Inter-religious dialogue

Shambhala just released an interesting new essay from Ken Wilber on "the common heart" of all religions. It is the foreword to an apparently not-yet-published book called The Common Heart, an Experience of Inter-Religious Dialogue, edited by Netanel Miles-Yepez. The whole text is well worth your time, but here's an excerpt:

"In 1984, Father Thomas Keating invited a broad range of spiritual teachers from virtually all of the world’s great wisdom traditions - Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Indigenous, Islamic - to gather together at St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado. (...) The Common Heart is the first report of that meeting and several subsequent ones with the same group. It is in almost every respect a rather amazing document. First, and especially, in that it could and did happen; second, and as much, in the results, both startling and reassuring simultaneously. (...)

As for these points of agreement, what are we to make of them? The first one is: "The world's religions bear witness to the experience of Ultimate Reality, to which they give various names." I ask because in today's world, there looms a very difficult issue that simply must be addressed: why is it that, at first glance, the world's religions - or the ones the public hears about on the news - seem to be the major source of human conflict, when, on the other hand, dialogues like these show that spirituality could be the primary source of peace among humankind? The disparity between the former and the latter is so large, so jarring, so hard to reconcile, and is made all the worse when beheadings in the name of God occur weekly, bombings in the name of God occur daily, and no world religion has a history totally free of such. I believe that unless we can find a way to understand and differentiate those two extremes of religion, both will be deeply suspect in today’s world.

Let me suggest one way to think about this, and let me give a frightfully abbreviated version (please see The Eye of Spirit for a more detailed look). Studies in developmental psychology over the last few decades show that individuals tend to undergo an unmistakable trajectory of human growth and development, from pre-conventional stages to conventional stages to post-conventional, or from pre-rational to rational to trans-rational, or from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric. Without pigeonholing anybody or any tradition - because people and traditions can span the entire spectrum - there is a world of difference between those who are acting in egocentric, preconventional, and pre-rational ways, and those acting in postconventional, worldcentric, and trans-rational ways. The latter, having developed and befriended rationality, now transcend and include it; whereas the former are not acting beyond reason, but beneath it.

It is the bane of contemplative dialogues such as these that in the common mind, preconventional and postconventional are lumped together, and pre-rational and trans-rational are unceremoniously equated, when they are quite literally poles apart. But for today's conventional, rationally-minded individual, the world's great contemplative and trans-rational mystics and realizers are indistinguishable from irrational fanatics or those seized with infantile oceanic fantasies.

This is not only sad, it is a cultural catastrophe of the first magnitude. And yet, until religion itself learns convincingly how to convey these differences and increasingly focus on the best in its postconventional, transpersonal, and contemplative dimensions, religion for the world at large will likely remain either the province of prerational fanatics or rational cynics. Transrational dialogues such as these - which embrace rationality fully and then go beyond it into the mystery of the divine and the obviousness of the ultimate - will never gain the deep appreciation and even reverence they deserve.

The points of agreement in the following dialogues do indeed spring from that deep space of trans-rational openness and contemplative transparency, where the human heart stands naked to the divine, discovering at the end of that journey into the present a dividing line between them almost impossible to find, a gateless gate to that I AMness that only alone is. (...)"