted to how it appeared to humanity 2500 years ago.
No recent figures have expressed this notion of an ever-expanding sense of the Divine with the confidence and clarity as the French paleontologist/priest Teilhard de Chardin and the Hindu philosopher Aurobindo Ghose (see earlier blog posts from March and April 2024). Both Teilhard and Aurobindo present an evolutionary spirituality which recognizes the presence of a paradoxical deity which, while already existent in its pure form, is also progressively manifesting itself in the process of cosmic evolution, producing the opportunity for an increasingly fuller, expansive, and more complete perception of itself by humans whose consciousness is developing expanded capacity for perceiving the Sacred.
 
In one sense, the small, limited concept of God/Spirit that still dominates human religious awareness can be seen as the product of epistemological parochialism, or the assumption that the nature of reality must correspond to the epistemological capacities of a single (rather young) species on a single (tiny) planet. Of course, this is an untenable position. We should always retain a deep sense of epistemological humility, rooted in recognition of the absurdity of the notion that the Ultimate Nature of all reality could be adequately understood and articulated by a relatively new species using a gooey three pound organ, or brain. Ants can’t do algebra, and similarly, it’s not likely that humans, while blessed with an intuitive capacity to sense that there is a Something More or Spiritual quality to reality, can comprehensively perceive, understand, and describe that which is infinitely beyond the limited capacity of human perception and knowledge.
 
But if we set aside the anthropomorphic, parochial, and outdated characterizations of Spirit, what does that leave us? How will humans conceive of the “God/Spirit” of the future?
 
In a spirit of humility as referenced above, we are reluctant to speculate on this issue, other than to assert that the “God-concept” of the future will be one which reflects the four criteria described above. To attempt anything beyond that would be ill-advised and irresponsible, and for two reasons:

    1. A period of transition  
We clearly are in the early stages of a transition period from one mode of spirituality to something new, and the way in which Spirit will be conceived in that new spirituality has not yet coalesced into anything even remotely specific. Certainly, this post-traditional concept of Spirit will be less anthropomorphic, parochial, and static, and more full, expansive, and evolving, but what it is beyond that will have to wait for the coming years, decades, and perhaps centuries.

    2. Spiritual Minimalism
We have reached a stage in our understanding of the Cosmos, humanity and its place within the Cosmos, and a sense (admittedly vague) of Spirit which is likely to preclude the future development of the kinds of detailed theological and philosophical propositions about the nature of God that have been characteristic of thinking about Spirit in the 2500 years since the beginning of such speculation in the Axial Age. An honest account of our awareness of the nature of Spirit is more likely to be characterized by a sense of Spiritual Minimalism (which, of course, has been found for centuries in mystical and apophatic traditions in both Eastern and Western thought). The reality of Spirit will be affirmed without the addition of speculative and often divisive detailed affirmations about that Spirit. We are less likely than our predecessors to pretend to be ants doing algebra.
 
 And then we wait…..

 So perhaps we need to be content, for now, with just taking the first step of confidently and clearly recognizing that certain aspects of the traditional understanding of Spirit/God can be set aside. The understanding of God that evolved prior to the emergence of modern consciousness and the contemporary epistemological sensibility which incorporates scientific, historical, and cross-cultural awareness, will hopefully be gradually modified and replaced (in the “transcend but include” mode which we described above) by a concept of Spirit that is credible to a contemporary consciousness, leading to what J.L. Schellenberg has referred to as a badly needed “religion appropriate to our time.” 
Some might be dissatisfied with the absence of a clear account of such a  “new God-concept” which is likely to develop, but for now, just recognizing that we can set aside traditional ways of thinking about Spirit can be an incredibly liberating experience, one that breaks the spiritual tethers to the past and opens the door to new ways of experiencing, understanding, and, eventually, making sense of Spirit in a way that is credible and meaningful to 21st consciousness.

​ Everyday Religious Experience
 
William James and Mysticism
 
The recognition of religious experience as a legitimate subject for serious academic study is usually traced back to William James’ classic 1902 work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, in which he famously stated, “Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.”           
     
Using this recognition of multiple modes of consciousness, James then proceeded to categorize and describe several types of religious experience, resulting in the first scholarly attempt to give serious consideration to religious experience as a real psychological phenomenon. But the chapter in Varieties which attracted the most attention, and continues to do so today, was the chapter on mysticism, which James does not hesitate to identify as the most basic and valid type of religious experience, and that which mostly closely approximates the fundamental human awareness of a spiritual dimension to the Cosmos. In this chapter, James presents multiple first-person accounts of mystical experiences, all characterized by a sense of unity, ineffability, and a sense of deep wisdom about the ultimate spiritual nature of reality.
 
Although James examined both common and exceptional types of religious experience, the impact of his chapter on mysticism had the effect of the academic fields of both religion and philosophy gravitating toward the study of non-ordinary experiences as the primary, if not sole, expression of religious experience. Since the publication of James’ book, mysticism has acquired a privileged position in the study of religion in general, and religious experience in particular, and rightfully so. Although the very word “mysticism” is difficult to define, its basic characteristics, as articulated by James and his many successors, constitute one of the few universal elements of religion, found in various forms in all of the contemporary world religions. At the same time, mysticism is not constrained by association with the beliefs and doctrines of any single religion: while present in all, it is restricted to none. Mysticism provides empirical evidence that there is a mode of consciousness which humans can attain, quite different from our everyday consciousness, in which one can experience empirical verification of the existence of Something More than the material realm.  
 
