​ 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?
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*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….”
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Henry David Thoreau, “Solitude” in Walden

Henry David Thoreau: Spiritual Minimalist
 
Writing well over a century ago, the American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau clearly had a sense of what we have previously (see blog post from 11/8/23) referred to as Epistemological Humility and Spiritual Minimalism, when in defining religion in his journal entry of August 18,1858, he wrote:
 
                                    “What is religion? That which is never spoken.”

Consciousness, Evolution, and Religion:
The Importance of the Content of Consciousness
 
The close and inextricable relationship between the evolution of consciousness, the emergence of the human capacity to perceive a spiritual dimension of reality, and the development of religions in their many and varied manifestations has become a common theme in the exploration of the evolution of religion and the broader field of consciousness studies. Fortunately, after decades of being consigned to the status of a taboo subject for serious investigation, since the mid-1990s the topic of consciousness – its nature, origin, and function - has produced an explosion of sophisticated and meaningful works, in books, scholarly publications, blogs, etc. The enormity and complexity of this body of work has recently been captured by Robert Lawrence Kuhn in his remarkable piece, A landscape of consciousness:Towardataxonomyofexplanationsandimplications (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610723001128via%3Dihub&fbclid=IwY2xjawEppAlleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHdinYJZ37AprVucT1BLJ9zmIvGNyixJarHvlAnH_1QpTpbrVVLleOrTgcg_aem_ZvpFMekpBMRXjWVOBYraGA).
 
And yet, despite finally acquiring the status of a fully legitimate area of study and the proliferation of work that has been produced as a result of that status, for both scholars and the general public, we would suggest that something is missing in much of contemporary consciousness studies, namely an exploration and appreciation of the actual content of consciousness. As a general phenomenon, much has been said about the nature of consciousness, but often in a manner that fails to recognize the extraordinary quality of the content of consciousness, particularly when viewed in an evolutionary context. Here we will present just a brief summary of this issue, with a fuller treatment to follow at a later date.
 
Consciousness as Qualia
Ever since the 1990s work of Thomas Nagel and David Chalmers, both of whom were instrumental in returning consciousness to the status of a legitimate subject of serious scientific and philosophical exploration, the focus of most of this work has been on the exploration of the general nature of consciousness as that which is understood in terms of qualia, or subjective experience, as perhaps best understood by Nagel’s characterization of consciousness as  “what it is like” to have an experience. Some might suggest that roughly five decades of extensive production in the fields of science and philosophy is perhaps a bit much to convincingly establish the reality of something that is always present to any waking human with an healthy operative brain. And yet, much of consciousness research has focused on the questions of whether consciousness even exists and whether consciousness can be reduced to and explained in strictly materialist terms. Much of this work has revolved around what Chalmers labeled the “hard problem” of consciousness: the “easy” problem is establishing various correlations between events in the brain and conscious experience, but the “hard” problem attempts (without success, many would argue) to grapple with the issue of what consciousness is, or its ontological status as something that cannot be explained, described, or categorized in strictly materialist terms. 
In the debate between materialists and non-materialists (who often, although certainly not always, also support belief in the reality of a (frequently non-traditional) spiritual dimension), this is of course a fundamental issue, and the enormous body of work derived from the arguments back and forth is understandable.
But this focus on the very existence and nature of consciousness, usually understood in terms of a defense of the reality of non-physical qualia, has been so intense that the actual content of consciousness often has been neglected. This is unfortunate, for we are suggesting that the evolution of consciousness has produced, in the human species at least (and perhaps in other species elsewhere in the Cosmos, but that sort of speculation is not our concern), awareness of non-material realities that are utterly remarkable (and that’s an understatement) and hardly the sort of thing that one might expect to emerge out of the rearrangement of particles of matter over roughly 14 billion years. By ignoring the content of consciousness, much of contemporary scientific, philosophical, and even spiritual thought about consciousness, thus presents a very diluted understanding of consciousness, where consciousness is defined in terms of only awareness, subjectivity, “what it’s like to be”. We are suggesting, in other words, that consciousness isn’t just about “qualia.”

