(Originally published at http://www.kosmosjournal.org/reader-essay/evolving-spirituality-for-global-transformation/)

Having been on the spiritual path most of my life (yoga and meditation, Buddhism, and Advaita Vedanta), I’ve become increasingly involved over time in the integration of spirituality and social action, particularly in response to the global crises of ecological collapses and rising social inequality. For the last ten years, I’ve been working with groups addressing these themes: the Global Peace Initiative of Women, the Great Transition Initiative, New Earth Nation, United Earth, and Agents of Conscious Evolution.

During this time, I’ve identified certain key areas in which I see a new evolutionary paradigm emerging, heralding profound shifts in both consciousness and society. These new directions could be called the streams of a new ‘Evolving Spirituality,’ bringing spiritual wisdom into personal and global healing, including social, economic, and ecological transformation. Ideally, I would love to create a living centre for practice and action exploring and weaving together these trends, accelerating the movement towards whole-systems transformation. Here are the directions I’ve identified:

Interspirituality – Discerning the common ground of universal wisdom at the heart of the world’s spiritual traditions; integrating the strong points of each to foster a common movement towards a cooperative, sustainable, and just society. Here the aim is to draw upon the deeper, shared spiritual wisdom at the core of the traditions, not simply for the sake of religious tolerance or comparative theory, but to build a movement together addressing our global crises and transforming our systems.

Sacred Activism – Bringing the deep universal spiritual truth of interconnectedness and Oneness into social and ecological action, particularly in addressing climate change and rising social inequality. Sacred activism seeks systemic transformation, going to the root causes of today’s crises, challenging a global economic system based on a worldview of separation, competition, and self-profit, and offering alternative visions that would serve the highest good of both planet and peoples.

Psychospiritual Integration – The personal is political, but the dysfunctions at both levels have their basis at the spiritual level, in a fundamental misperception at the core level of consciousness. We cannot change our systems without changing ourselves; neither can we change ourselves without recognizing the falsity of our sense of separation and how it has been powerfully reinforced in our psyche through our social conditionings and systems.

Integrative healing processes are now emerging that approach personal healing from both a deeper spiritual and wider social context, releasing the false self-images that keep us separated from others, nature, and the very Source of creation that gives rise to all, unleashing the creative power to change ourselves and our systems from a radical shift in consciousness at our very core.

Bringing in Feminine Wisdom – Integrating feminine wisdom, perspectives, and leadership into a new, more balanced spiritual paradigm. This entails both more women’s leadership in the spiritual and social domains, as well as a new consciousness in both men and women that honors the interconnectedness of all life and seeks to serve it with love and caring, cooperation and communion. A movement is emerging not just to empower women but to shift our most fundamental notions of power itself, from ‘power-over’ to ‘power-with,’ working together to empower all life on our planet.

Bringing in An Evolutionary Perspective – Emphasizing a life-affirming vision of the continual, ever-unfolding evolution of consciousness and Cosmos and our co-creative participation in it. Religious traditions since the Axial Age have often split matter and spirit, emphasizing renunciation and transcendence of the world; this has led to a denigration of the Earth and its beauty, as well as a fatal denial of the inviolable interdependence of our own evolution upon it, decimating the very processes of life that sustain us. Today, a new spiritual vision is emerging to heal the split between spirit and matter and re-empower our connection with the Whole of creation and our co-creative power in the sacredness of its unfolding.

Bridging Spirituality and Science – Many in today’s secular, materialist world have lost faith in spirituality yet take science as their religion. Interestingly, modern science itself is affirming the ancient spiritual truths – that underlying the material world is energy and consciousness in which we are all united. While quantum physics verifies the interchangeability of matter and energy (particles and waves), neuroscience is now able to record the measurable changes in brainwaves of meditators in deeper states of consciousness. Tapping into these dimensions that underlie our being not only tunes us into our intimate connections with all others, it detonates enormous creative power to change ourselves and our world. Exciting new initiatives today are bridging the worlds of spirituality and science, and simultaneously of contemplation and action.

At the root of all these directions is the recognition that we are not separate, neither from each other, nature, or our own source. We exist in and as a unified field of consciousness, energy, and matter, inseparable from each other, this precious Earth, and the entire process of Cosmic evolution. Together, they herald a new paradigm of conscious evolution emerging, a global transformation in harmony with all life.