Will the Millennium usher in a new age of spirituality? A recent interview with Ken Wilber (Science of Mind, May 1997) puts this idea in context. In my view, no one integrates scientific and spiritual understanding better than Ken Wilber, and so I want to share portions of the interview with you, some quoted, some paraphrased.

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Wilber speaks of the continuity of evolution: In the past 15 billion years the earth has evolved from mineral to plant to animal to human, and evolution continues. Each level incorporates the previous one and adds new elements. "[M]atter and minerals were taken up and included in plant life, which then added the capacities for growth and reproduction. These capacities were taken up and included in animal life, which then added the capacities for mobility and an emotional and sexual life. Those capacities were taken up and included in humans, which then added the capacities for rational and conceptual thought. Nothing is lost. All is retained, enfolded, included, and embraced in each successive step."

Wilber suggests that the next stage of evolution, which we are already experiencing, adds to rationality and the other capacities "transrational intuition," which I understand to mean ways of knowing that tap our inner wisdom. These include imagination, creative impulses, and dreaming, as well as intuition, incorporated in a new age of consciousness which depends less on knowledge from the five senses and more on openness to the reality that exists beyond sensory knowledge. This perspective does not reject rationality or downplay it, as many New Agers do.

Wilber's time perspective attaches no dates, millennial or otherwise. There would seem to be no reason to expect that this stage of evolution would move any more rapidly than previous stages. According to Wilber, some of us have already begun to evolve into this new pattern, while others remain stuck in a prerational mode that produces the pathologies of conflict, exclusivity, and other ego-based expressions.

Evolution appears profoundly purposeful: "These patterns are not random," Wilber says, "the universe is obviously up to something. That something very well might be spiritual. I certainly believe it is. I believe evolution is the manner and mode of Spirit's creation."

"Following God's plan?," the interviewer asks, and Wilber responds by asking which God? whose God? because "So many [conceptions of God] are childhood hangovers, mythic projections of human potentials, or ethnocentric conceits of a particular people." He continues, "...[E]volution can be following a creative and intelligent drive....We don't necessarily have to get involved in a theistic or mythic father figure or mother figure. The universe itself might simply be an incredibly intelligent organism, in the process of growing up. It shows purpose, design, intelligence, agency, and will, not imposed on it from the outside by some external God, but growing from deep within its very own being.... I think the very insides of the universe possess a self-organizing drive, and I believe that drive, by any other name, is Spirit's own evolution. Spirit is not something doing this from the outside; rather, Spirit is doing this from deep within the universe itself, growing it from within. Spirit is not an alien outsider pushing the world around, but the very depths, the divine depths, of the universe itself. For just that reason, Spirit is not something outside of you, either, but rather the very deepest part of you. (emphasis mine)

Well, I could stop musing right now, because Wilber has stated so clearly what I have been muddling around with as I discarded my infantile ideas about God and searched physics and psychology and philosophy for better answers. My search has led me to Wilber.

I could also pause to bow in the direction of Carl Jung who believed that one gains access to God as one discovers one's deepest Self. And I could document how Wilber's words echo the mystics of nearly every religious tradition as they advise the spiritual seeker to "go within."

It seems best, however, to stay with the interview, because there are other important questions to be asked and answered.

If Spirit is all-pervading, if Spirit is the only reality, then why don't I see it right now? If ultimately there is only God, then why do I seem to be left out? Why can't I see God right now? And what kind of God would run off and hide on me like that?

Because "[M]y awareness is not open and relaxed and receptive and caring[;] it is closed, contracted, grasping, and unloving. This is not something that is being done to me. It is my own activity right now -- my own 'sin' or delusion or dualism." However, Spirit is at work in this very process of contraction. "The more we contract in the face of infinity, the more it will hurt, until we uncoil in the vast expanse of a loved and loving Spirit." That is to say, our hurt can be seen as a birthing or growing pain, which Wilber calls "a first grace... a wake-up call." We respond by replacing "inattention with mindfulness, self-contraction with open love, resentment with forgiveness, anger with gratitude, carelessness with compassion."

And what of creativity?

"I think creativity is just another name for...evolution, for emergence, for the very drive of Spirit to unfold its own potential.... The same force that produced apes from amoebas and adults from infants drives the evolutionary thrust in general, and that drive is creativity, which is just another one of the names of God.... Creativity is the deepest impulse of your own greatest potentials."

Omniscient?

