Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre
Abstract
More than ten years ago, the Club of Rome published its much discussed report The First
Global Revolution which stressed that our world possesses a promising opportunity, one
unlikely to be provided again, to shape a new understanding and new attitudes towards the
world as a whole. Whilst contemporary societies are much confused about morals and
ethics, whilst we experience much social, educational, personal and environmental chaos,
the Club of Rome report argued that it is essential for humanity to respond to this unique
opportunity for a global revolution and find the wisdom needed to deal with it in the right
way. But how can we find such wisdom? How can we deal with our personal, social and
ecological predicaments? Traditionally, religions have fostered wisdom and morality, have
shaped individuals and groups, yet their teachings have shown few outward signs of success
because their loftiest ideals have rarely been put fully into practice.
For the Club of Rome to appeal to inherited wisdom was a momentous step; it was an
appeal to our global religious and philosophical heritage, but also to the task of analysing the
powers of spirituality for contemporary society and culture, and to discern the different
cultural and historical expressions of spirituality whilst assessing their significance for
contemporary ecological thinking and concerns. More recently, the American ecological
thinker Thomas Berry, much shaped by his deep knowledge of American native traditions, of
eastern religions, and the work of the French thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, also spoke
about the need to draw on the resources of wisdom in his seminal book The Great Work.
Our Way into the Future. The great work, which is the work of all the people, is “to create a
mutually enhancing mode of human dwelling on the planet Earth”. Thomas Berry speaks of
the need to rediscover the spiritual sense of the universe and the need “to reinvent the
human”. To create a viable earth community, to develop the new world vision required for
building a viable human future, the politics, education and financial arrangements around
the globe – or governance, universities and corporations – need fundamental restructuring.
This task is impossible to achieve if humankind does not creatively draw on what Berry calls
the “four wisdoms”: 1. the wisdom of the classical traditions, that is to say the wisdom of
traditional religions and philosophies; 2. the wisdom of native peoples; 3. the wisdom of
women; 4. the much more recent and newer wisdom of science.
This is a profound insight, for we have so far little explored the spiritual resources of science
and nature. The convergence of traditional spiritual perspectives of a religious consciousness
with some of the spiritual insights that modern science yields is a truly exciting development
for human consciousness and community.
So how can we relate ecology, spirituality and our global religious heritage
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