The Privileged Status of Mysticism
 
And yet, as a type of non-ordinary experience associated with a temporary altered state of consciousness, mysticism can be characterized as rare and exclusivist. For those who have such an experience, the impact can be lasting and life-changing (as attested in the Varieties). But as James acknowledged, mystical religious experience is usually brief, transient, and rare.
 
This raises a somewhat troubling question which derives from this portrayal of mysticism as something that is a rather exclusive and privileged type of experience: what about the many who don’t have such a non-ordinary, altered state of consciousness type of experience? If mysticism provides the fullest and most meaningful direct access to Spirit, but mystical experiences are quite rare, where does that leave the many who never have such an experience?
 
The Alternative: Everyday Religious Experience
 
We would like to suggest (without in any way diminishing the value of mysticism) that there actually is an alternative mode of spiritual awareness, one that is not only available to everyday consciousness, but also is regularly experienced as an ordinary part of everyday life, even though those having the experience might not recognize its spiritual significance.
 
For lack of a better term, we will refer to this type of experience as “everyday religious experience,” which can be found in four complementary varieties:
 
1. The Experience of Spiritual Expansiveness
 
The consciousness of contemporary humans makes it possible to experience the vastness of the Cosmos in a sense that previous generations lacked. Ironically, scientific knowledge (tracing the history of the Universe and the complexity of its evolution, especially from a Big History perspective as presented by the likes of David Christian, Brian Swimme, and many others) and technological advances (the Hubble and Webb telescopes, particle accelerators such the Large Hadron Collider) have resulted in a conscious awareness of the vast, grand, majestic nature of the Cosmos in a manner that often evokes a sense of sacred awe, wonder, and mystery. This scientifically-rooted “spirituality” is represented by the proponents of what has been labeled as “Religious Naturalism,” and is expressed beautifully in the work of Ursula Goodenough and others.
 
Religious Naturalism is certainly not a “religion” in the traditional sense, and many religious naturalists see no need to affirm belief in any sort of supernatural entity. But it’s difficult to read the words of religious naturalists without sensing that they are talking about an experience of reality that sounds more like ancient Vedanta and Neo-Confucian spirituality than it does objective scientific description. Indeed, words such as awe, wonder, mystery, and even sacred are commonly used by Religious Naturalists to describe their experience of the Cosmos, which is an experience that is available to everyone, regardless of scientific knowledge. Simply gazing at images of galaxies, contemplating the vast complexity of the 14 billion year evolutionary process, and marveling at the images generated by particle collisions provokes our consciousness to recognize a quality to the Universe that can legitimately be designated as Sacred.
 
2. The Experience of Moral Goodness
 
Leaving aside and quite independent from the feeling of spiritual expansion that derives from our awareness of the vastness of the Cosmos, there is another source of everyday experience that confirms the reality of Spirit: our experience of moral goodness.
 
By moral goodness we don’t mean knowledge of and obedience to a specific set of moral laws, principles, or traditions. Rather, we are referring to the deeper sense of the very nature of moral goodness that we encounter at more of an experiential than cognitive level: the very notion that we should act in certain ways, and that through such actions we establish a right relationship with a transcendent reality. Certainly moral laws are important, and sociologically speaking, they became an evolutionary necessity as human groupings developed beyond the size of the clan or tribe, where the personal authority of a leader was no longer effective in a growing population. But the notion that we should obey such moral laws is the function of a deeper sense that there really is such a thing as Goodness. The sense of “shouldness” of everyday human existence cannot be fully accounted for as merely a sociological necessity, a desire to fit in, or blind obedience to others. And the sense of shouldness cannot be derived from a purely materialist model of reality. Rather, the existence of a deep sense of moral shouldness is a rather peculiar human quality which, even though we aren’t usually aware of it, points to the presence of something beyond the material realm and beyond our individual existence, to the presence of a transcendent spiritual reality, or the Good in the sense that it was recognized as far back as Greek thought in the characterization of the transcendent realm as the locus of the ontologically real Truth, Goodness, and Beauty (an idea that was further developed in Christian theologizing on the existence of Transcendentals, and also found in varying expressions in Buddhism, Neo-Confucianism, and Hinduism).
 
But this experience of moral goodness, full of spiritual significance, is not an extraordinary experience made possible by an altered state of consciousness. Unlike mystical experience, the experience of moral goodness is something that happens in small, ordinary, everyday moments.
 
And unlike the experience of spiritual expansiveness which we described above, the spiritual sense of moral goodness is something that is encountered in the preciousness of ordinary beings, human and otherwise, as we simply recognize the beauty and sacredness of the limited present, the poignant beauty and goodness of a very transient and restricted miraculous moment in space and time where we recognize the sacred quality of another being, our sense of responsibility to that other being, the consequent establishment (however brief and outwardly insignificant) of a relationship with that being, and, in the establishment of that relation with a single transient being, the concurrent establishment of a relationship or connection with Spirit.
 