"...[I]f you don't know what you're going to do tomorrow,... why should Spirit? Spirit is just as spontaneous and creative and unpredictable as this universe itself, which is simply one of Spirit's manifestations.... Spirit's manifestation tends to follow various patterns,...but one of those patterns is novelty, which means unpredictable, fresh, free. So Spirit is not all-knowing in some rigid sense, because Spirit is making a lot of this up as it goes along. Creativity is another word for 'Surprise!' And if creativity is simply one of the names of Spirit, so is surprise."

If Spirit is the ultimate reality, what is the use of individual or personal existence?

"Spirit realizes itself... only in and through... an individual human person. Only through you can Spirit come to its own fruition. So this little personal existence that we are living is not so little, is not so insignificant. It carries profound value, literally infinite value. And by the same token, it carries an infinite responsibility. [We] are responsible for Spirit's self-realization. And therefore this life of [ours] must be lived with great care and great concern and great compassion and great dedication.... We must engage our own evolution, our own higher development, our own growth toward God, which is the only way God can grow as well."

WOW!!

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Ken Wilber's most recent books are A Brief History of Everything and The Eye of the Spirit.

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Obviously, Wilber's concepts speak to me with power, but if your quest is rooted in a personification of these cosmic forces, then you will find a strong and mature concept of a personal God in Conversations With God: An Uncommon Dialogue, Book 1, by Neale Donald Walsch. I find truth in both portrayals.

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The question of a personal God continues to confront me. I think I have stated my position as clearly as I am able, and some of my readers for whom I have the greatest respect, as they respect me, simply hold a different view. From two letters, I offer the following statements:

"...there are two things that cause me to be uncomfortable with your writings. One is that the "Life Force" which you say you would call God, does not seem to have a personality. Like you, I believe in the immanence of God, that what the doctrines call Holy Spirit pervades the universe, and is present in all of creation. However, I believe that God has a personal entity, that God has a stake in what happens in creation. I believe the God wants relationship, that God wants to be in relationship with me, that God wants all of creation to know and understand that God is. I don't get that sense from your writings that God yearns for relationship with us, the creatures. That yearning is the story of the Bible, the record of human's (sic) understanding of the out-reaching God, straining to gather us into right relationship.

"The second thing that bothers me comes from the first. That is the responsibility of relationship, both with God/Creator, and with all the Creatures. In reaching out to us, God wants us to reach out to our fellow creatures, to embrace them and become one with them. This is the root of our ethical understandings: how we stand in relation to God and to those with whom we share the gift of life. This is the essence of the oneness you write about, that, like Paul, we all realize we are members of one body, that we need diversity to accomplish the task of living, but that no member is more valued than another."

She recognized that I may have spoken to these issues in Musings that she may not have read carefully, and so I had. But her concerns, her statement of faith, needs to be on record. I have no quarrel with her, because her faith is expressed and embodied in a loving person. She walks her talk, as I hope I do mine.

Another thoughtful friend also deserves a hearing:

"Of late, my respect for those religions that teach a personal God has increased. No, I do not believe in a God with a black robe and a big checklist of our errors and repentances. But the concepts that are more vague, like Life-Force, or Essence, or Energy, or whatever, have left me bereft of a RELATIONSHIP with a god.

"After all my years and all my miles of journeying, I am slowly, haltingly, trying to find and use practices, rituals, even schedules that will enhance 'relating" to Something Bigger Than You or I.

"I have felt Oneness at moments. I have listened to Intimations from a Knowing much clearer than I could be. I have known days of Peace that makes the day flow effortlessly. And I have marveled at Deep Mysteries and Gifts of Gracious Transformation coming into my life unexpectedly. But all those moments left me hungry at a buffet of Life that I believe can feed us with no lack, if we but learn to connect....

"I sat down recently and read words in the 'Old Favorites' section of an old, old hymnal. That personalized God they spoke of gave those people a method of regular communication with that place inside where they could see clearly, and accept Life's bad times with some equanimity. They had a relationship with their God.... Our people in our Today world need tools to help them establish a relationship with God."

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I have no wish to argue these points. None of us has a concept that fits the Reality, the Ultimate Reality. So perhaps the best we can do if to find that approximation that best calls forth divinity wherever we find it, that prompts us to respond in ethical and co-creative ways. After all, "By their fruits (not their theologies) shall ye know them."

But I do wish I could communicate the vitality, the dynamism, the playfulness that I find in my concepts of intelligent energy...