Two for the Road: Religion's Path Ahead

Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, head of the Sufi Order International, and Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Hassidic-trained co-founder of the Jewish Renewal movement, took to the Future Visions stage of the State of the World Forum on September 5 for what Schachter promised would be some "jazz riffs" on religion's road ahead. Sprinkling their remarks with buzzwords cribbed from the Internet revolution, the two men proceeded to delight the audience with dollops of a distinctly puckish profundity.

The white-haired, white-clad Khan, his eyes bright blue, leaned on an ornate wooden staff a head taller than he was. It resembled the one Moses might have used to part the seas, but here, using the interrogatory style favored by Sufi teachers, he tried to part the mists obscuring the view of our once and future place in the scheme of things.

"Is the universe a global, conscious being endowed with thinking, will, intention and even 'programming'?" he asked rhetorically. "Does our awareness of it contribute to its awareness of itself? Is our own creativity recycled into programming of the universe, as updates and upgrades?" As science stands on the verge of downloading sizeable chunks of rejiggered code into the natural world, Khan urged we reexamine our role as co-creators based on spiritual values, lest we inadvertently cause a crash. "Human transformation is needed to save our endangered planet from a possible and probable disaster," he said. One key, he added with a twinkle, was a simple human one: We should start, he said, "respecting and loving obnoxious people!"

Rabbi Schachter then took the microphone for an ebullient free-form discourse con brio (or was it chutzpah?). Many religious structures, he said challengingly, had become ossified remnants of another time. "All traditional systems—Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha—were embedded in the social and economic systems in which they arose. Their reality maps are a little obsolete." At the same time, he suggested, the rise in religious fundamentalism was evidence of the need for mystical, "born-again" experience not always welcomed in mainstream religious institutions.

We need, he insisted, "transmogrifications of holiness," practices that do not depend on "weekly transfusions" from church or temple, but on a daily ritual practice. Launching into a pun-laden set of variations on a theme, he called for "portals to the 'InnerNet' we can open for twenty minutes a day. We need 'socialized meditation' so we can share our spiritual life interactively with our loved ones." He urged the founding of "schools to produce bodhisattvas for the year 2050—we need saints not from the past, but saints for the future."

Though history has often placed saints and scientists at odds, today's science, he says, is tunneling toward spirituality from another side. He cited chaos theory, fractals, and strange attractors as "an approach to mystical reality." Continuing his passionate, playfully framed call for action, he proposed, "We need laboratories of the spirit; we need to log onto the cosmic central intelligence agency." If we did this, we'd discover that, contrary to the older scientific paradigms of humanity alone in an impersonal, random universe, we are instead "being guided, we are being drawn—we wouldn't be here if we weren't deployed to be here."

Humanity, he said, has arrived at an evolutionary crossroads. Throughout history, he noted, and too often in our personal lives, we've been over-susceptible to our "hardwired, atavistic physiology, the reptilian, fight-or-flight part of the brain, the part with the fastest reaction time. Someone gives you a bad look and right away, grrrr, it's Jurassic Park." What is needed, he said, is a "messianic jump," a collective realization we are "members of a larger body. The spirit of the Living God, the Shekinah, is waiting for us to grow up. There is the possibility of living heavenly days on this earth."

Though his inspired improv suggested a kind of Marxist religion (Groucho, not Karl), his questions pivoted on a matter of profound importance: How could the repository of world religious wisdom help humanity through a critical transition to a global civilization? One thing was clear, said Rabbi Schachter: "Our motto has to be: The only way to get it together is together. I bow to you, fellow recruits!"

Turning to Pir Vilayat Khan and embracing him, he suggested they join in a song. Then, an ad hoc spiritual supergroup, they began a rendition of an old Hebrew hymn, their voices interweaving uncertainly at first, then in close and trembling harmony.

copyright © 2000 State of the World, Inc.