So every time that we generate an act of moral goodness, we implicitly recognize that there is more to reality than matter and energy. We recognize, or more precisely, intuitively experience, a qualitative aspect of the Cosmos, a transcendent ontological reality, namely moral goodness.
 
In countless gestures of everyday moral goodness (not just in saintly or heroic acts, but in a simple gesture, a glance, a patient pause, a kind word, and in countless ordinary ways) we are actually affirming the experiential presence of Spirit – even when we don’t recognize what we’re doing or the immense significance of it. As evolved conscious entities that know and act according to moral goodness, we affirm/experience a transcendent spiritual reality. Subtle, quiet, everyday acts of moral goodness are nothing less than unrecognized affirmations of Spirit.
 
3. The Experience of Meaning: What We Do Matters
 
With the experience of moral goodness, there simultaneously occurs, in a similarly intuitive, dim, and often unconscious manner, an experiential sense of the meaningfulness of existence. The experience of moral goodness goes hand in hand with the experiential affirmation that things matter: what exists, what we do, how we (and other beings) think and feel.
 
Precisely how things matter might remain elusive, mysterious, and beyond our ability to articulate in precise statements. But in such moments there is a confident, intuitive, experiential sense that, in some mysterious way, they really do matter. Of course, we’re not talking about meaning in the sense of propositional statements which articulate a complex philosophical account of the meaning of the Cosmos. Philosophers and theologians produce such accounts, but all are inadequate as essentially nothing more than well-intentioned guess-work, produced by creatures who are attempting to employ quite limited epistemological capacities to express comprehensive affirmations about the ultimate meaning of existence. That never works. But what does work is the simple acceptance of what our capacity for spiritual perception tells us in a very quiet, direct, and confident sense. We know that there is meaning, in the sense that things really do matter, even though we cannot articulate the nature of that meaning, especially in the context of an honest 21st century sensibility where the use of mythological narratives is no longer credible. Not to reduce something so profoundly important to the level of triviality, but like the Chipotle restaurant commercials that are popular as I write this, one can also say of the experienced meaningfulness of existence, “When you know, you know.”
 
Moreover, the affirmation of meaning does not derive from the experience of some sort of exceptional event. As with moral goodness, we are talking about experiences that occur as part of everyday, ordinary human life. Sometimes these meaning-affirming experiences are experiences of great joy (the birth of a child, the experience of beauty), some are experiences of deep sorrow (suffering and death), and some are, superficially at least, just ordinary moments of sensing the precious meaningfulness that saturates each moment of existence in space and time, however transitory that might be. But they are not experiences which necessitate entering into the non-ordinary, altered mode of consciousness associated with mystical experience. Ordinary people, operating in an everyday mode of consciousness, have the capacity to experience meaning in the same sense that they have the capacity to experience moral goodness.
 
4. The Experience of Consciousness
 
We’ve covered the spiritual significance of the experience of consciousness, and especially the uniquely human capacity for consciousness of consciousness, elsewhere on this site (see blog posts from June, August, October, and November 2024) and in the book, Thinking About Religion in the 21st Century: A New Guide for the Perplexed, so we will limit our comments here and refer readers to those earlier remarks.
 
The key point is simply that consciousness itself is another aspect of everyday experience which offers a window to the presence of the spiritual dimension. In fact, the three areas of everyday religious experience identified above (spiritual expansiveness, moral goodness, and meaning) are only made possible through the presence of consciousness. In a sense, consciousness, especially in its evolved human expression, is the starting point for all things spiritual. Consciousness provides immediate, experiential confirmation that there is Something More than the physical dimension of the Cosmos, and consciousness makes it possible to fill in the content of that Something More with the kinds of experiences described above.
 
 
Religious Experience in Everyday Life
 
The above account of the nature of everyday religious experience is not intended to in any way deny or diminish the significance of mysticism and exceptional, non-ordinary states of consciousness. Such experiences occur, and as James emphasized, for those who have had such experiences, they impart an ineffable sense of meaning and wisdom (what James referred to as the “noetic” quality of mystical experience) which can be life-altering, even when such an experience occurs only once and for just a few minutes or even seconds.
 
But we are suggesting that, aside from the rare and exceptional mystical experience which is encountered by only a fortunate few, aspects of everyday experience which are available to everyone also provide experiential access to the presence of a spiritual dimension of reality, even though these everyday experiences are so commonplace that we typically take them for granted and do not fully appreciate the spiritual import that they carry. Furthermore, there obviously is no contradiction between mystical religious experience and everyday religious experience. One can have both or either: occasional intense experiences in a non-ordinary mode of awareness might be more intense and produce a stronger sense of immediacy, but even in the absence of such special experiences, awareness of Spirit is available to those who dwell in the ordinariness of the everyday – which, in reality, is not ordinary at all.

​Henry David Thoreau:
Prophet of Evolved….Eating?
 
At various times, Thoreau wrote as a philosopher, a scientist, a nature writer, an economist, a moralist, a social activist, a natural theologian, and in a few places, a commentator on, of all things, eating. In this latter role, he perhaps serves as an unintentional prophet of where we are headed as spirituality evolves and the circle of human moral concern continues to expand, even beyond the human species. Of course in doing so, Thoreau, as is sometimes the case, embodies blatant and unresolved contradictions, but that’s part of his charm: he never intended to write as a systematic philosopher who claimed to explain everything in a vast system in which all topics are rationally connected in a comprehensive synthesis. Thoreau just wrote (with beauty and simplicity) what he thought, felt, and experienced, including the contradictions.
 