Mapping the Content of Consciousness
In a sense, it’s easy to appreciate the existence of a certain reticence about offering any sort of authoritative map of the contents of consciousness, given that this would involve exploration of something that is entirely internal, hidden from the public view which is privileged in much of scientific thought, and subject to evolutionary change over the long span of human development. Various maps have been developed, many grounded in the earlier work of Jean Gebser and influenced by the non-mainstream work of Ken Wilber.
Here we have no intention to attempt the gargantuan task of articulating an exhaustive account of these various models of the content of consciousness, but for the sake of providing context for the larger point that we are trying to make, a generalized and admittedly incomplete model of the evolution of consciousness would likely include the following:
        1. Sensory awareness: The simplest form of perception, found in a rudimentary sense in pre-human life forms and reaching a fuller expression in the human capacity for awareness generated through the five senses of touch, sight, sound, smell, and taste.
        2. Spatial consciousness: Whereas sensory awareness is direct, spatial consciousness emerges only with the development of the capacity to engage (consciously or unconsciously) in the capacity to contextualize sensory perceptions, distinguishing between here and there.
        3. Temporal consciousness: Similar to spatial consciousness, temporal consciousness emerges only with the development of the capacity to engage (consciously or unconsciously) in the capacity to contextualize perceptions in a temporal sense, distinguishing between now, then, and not yet.
        4. Memory: In conjunction with the above referenced development of the capacity for spatial and temporal consciousness and presumably occurring as a co-development rather than as an isolated step, at some point the content of human consciousness evolved to the point of distinguishing between realities that are present and realities that 1) were once present, 2) are no longer so, but are 3) retained in consciousness with varying degrees of vividness, accuracy, etc.
        5. Self-other: Awareness of the sense of a separate self, which may include but is certainly not an immediately apparent corollary of perception of the body of another, at some point in our evolutionary development became an established component of the content of consciousness, subsequently leading to an even deeper sense of self as something which has the capacity to exist outside the body, whether in shamanic spirit flights or the many concepts of a post-mortem afterlife found in early religions and refined in Axial Age traditions.
        6. Abstract thought: The capacity to hold in one’s consciousness “ideas,” or non-material realities that are not immediately present in the “external” world and to manipulate these ideas (through reasoning, mathematics) marks a significant development in the evolution of human consciousness into areas that are only minimally present in other life forms.
        7. Will/intentionality: Many of the philosophers who choose to deny the existence of consciousness also choose to deny the reality of will, or intentionality, despite the fact that, like consciousness, it is immediately present to us and is reflected in the very acting of choosing to deny it. Our intent here isn’t to get into the debate about the degree to which human intentionality can be characterized as an exercise of free will, but rather to simply assert that at some point in the evolution of our species, the remarkable capacity to make intentional decisions emerged. As with consciousness, intentionality does not appear to be an exclusively human quality, but the extent to which humans have the capacity to make intentional choices based on conscious reflection is qualitatively different than that evidenced by any other species, and hence represents one of the hallmarks of human uniqueness.
        8. Emotions: The richness of the human internal affective content also reflects a progressive evolutionary development of consciousness, as evidenced in the range of human awareness of different emotional states and expressions. In the course of human consciousness evolution, higher affective qualities such as love, awe, and wonder have developed to further differentiate human from other forms of consciousness which include affective states of awareness but only of a more basic sort.

The above account of the evolution of the content of consciousness speaks to the need to recognize that consciousness is far more than a sense of “what it is like to be…”, or perhaps more precisely, it confirms that the human sense of “what it is like to be” has evolved over time, such that a full appreciation of the nature of human consciousness needs to take into consideration this steady expansion of the content of consciousness, which has led to a fuller and fuller awareness of reality. What early humans were capable of perceiving through their nascent consciousness was less than what contemporary humans are capable of perceiving through their currently-evolved mode of consciousness. Contemporary humans simply have a fuller experience of the totality of the real than did our predecessors, whether within the species or prior to it.
 
