The Coming Interspiritual Age

development. Religious differences have fueled much conflict and war, however the authors propose not to abandon all religion but instead to discover a deeper and more common mystical spiritual experience in order to survive and grow.

Many of us have believed that we are not capable of this deeper spiritual mystical experience, that the best we could hope for was an occasional moment of peace in nature, or with friends, or at church, synagogue, mosque, or on a meditation cushion. What if this is not true?

Wayne Teasdale says in The Mystic Heart, “We are all mystics!” and “we need to understand, to really grasp at an elemental level, that the definitive revolution is the spiritual awakening of humankind. This revolution will be the task of the interspiritual age. The necessary shifts in consciousness require a new approach to spirituality that transcends past religious cultures of fragmentation and isolation.” The great hope is that from the recent bringing together of the world’s contemplative traditions with science and psychology, the principles and essential methods of realizing and activating our spiritual awakening are beginning to become simpler and more effective.

Though we have developed our intellect to create tremendous modern advances, we are beginning to realize that the next stage of our development is to discover a non-conceptual unitive awareness and to drop into the wisdom of our heart. Mysticism is not regressing back to a childlike primitive state. Mystical awareness is actually a necessary progressive type of unity consciousness, which includes and also transcends our everyday mind.

The direct path wisdom traditions have reported that this spirit or unitive awareness is equally available to each of us and within each of us, and also as each of us. The radical mystical assumption is that we don’t have to wait for the spirit, earn grace, or create a new awareness.

Instead unitive awareness is already here and it is a matter of learning how to accept it, perceive it and live from it. If we do not consider ourselves mystics already, then we are potential mystics—and if we choose, mystics in training.

If this unitive awareness is already here, why have we missed it? One of the reasons is because the spirit or unitive awareness is not a thing; its essential nature has no shape, size, or color.

Emile Durkheim, the renowned anthropologist, believed that human beings developed religions through their perception of the sacred, “a superior realm, impalpable through the five senses but one that can nevertheless be experienced.” In one Buddhist model of consciousness we have our five senses, but then thinking is considered our sixth sense. One of the doors to mystical perception is to discover what or who these six senses appear to, and to develop a seventh sense of unitive awareness.

One ancient wisdom tradition from India identifies four natural states of consciousness. The first three we all know well: 1) ego-consciousness, or our everyday waking state, 2) sleep, 3) dream and daydream. The fourth natural state is unitive awareness, called turiya in Sanskrit, and it is not included on our Western psychological map. However, once we know how, we can experience unitive awareness just as naturally as we experience the other three states. Though unitive awareness may seem like a new experience, it is not an altered state. We will realize that