Higher Laws is one of the chapters in Walden where Thoreau attempts to articulate some of his spiritual ideals and how they are carried out in daily life. But the beginning of this spiritually-oriented chapter begins rather strangely, with an account of a walk in the woods at night, during which he spotted a woodchuck and experienced a “savage delight” at the thought of killing and devouring the animal raw, even though he wasn’t even hungry. This passage is followed by his famous declaration that, “I love the wild not less than the good”(202 ).***
 
And yet, only a few pages later, Thoreau confesses that, “I have found repeatedly, of late years, that I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect,” and later in the same paragraph, “I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind…..Is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal?”(206-207).
 
So in the short span of three to four pages, Thoreau has gone from sharing his desire to kill and eat a groundhog raw to declaring that meat-eating is a shameful human form of eating!
 
But his exploration of eating gets even more interesting shortly thereafter, when Thoreau not only offers a reconciliatory interpretation of such contradictions but, quite remarkably, does so in the context of evolving human spirituality:
 
“Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals” (207).
 
Could it be that, without realizing it, Thoreau here serves as a prophet of ethical eating in the spirituality of the 21st century? Of course, refraining from eating meat for ethico-spiritual reasons preceded Thoreau by many centuries, as seen for instance in certain schools of ancient Hinduism and Buddhism and the Greek Neo-Platonist tradition inspired by Plotinus (3rd c.). But hearing Thoreau advocate a vegetarian diet for ethical purposes is different, since even in spite of his quirks and self-declared desire for solitude and simplicity, he is a fully “modern” writer and thinker, and as such, his words have the potential to influence today’s readers in a more meaningful way than do the words from ancient sacred texts.
 
Thoreau doesn’t attempt to present an argument to establish the moral wrongness of killing animals for food, but rather suggests that it’s more like an intuitive moral sense that develops as one matures spiritually.
 
 If Thoreau had been familiar with the concept of evolutionary spirituality that has developed in the past century, I suspect that he might have put it this way: As human consciousness has evolved over the centuries, to the point where that consciousness includes the capacity to intuitively recognize the inter-connectedness of all beings, including the human connection to the animal realm and, indeed, all sentient beings, our sense of moral responsibility has widened to include a wider moral circle that is no longer restricted to the human (see the work of Peter Singer on the expanding moral circle).
 
If Thoreau was living today, he probably would be pleased to see the extent to which vegetarianism and veganism have permeated our culture, with even mainstream capitalist fast-food business enterprises offering plant-based alternatives (e.g., the “Impossible Whopper”) and meat-free restaurant chains popping up across the country – a trend that is likely to increase as we develop protein rich synthesized foods that are not only nutritious but also tasty and aesthetically appealing.
 
 
***All Thoreau quotes are from Jeffery S. Cramer’s Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition, a wonderful edition of Thoreau’s classic text in which Cramer’s annotations provide invaluable insights into the book and Thoreau’s life. All italics, including those within the Thoreau quotes, are mine.

​The Inter-Connection of All Things:
The Confucian Doctrine of the Mean
 
The cosmic morality of the Neo-Confucian tradition (see previous post from 6/2/24), while explicitly found in Neo-Confucian figures such as Wang Yang-ming and Zhang Zai, is rooted in a much earlier Chinese text, the Doctrine of the Mean (sometimes attributed to the grandson of Confucius, but probably written in the 5th century BCE.). Through the Doctrine of the Mean, ancient Chinese thought provides an anticipation of 21st century spirituality in both a metaphysics of cosmic inter-connection or relationship and a universal morality which extends the human moral sentiment and consequent sense of ethical responsibility beyond the human and into the natural and spiritual realms.
 
The Doctrine of the Mean 22 (translation by Wing-tsit Chan)
Only those who are absolutely sincere can develop their nature. 

If they can fully develop their nature, they can then fully develop the nature of others.  

If they can fully develop the nature of others, they can then fully develop the nature of things. 

If they can fully develop the nature of things, they can then assist in the transforming and nourishing process of Heaven and Earth. 
 
 If they can assist in the transforming and nourishing process of Heaven and Earth, they can thus form a Trinity with Heaven and Earth. 

​Between Silence and Saying Too Much:
The Language Dilemma of Future Spirituality
 
Over the vast stretch of human evolution, consciousness, slowly and fitfully, has evolved.
 With that evolution of consciousness, humans eventually acquired a sense of the Transcendent, Spirit, the Numinous, Something More, or whatever language one wishes to use to designate that meaning-creating aspect of reality that is not limited to the physical dimension of the Cosmos. Humans, in other words, have acquired the capacity to sense the spiritual dimension of reality.
 
The Language Factor
 
And as humans, a communication-oriented species, we sought to express that elusive and ever-evolving sense of the existence of the spiritual dimension of the Cosmos through the creation of religious language, based on the symbols and concepts available to us at any given time. 
As centuries passed, and as human awareness of the spiritual dimension changed (as all aspects of human awareness and knowledge change in the unfolding of the potentialities of consciousness), we developed new linguistic expressions to communicate about that Spirit.
And consequently, we developed new religions, with new words and concepts to provide doctrines, creeds, sacred texts, moral teachings, accounts of religious experiences, and all that goes into this ever-changing thing that we call religion.
 