The Supersensory or Transcendental Content of Consciousness
And yet, the above account of the evolution of consciousness, however remarkable it might be, only brings us to the doorstep of the truly unique nature of evolved human consciousness, for, in addition to the various sensory and abstract contents of consciousness as described above, consciousness provides access to an awareness (however dim) of what we can variously describe as supersensory, transcendental, or spiritual dimensions of reality.
In the human form, there has emerged a consciousness through which there is the recognition that reality consists of Something More than the totality of the sensory realm of matter, energy, space, and time. Through human consciousness, we find an awareness of a spiritual or transcendent dimension that reveals the presence of meaning and value in the Cosmos. The sense of spiritual qualities such as moral goodness, love, meaning, and the many other transcendental dimensions of existence are not available through the sensory perception of the material dimension of the world. But through consciousness as it has evolved in the human species, we gain (admittedly in what is often a sporadic, ambiguous, and ineffable sense), an awareness of a qualitative, spiritual, meaning-laden dimension of the Cosmos which is not otherwise apparent.
This supersensory or transcendental aspect of consciousness has, of course, been accessed through the contemplative practices of prolonged meditation and other spiritual techniques in various religious traditions for centuries, but we would suggest that it is also part of the everyday awareness of modern humans, and that such supersensory or spiritual awareness is not dependent on a connection to any particular religious tradition. Just as human consciousness evolved over time to slowly provide all humans with the capacity to perceive time, abstract ideas, number, and other mundane qualities of reality, so consciousness has continued to evolve to the point where the perception of the transcendental spiritual qualities such as meaning and moral goodness have similarly become a standard dimension of consciousness in most humans.
But returning to the topic of this essay, our larger point here is that in the contemporary study of consciousness which tends to explore the mere existence of consciousness but not its content, the utterly remarkable nature of the content of consciousness is overlooked.
Granted, there occasionally is a recognition – almost passing in nature – of the content of consciousness, as in Phillip Goff’s recent Why, where he states, “But there is more to human consciousness than these raw sensations. Human consciousness is also permeated with meaning and understanding.” (Why, 50) But such an observation is made without sufficient recognition of what an astounding assertion it is! Yes, the very existence of a non-material, irreducible something such as consciousness is remarkable, but even more remarkable is what consciousness has allowed us to gain access to, producing a content that needs to be acknowledged in a spirit of sufficient wonder and awe. Appreciating the remarkable nature of consciousness is not just a matter of “what it’s like to be” something, but rather what it’s like to be something which senses dimensions of reality that nothing else in the (known) Cosmos has access to! How remarkable that over the course of 14 billion years, ever-changing constellations of energy and particles have evolved with sufficient complexity that in at least one complex organism (the human) there has emerged awareness of a dimension of the Cosmos, characterized by moral value and meaning, that is otherwise invisible and unknown. In ordinary everyday language, this is a really big deal! – and yet it is commonly treated in a casual manner or simply overlooked.
 
Of course, skeptical reductionists will diminish the uniqueness of the content of consciousness by essentially passing it off as nothing more than human inventiveness responding to the need for psychological defense mechanisms (religious concepts such as meaning and an afterlife were invented to protect against the terror of loss, suffering, and death) and the need for social order (religion, meaning, and value were invented to help maintain social control - people fearful of eternal punishment and hopeful of eternal reward are more likely to act in a way that is conducive to the perpetuation of orderly society).
This is not the place to engage in a complicated analysis of the flaws of such simplistic reductionism. Rather, we shall simply point out that reductionism, which argues (often on rather weak grounds) that humans create value and meaning, is being increasingly challenged by the position that consciousness is the vehicle that allows us to discover value and meaning, which are already “out there” as ontological realities that exist independent of human perception.
Phillip Goff (far from being a defender of traditional theism) nicely articulates this position in his description of Value Fundamentalism in the opening chapter of Why?, where he refers to value as “primitive facts in their own right”(11) that cannot be passed off as mere human creations.
Similarly, in his recent Notes on Complexity, Neil Theise argues that just as mathematical Platonism posits mathematics as something that “awaits human discovery, not human invention,” (131), the same can be said about meaning, value, and transcendental qualities such as Goodness and Truth: they exist as aspects of reality which, at a certain point in the evolution of consciousness, humans acquired the capacity to discover or perceive, however imperfectly at this rather early stage of human development.
 
The Point
To summarize, then, the point of all of the above: On the one hand, we should recognize the remarkable developments in the field of consciousness studies that have emerged since the 1990s, during which time consciousness has gone from a taboo, derided topic to a widely accepted subject of mainstream philosophical and scientific inquiry. This development has included, at least among non-reductionists, a recognition of what a remarkable and  mysterious phenomenon consciousness appears to be.
But that recognition in itself is insufficient: in addition to acknowledging the remarkable nature of consciousness as “what it is like to be” a subject capable of experiencing qualia, we should be even more astounded by the content of consciousness, or that which consciousness makes it possible for us to perceive, namely the non-material but ontologically real aspects of the Cosmos. As a result of human consciousness in its present state of evolutionary development, we know that the Cosmos is more than stuff: it is also a reality saturated with meaning and value, including qualities of Goodness and Truth that, in the absence of consciousness in its present state of development, would not be known. In the human form in its current state of evolutionary development, a being composed of particles of matter/energy has developed a degree of complexity that results in the (still unexplained) emergence of an immaterial reality (consciousness) that allows us to achieve the perception of aspects of the Cosmos that are utterly immaterial and transcendent. In essence, through consciousness we are granted confirmation that we exist in a Cosmos infused with meaning and value, and as such, we should always view consciousness with reverence and awe. 
 
