The Coming Interspiritual--Archive Edition

reveal our own unquestioned assumptions that what is true for us must be true for others. It helps us to broaden our spiritual vision, belief and practice to become inclusive rather than exclusive.

Inter-Spiritual Meditations, Rituals, Liturgies, and Rights of Passage As Father Thomas Keating often says, “silence is the first language of the divine.” Those who have gathered in the silence of inter-spiritual contemplative gatherings attest to this. Silence provides a neutral, universal ground of shared contemplative consciousness.

These silent gatherings, along with my work with contemplatives of various traditions, inspired me to create a process-oriented contemplative practice that we all might do together called “InterSpiritual Meditation” comprised of seven parts. This meditation adheres to the priorities shared with InterSpiritual education as clarified above.

There are a marvelous variety other new inter-spiritual meditations, rituals, liturgies and rightsof-passage that will become part of an ever-expanding curriculum for inter-spiritual education.

Creating a Personally Meaningful Spiritual Path An inter-spiritual education helps each individual to develop their own path from within a single tradition or from a variety of traditions. This is an education of both heart and head, a process acknowledging our interconnection. It might entail a process of integrating our isolated, individual sense self with the interdependent elements, consciousness and energies that animate all of life. An inter-spiritual education might help us to sharpen the lenses through which we perceive the spiritual journeys or others. The education can help us refine the internal mechanisms through which we process and integrate spiritual data, wisdom and experience.

This education could help us to create a neutral lens uncolored by the dogma of any particular religion so that we can clearly see others as they are rather than how we project them to be. It could help each student to carefully discern practices and beliefs within a variety of traditions that they can make into their own. One example of this is my work called “Creating Your Spiritual Path:” Awakening our Achetypal Spiritual Styles, Honoring Our Spiritual Questions, and Discerning Your Best Practices.” I also call it “The Mandala Process” for it is based on the Spiritual Paths Mandala that is the center of my work.

Training for Interspiritual Educators As inter-spiritual educators, many of us have been formed within a specific tradition. It is very important that we do not impose our own private biases about inter-spirituality on other students and colleagues. Therefore, as inter-spiritual educators we will also have to undergo a process of discernment about our own beliefs and be aware of our natural tendency to transfer these onto others. In our Spiritual Paths Institute programs we have often used the phases: “We speak from our tradition not for our tradition.”

Using the above guidelines, the inter-spiritual teacher training process can help trainees learn to soften the identities created around one’s spiritual traditions and allow the wisdom of other