Religion’s Changing Language
 
This was a long and complex process, and any attempt to capture the evolution of human spirituality and religion in a neat and tidy model is necessarily an over-simplification. Nonetheless, recognizing its limitations, historians of religion tend to portray this spiritual evolution as passing through the stages of animism (a vague belief in spirits, often present in nature, often without a defined and clear identity), to polytheism (spiritual beings, residing in a heavenly realm, often capricious and far from consistently moral, with a clearer identity and personality, communicating with humans, responding to human actions such as sacrifices and rituals), to monotheism (a personal, unitary being –one God, not many- whose nature includes a sense of Goodness and justness, and expects the same of humans). There were other variations on the human perception of the Sacred (monism, pantheism, panentheism, deism, etc.), but for humanity as a whole, and especially for the “ordinary” citizen who was not a religious or philosophical specialist, this directional development from animism to polytheism to monotheism appears to hold true.
 
Transitions: Slow and Conflictual
 
But the shift from one mode of spirituality to another did not happen rapidly and smoothly. To the contrary, each shift required a long transition period which was characterized by conflict between the established old view and the emerging new view, as the new view sought to develop and establish a language, beliefs, and practices appropriate to its new form of spirituality. The transition from animism to polytheism was hardly a smooth organic process, and one need look no further than the Bible to see the intense animosity (resulting in political and military conflict and the loss of much life) between the traditional animistic/polytheistic religions of the ancient Near East and the monotheistic Hebrews, or the similar history that was repeated between pagan polytheistic Greco-Roman culture and early Christianity. Transition to the next step of evolving spirituality is never rapid, and is never easy.
 
The Contemporary Transition
 
Today we are in the midst of such a transition, as the traditional anthropomorphic myth-based religions lose their hold on 21st century spiritual consciousness and contemporary believers move on to….well, what? Part of the spiritual dilemma of our time is that, while the old religions have lost their credibility, a clearly articulated replacement for these 2000 year old traditions has not yet emerged. In a broad but ill-defined sense, a new awareness of Spirit has emerged, but the language, practices, doctrines, ethical codes, and all of the other factors that are required for a spiritual sensibility to be sufficiently expressed in objective form so as to allow it to be communicated about and practiced, has not yet coalesced.
 
This doesn’t mean that we are in need of a wholesale rejection of the traditional meaning of the word “God” and the various beliefs and traditions that derive from the traditional sense of Transcendence. A future spirituality and its religious language should retain the nature of the Ultimate as the source of all Being, the essence of Goodness, the basis of Meaning and Hope, in some sense both immanent and transcendent, both personal and more than personal, the source of order, virtue, and some sort of moral accountability. But that future religious language must be cleansed of the qualities of jealousy, capriciousness, vindictiveness, favoritism, and cruelty that all too often are part of the traditional notion of  "God." The Ultimate reality of the next stage in human spiritual evolution will not be seen as something which orders the murder of innocents, authorizes a rapacious subjection of the non-human natural world which has no inherent value, or privileges one gender or race over another. The “God” of this next phase of human spiritual awareness will be one which reflects the (slow and still quite imperfect) development of human spiritual and moral sensibility, in language that is meaningful to contemporary humans.
 
Then why, one might ask, doesn’t someone just put together the details of what we might call a 21st century spirituality, or a religion for the future? But the emergence of a new form of spirituality and its concrete expression in a religion is an extraordinarily complex process, one which happens over centuries in an organic manner with multiple contributors and multiple variations until an identifiable new expression of faith emerges.
 
A New Religious Language
 
This short blog format is not sufficient to speculate on the entirety of that sometimes century-long process. Rather, here we will confine ourselves to what might be considered the first step in the development of a new religion, one which, in the words of J.L. Schellenberg, is a “religion appropriate for out times,” and that first step would be the development of a new religious language.
 
The traditional theistic God-centered language of the existing traditional religions is no longer adequate for many 21st century believers. Human spiritual consciousness is in need of a language to express a sense of the Sacred that is far more expansive, universal, and moral than much of the God-language of traditional religions. This is not to take the position that “God,” or an Ultimate Reality, does not exist. Rather, it is to affirm that the “God-word” as understood in the context of the anthropomorphic, mythic, tribalist, sexist, militaristic and other problematic associations that it has acquired over the past 2000 years might be too narrow and parochial to fit the 21st century spiritual consciousness. We need a language that adequately reflects the spiritual experience of the more expansive, global, universal sense of Spirit that human consciousness is now capable of experiencing on a wide scale basis.
 
For some, the word “God” can be divorced from these traditional limiting connotations to an extent that it is still a useable word. But for others, those connotations are so tightly bound to the word and related beliefs and doctrines that they cannot be undone, and a new language is needed. But this is precisely the dilemma faced by the evolution of 21st century religion: we have achieved the capacity for a certain mode of spiritual awareness, but we lack a language in which to express it, and lacking a language, we cannot develop the corresponding beliefs, doctrines, shared practices, moral codes, etc., that are necessary to turn an internal, private experience available to a few, into a public expression of a religion made possible by shared language and the institutional components which grow out of that language.
 
