Winston Franklin, who as vice president for the Institute for
Noetic Sciences in Sausalito, California, tracks new developments in
spirituality, maintains that the new awakening draws on the long heritage
of American self-sufficiency and self -help. It uses science, he says,
not as the supreme rational goal for living, but as a tool to understand
the larger mystery of experience. It is profoundly optimistic. It views
personality as shaped by dynamic forces of the unconscious; it emphasizes
multiple realities; it aims toward an understanding of extraordinary
states of consciousness and expanded human potential. It promotes the
paranormal as a reality of human functioning and it takes seriously
accounts of spirit communication on the after-death plane, dream images,
personal symbols of one's destiny, and religious visions.
With an intense attraction to the natural environment, the new
awakening hints that there is some fundamental relationship between a
return to nature and the recovery of basic values. What is divine shines
through to us most clearly through nature. Hence, it spawns the
imperative to save the earth. In this system, healing be-comes a major
metaphor for fixing a fractured society--resolving the split between mind
and body and repairing human relationships of all kinds. And, because of
a belief in the interconnectedness of all things, the new awakening seeks
everywhere to create healing spiritual communities.
As a result, belief in the reality of higher states of
consciousness has developed into a political issue of great importance to
those interested in the profoundly transforming effects of spiritual
experience. Because they are incompatible with prevailing reductionist
thinking, spirituality, higher states of awareness, and references to
alternative realities have been banned from open scientific and medical
discussions by silent decree--what has been called the politics of
consciousness.
The ban now appears to be crumbling, however. An awareness of the
spiritual dimension of experience is the principal force behind the
emerging field of mind-body medicine, for instance. The field first began
when Harvard cardiologist Herbert Benson demonstrated a relationship
between meditation and stress reduction, made popular in his best-seller,
The Relaxation Response. In his latest work, Your Maximum Mind, Benson
emphasizes daily meditation practice for self- development as well. To
achieve it, the relaxation response is practiced within the context of
one's traditional religious belief system. John Kabat Zinn, head of the
stress reduction clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center
at Worcester, has based a whole therapeutic regimen on his own spiritual
practice of Buddhist insight meditation and yoga techniques. Larry
Dossey, M.D., editor of the new journal Alternative Medicine, suggests
there is scientific evidence that prayers for sick loved ones do have an
effect. In Healing Words: the Power of Prayer and the Practice of
Medicine, he suggests that the true locus of healing may not be a
physician's scientific manipulations but rather the spiritual
relationship between patient and doctor.
Advances of the new spiritual ethic are not limited to medicine.
They are also rife in the entrepreneurial world. Ben and Jerry's ice
cream, Tom's of Maine toothpaste, and the Celestial Seasonings tea
company, all in the name of higher consciousness, have put themselves
forward as the corporate mentality of the future, with dean foods and
environmentally sensitive products.
Mitch Kapor, cofounder of Lotus software, is the arch example of
this new ethic. Fresh out of yale he became a full-time Transcendental
Meditation initiator. He then turned to psychology and computers.
Eventually becoming, in his own words, "too successful," he has since
turned his attention to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit
organization he cofounded to develop policies to foster democracy and
protect civil liberties on the electronic superhighway.
He maintains that computer technology offers an advanced way to
attain personal liberation because it represents an altogether new
spiritual dimension--re-lease from the prison of your own mind. To
achieve real freedom is, Kapor says, a possibility in both traditional
Buddhist practice and the new computer technology. He sees his work as a
kind of engaged Buddhism, relieving suffering wherever it is
possible.
A NEW COMMITMENT
Today's spiritual awakening not only reveals the hidden
interconnectedness of things, it prompts people to pledge themselves to a
host of new causes, from saving the planet to helping the
disenfranchised. Spiritual awakening leads to a new kind of selflessness
and personal commitment to issues related to growth and health. As Gandhi
proclaimed, we might live to see even governmental service become the new
form of spiritual discipline.