 
 

​If human consciousness continues to evolve (slowly and sporadically) in such a manner that humans continue to acquire a fuller, more expansive sense of the nature of Spirit, what are the implications for the existing traditional religions which all emerged over 2000 years ago from the mode of human spiritual awareness (more mythic, dualist, anthropomorphic and anthropocentric) that was dominant at that time? 
While we can only hazard vague educated guesses about what the many dimensions of the post-traditional religion of the 21st century and beyond will look like, it seems reasonable to assert with considerable confidence that future religion will be characterized by an embrace of religious pluralism and a rejection of exclusivism. The notion that there is only one true religion and that religions can be neatly categorized into “true” and “false” is already rapidly disappearing among many populations, and the pluralistic appreciation of a multiplicity of spiritual beliefs and practices will likely, over time, become the new norm. The exclusivist assertion that there is only one true religion, one true revelation, one true set of beliefs, and one true path to salvation is simply not credible to people whose perspective is fully informed by study of the history of religions, which exposes the sociopolitical factors that influence the formation of each religion; study of World Religions, which demonstrates the multiple commonalities between traditions; and, perhaps most importantly, direct experience with people of other faiths, which is inevitable in an increasingly multi-cultural world in which traditional boundaries of communication and interaction are rapidly collapsing.
 
We already see a movement away from the traditional exclusivist norm as, for instance, the boundaries between various branches of Christianity are dissolving, with practicing Lutherans being quite comfortable attending a Presbyterian service or even a Catholic Mass, and indeed with many Protestants not even familiar with the theological differences that once created a sharp and often acrimonious wall between different denominations. Today many Protestant Christians would be hard-pressed to describe the theological differences between, for instance, Lutheranism, Methodism, and Presbyterianism, and many (perhaps most) mainline Protestant congregations are populated by members who are there simply by virtue of family tradition rather than theological choice.
 
But this openness to other traditions also extends beyond the different branches of one’s own faith and into completely different traditions, as we see, for instance, Christians and Jews engaging in activities such as practicing Buddhist meditation, participating in Hindu religious festivals, participating in indigenous shamanic rituals, and reading sacred texts from multiple traditions.
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We appear to be heading for what Duane Bidwell has referred to as believers who are “spiritually fluid” (see Bidwell’s When One Religion Isn’t Enough:  The Lives of Spiritually Fluid People). Rather than feeling a need to be confined to one tradition, the spiritually fluid believers (which appear to be rapidly increasing in numbers) do not identify with any one tradition, but feel comfortable drawing different elements of their spiritual life from different religions. The spiritually fluid believer might, for instance, participate in a Christian Mass, practice Buddhist meditation, hold a worldview derived from Hindu Vedanta, and read Confucius for ethical guidance, all the while seeing no conflict in the blending of various traditions and not exclusively identifying with any one of them. To the spiritually fluid believer, being religious does not require identification with a specific historical tradition, but rather consists of an acceptance of and commitment to spiritual reality that transcends association with any particular expression of faith.
This is not to suggest movement toward a naïve and uncritical acceptance of any and all ideas and practices labelled “spiritual” by someone somewhere. Discernment of what is spiritually and ethically meaningful and edifying necessarily will continue to occur, but from a starting point of openness to the reception of elements (beliefs, practices, experiences, etc.) of religious value from any tradition. One’s own favored tradition or the historically dominant tradition of one’s culture will no longer automatically have a privileged place as the arbiter of what constitutes spiritual legitimacy.
 
This embrace of pluralism and movement toward spiritual fluidity doesn’t mean that we are necessarily headed toward some sort of universal, global One Religion. Spiritual beliefs and practices are influenced by many variables, some reflecting differences in personality and taste, some reflecting local traditions, and countless other subtle differences in human personality and culture that lead to a preference for one rather than another mode of spirituality. These factors will likely ensure that, as the religion of the future slowly evolves, it will develop along branches that reflect these many differences in preference, but the new normal in which such variations exist will almost certainly be one which strongly affirms religious pluralism, respecting but not constrained by the traditional Axial Age religions which still dominant the world’s spiritual landscape.