So what shall we do?
 
Three Options
 
The first option is to make no change at all: use the same language of God, Lord, Father, King, Judge, etc., with the understanding that its meaning has changed in conformity to a contemporary scientific, historical, and, above all, spiritual sensibility. Some are comfortable with the continued use of “God,” but redefined in a contemporary sense, divested of the moral and character limitations of jealousy, vindictiveness, ethnocentrism, etc. Indeed, liberal Christian theology has often tied itself in theological knots trying to hang onto the “God” word by radically redefining the term, sometimes to the point that earlier believers would no longer recognize it.
 
The second option would be to choose to simply say nothing, or as little as possible, reflecting the centuries-old tradition of recognizing that the Ultimate is ineffable, or beyond that capacity of humans to express in words. The notion of a religion based on silence rather than language is hardly anything new: Buddhism's Shunyata, Hindu Vedanta’s “neti-neti”, the Chinese characterization of the Dao as Unnamable, and similar positions of apophatic theology found in Jewish, Islamic, and medieval Christian mysticism all adopt such a strategy.
 
Today, in a spirit of radical epistemological humility where there is a newly found cosmological awareness of the vastness of time and space and the consequent diminished status of the capacities of human knowledge, there are those who sense this new spiritual awareness and are content to remain silent, as did their predecessors in the traditions described above.
 
But our situation is different from all of those earlier traditions in which silence was a workable option, in the sense that those traditions were embedded in well-established existing religions with sacred texts, doctrines, well-developed theologies, liturgies – in short, agreed upon language as pointers to the sense of Spirit which was available at the time.
 
But for an emerging spirituality, silence won’t work: an emerging spirituality which needs to communicate a new spiritual awareness needs words, however admittedly inadequate they might be, to communicate at least a vague sense of that new spiritual sensibility and a process for experiencing and living according to such spiritual awareness. For a sense of Spirit that is only dawning on human consciousness, how do you communicate it to others? How do you exchange ideas, and enter into meaningful conversation that leads to a refinement of what constitutes the preferred language to express it? How do you counter misguided paths which lead to pathological expressions of it? And how do you introduce it to youth and insure its transmission from one generation to the next?
 
In light of these challenges, a third option appears to be required: We need to develop a new religious language which is adequately expressive of a contemporary sense of Spirit, a language which will retain some aspects of the words and concepts of traditional religion, but one which in some ways will necessarily generate a dramatically new religious vocabulary, which over time will lead to statements of belief comparable to the creeds, doctrines, and theologies of the existing traditional religions.
 
So why don’t we just do it? Why don’t we create a new language and a new religion that reflect this new spirituality? As we move away from the traditional religions rooted in the Axial Age, why not just create a post-tradition spirituality which will bring forward the religions of what some have a called a Second Axial Age?
 
This is where things get rather frustrating, for the simple reason that religious concepts and their expression in language need to develop organically, and organic development takes time – a very long time, as in centuries. We are in a transition process where the old religions are no long grounded in language that is universally meaningful, but the new religions and new linguistic tools for communicating about the contemporary sense of the Transcendent have not yet emerged in useful, clear, agreed-upon, shared forms.
 
What’s more, we don’t even know how far into the transition to a new spirituality we are: early, mid-point, or near the end? The Protestant Reformation, for instance, did not begin and emerge fully developed in one day when Martin Luther made public his 95 Theses on October 31, 1517. Several centuries of previous debate about this newly emerging spiritual sensibility in Christianity culminated in that act of Luther, who was less responsible for “creating” the Reformation than for simply bringing to the church’s and public’s attention a spiritual transformation that had begun centuries earlier, organically culminating in the expression of that new spirituality in Luther’s document. And Luther’s spiritual vision continued to be refined by further variations of Protestantism, as well as Roman Catholic responses, that emerged in the decades and even centuries following Luther.
 
In a comparable sense, how close are we to such a transition? Clearly, a post-traditional, post-traditionally theistic, post-exclusivist, global type of spiritualty has been developing for centuries, as evidenced in medieval Christian and Muslim mystics, Indian varieties of non-dualism, the Cosmic writing of Chinese Neo-Confucian tradition, American Transcendentalists of the 1800s, and various new religious movements during the past several decades.
 
But when will these diverse strands of post-traditional spiritual sensibility coalesce to the point of generating a language that is sufficiently clear to be shared?
 
Caught Between Saying Too Much or Saying Too Little
 
So for now….
 
Perhaps we must assume that we are at an early stage of one of those transitional stages where the old ways of articulating the nature of the Spirit are no longer effective and meaningful, but new ways have not yet organically emerged. They will emerge, but it will take time.
 
In the meantime, we are left in this very peculiar position of trying to thread the needle between saying nothing and saying too much, between silence and meaningless verbiage. Reluctant to use the traditional language of ancient terms like God, Lord, and King, there is a temptation to remain silent in the still awareness of the existence of a Transcendent reality that is always difficult to express in words, and which can no longer be adequately captured in those traditional religious words that are deeply rooted in outdated anthropomorphic and mythic connotations.
 
Silence is tempting indeed, but silence will not succeed in bringing about the transition to the credible religion that we desperately need at this time. We need a new religious language that will seem believable to and resonate with contemporary believers and would-be believers, those who stay away from traditional religions because the existing language of the traditional religions is not meaningful to them.
 
In the meantime, as happens in any major transition in human consciousness, we can only patiently wait, contributing what we can to the emergence of new ways of articulating an emerging sense of Spirit that is far more vast, expansive, universal, and inclusive, than that which has preceded it. And knowing that, like all changes in human consciousness, the development of an intelligible, communicable, publicly shared linguistic expression of this spiritual awareness – in other words, a religion – will take time and needs to develop organically, we patiently wait and contribute in whatever way we can. 

Religion Changes – Always and Everywhere
 
Religion, like everything else, changes. Believers may tend to view their religion as the embodiment of eternal truths that never change, but the historical study of religion would suggest otherwise.
 
Indeed, all human knowledge changes, or evolves, over time, generally (but not always) in a progressive, expanding direction. This is clear with regard to secular knowledge: 21st century physicians and other health care providers don’t look to the writings of Galen (2nd century) when seeking guidance on how to treat an illness. NASA doesn’t consult Ptolemy (2nd century) for astronomical guidance when planning the complex task of launching a satellite into orbit. If you’re planning on taking a trip to China, you don’t do so based on a map from the time of Marco Polo (13th century).  Clearly, then, human knowledge has evolved over time. What the human species knows about the nature of things and how they work in the 21st century has changed considerably since what was known in pre-modern times. We simply know more today than we knew in times past, in virtually all fields of knowledge: science, medicine, engineering, agriculture, and on and on. At least in certain ways, humans simply do not think the same way that we thought 2000 years ago. Or at least, in most areas we don’t…
 
The progressive evolution of secular knowledge, both sensory-based and abstract, is obvious. And yet, when it comes to religion, there is often a strong tendency to look to the past for truth, seeking wisdom about spiritual matters in books, doctrines, and practices that emerged on the scene 2000 years ago and longer. Why are we so reluctant to consider the possibility that spiritual/religious knowledge, like all forms of human knowledge, evolves and expands over time? When you step back and contemplate this practice of 21st century humans habitually and without hesitation looking to ancient books for knowledge about something that is presumed to be a present-day reality (Spirit/God), the practice might appear to some to be a bit strange!
 
This is not to deny that there is much wisdom in the ancient religious traditions: of course there is, and that accounts for the persistence of these traditions over centuries. The traditional religions do indeed provide us with profound insights into the nature of Spirit/God, human nature, and the relationship between the transcendent and the human. However, we are suggesting that spiritual knowledge should not be understood as being found only in those traditions which originated centuries-ago in the Axial Age and are still with us today. Human consciousness, including our capacity for awareness of the transcendent, spiritual dimension, evolves over time, and we should be receptive to the new expressions of the nature of Spirit that grow out of that ever-evolving spiritual sensibility.
 
To some extent, given the slow, organic pace of the evolution of human spiritual consciousness over very long periods of time, that evolution can be hard to notice, and it might appear to believers at any given fixed point in time to be the case that religion does not change at all, simply due to the slow pace at which it does change. But that perception is incorrect, an error rooted in the inability of humans to temporally contextualize those things that take more than a generation, or century, or millennium to change. Viewed from the more expansive, comprehensive perspective of the approximately 40,000 (or more) year-old human awareness of a spiritual dimension and the 6,000 year-old history of human philosophical and theological speculation on the nature of that spiritual reality, religion does indeed change. 
 
Canadian philosopher J.L. Schellenberg distinguishes between a synchronic and diachronic understanding of religion. A synchronic perspective looks at spiritual truth as fundamentally static and unchanging; a diachronic perspective looks at spiritual truth as something that is constantly changing, like all forms of human awareness, as human consciousness evolves over time. Clearly, we are adopting a diachronic perspective in the blogs on this site.
 
Furthermore, in the context of that long process of slow, organic changes in human awareness of Spirit, things periodically reach a tipping point where there appears to be a dramatic transition to something new that is substantially different from all that proceeded it. We are suggesting that that human spirituality is on the verge of such a tipping point, where the traditional religions that have been with us for over 2000 years have lost much of their credibility and hold on the consciousness of many contemporary humans who have a fully informed 21st century sensibility.
 
But this does not mean that we are headed into a non-religious era.  Rather, it means that we are entering into the early stages of a transition to a religious era that will be characterized by a different way of thinking about and acting toward the transcendent dimension of the Cosmos. Such a tipping point and transition to a different form of spiritual awareness occurred during a period which historians of religion refer to as the Axial Age, which ran from roughly (very roughly – one could extend the dates by a couple centuries in either direction) the 8th to 3rd centuries BCE.  Just as our Axial Age ancestors gradually set aside and rejected the spiritual concepts of pre-Axial religion (animism, polytheism) but still remained religious, albeit in the context of a new Axial Age spirituality (grounded in a more unitary and moral sense of Spirit), so we should feel confident that humanity today can set aside many of the concepts of the Axial Age spirituality which has served humanity well for 2000 years but may have reached the end of its relevance, while we remain “believers,” but believers of a somewhat different sort: believers in what we refer to as post-Axial Age or post-traditional spirituality, which is only in the early stages of emergence from the Axial traditions that it is evolving out of and slowly replacing.
 
The nature of that slowly emerging post-Axial spirituality is the main topic of this website, as well as Thinking About Religion in the 21st Century: A New Guide for the Perplexed, as we explore what a religion of the 21st century and beyond might look like.
 

​Thoreau and Evolving Spiritual Awareness

Readers who have followed the posts on this site are likely to be puzzled by the last three short posts, all of which have been based on passages from Henry David Thoreau.* What, might one ask, does an 18th century New England Transcendentalist have to do with the evolving nature of religion, which is the theme of this site?
Thoreau’s many passages describing his experience of the Sacred in the natural world sometimes are reminiscent of what some might call “paganism” (or, to use the far less pejorative label, animistic religions). In turn, some might then argue that this is evidence that religious consciousness doesn’t really evolve at all. If pre-Christian animists and an 18th century American transcendentalist both had a similar spiritual sensitivity to the presence of Spirit in the natural world, what evidence is there of an evolving spiritual consciousness over a span of more than 2000 years?
To that challenge, we would offer two points to consider:
 
1. Evolution and the principle of “Transcend and Include”
To suggest, as we do,  that the evolution of human spiritual awareness demonstrates an ever more expansive and fuller sense of Spirit, is not to imply that earlier spiritual experiential senses of the Sacred were false and should be rejected. Evolution always proceeds according to the pattern of transcend and include, both in the evolution of matter and the evolution of consciousness.
Ken Wilber consistently emphasizes this important insight: while evolution is a process which is constantly leading to entities with increased complexity and new traits that are different from and more complex, functional, and adaptive than what preceded them, those preceding stages are not destroyed or abandoned, but rather maintained as the basis for the newly evolved entities. In the physical realm, the formation of a molecule “transcends”, or is more than, the particles of which the molecule is composed, but the existence of the molecule does not (and cannot) destroy those particles. Similarly, an organ which is composed of a complex arrangement of cells is more than those cells, but it does not in any way negate them. And, of course, a human which is composed of a variety of organs acquires capacities (including consciousness) that are not found in any of those individual organs, but the human entity remains dependent on the organs for its material existence.
With regard to the evolution of spiritual consciousness, the obvious expansion of the human sense of Spirit in no way negates the earlier sense of Spirit, but it does expand the depth and breadth of our awareness of the Sacred. In Thoreau’s case, while he possessed a profound sense of the presence of Spirit in nature, he did so in a manner that was free from the mythic and anthropomorphic projections, as well as the sometimes brutal ethical elements (sacrificial practices of various types, including sentient beings) that are found in earlier expressions of animistic spirituality. In a sense, Thoreau’s spirituality includes the animistic sense of immanent Spirit in the natural world but also transcends it by removing the culturally conditioned mythic and anthropomorphic dimensions and expanding the circle of moral empathy.
 
2. An appropriate sense of temporal contextualization
In looking at evolution in general or spiritual evolution specifically, it is necessary to keep in mind the basic truth that evolution proceeds over vast stretches of time. That humans in the first century c.e. thought about spiritual matters in ways that are similar to how many humans think about such things today is not surprising, given that 2000 years is a very short period of time when we’re looking at evolutionary development. Philosopher J.L. Schellenberg has explored this theme in great depth in his wonderful trilogy on religious faith, where he repeatedly urges us to consider humanity as a fairly new, immature species, that has only recently acquired the capacity to experience and reflect upon the presence of a Transcendent or Spiritual reality.
Of course, some things have changed if we look at the evolution of the human spiritual sensibility from Neolithic pre-Axial cultures to today. A greater sense of the moral quality of Spirit and an ever-expanding sense of moral responsibility beyond the human species to other sentient beings are important evolutionary developments in spiritual awareness, and 3000 years is a relatively short period of time for such a development to occur.
So one should not be surprised to find animistic elements of a nature-based spirituality in Thoreau (and his fellow Transcendentalists), nor should one be surprised that Thoreau’s spiritual awareness is in some ways different from what preceded him. That’s how evolution works. That’s “transcend and include.”
 
All of this leads to the most intriguing question: what happens next?
Yes, it will take centuries or perhaps millennia for the next stage in the evolution of human spirituality to emerge. And yes, that process will be so slow and organic that it likely will go largely unnoticed. And in all likelihood, it will lead to a spiritual awareness that is utterly incomprehensible to 21st century humans, in the same way that non-dual mysticism and the moral duty to all sentient beings would have been incomprehensible to our ancestors from 40,000 years ago when, just yesterday, the religious sensibility appears to have emerged in our species.  How will the slowly evolving capacity of human consciousness to experientially intuit the spiritual element of the Cosmos, following the principle of transcend and include, manifest in new forms of spiritual experience and understanding?
__________________________________________________________
*It should be noted that Thoreau enthusiastically read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species shortly after its publication, although, of course, he did not apply the concept of evolution to consciousness or spiritual experience.
 
                             

Thoreau and the Experience of Transcendence in Nature
 
“This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself…..I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me….Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me….”
​
Henry David Thoreau, “Solitude” in Walden