As we moved toward the 2018 Parliament of the World’s Religions’ in Toronto, I was invited by The Interfaith Observer to write an update on the interspirituality worldwide. The Interfaith Observer (TIO) has served the interspiritual phenomenon, which is really an outgrowth (and deepening) of the global interfaith experience, by regularly publishing articles and discussions on the roots, vision and growth of the interspiritual movement.

Accordingly, TIO is a great resource for tracking the history and growth of interspirituality for authors that are indexed at TIO with links to all their articles. Below are a number of the master links to the articles on interspiriuality by these various authors, all of which are associated with this Interspiritual Network website:

In “The Growing Edge of Interspirituality” I aimed to present a brief and concise summary of the growth of the Interspiritual phenomenon since the name “Interspirituality” was published by Br. Wayne Teasdale in his now classic book: The Mystic Heart: Discovering a Universal Spirituality in the World’s Religions. I have written a similar summary, entitled “The Interspiritual Paradigm: Legacies and Horizons” in Mature Interspirituality (Swami Shraddhananda, Editor), Sacred Feet Publishers, 2017.

Both articles summarize the vision and growth interspirituality under these subtitles: “The Dawn of a New Consciousness”, “Diversification and Global Hubs”, “Legacies”, “The Interspiritual Movement”, “Short History of the Interspiritual Movement”, “Short History of the Community of The Mystic Heart”, “Horizons [The Future]”.

Today it is a general observation among many interspiritual pioneers that the day for us having to explain what the interspiritual experience or phenomenon is over. In today’s world where worldviews are now on a much more holistic in nature, the understanding of a universal spirituality underpinning all the world’s religions, and indeed even is philosophies is much more self-evident. Further, and a new frontier for interspirtuality is its synchronicity with the views of modern evolutionary biology that evolution is, at any higher level of complexity or for intelligent species, a matter of cooperation, not competition. I have written about this extensively with the renowned evolutionary biologist Dr. David Sloan Wilson, one of the champions of the modern “cooperative view” of evolution. See “Steering Toward the Omega Point” from Evolution Institute here.

It is an exciting time in the ongoing growth of the Interfaith and Interspiritual Era. As renowned integral philosopher Ken Wilber has said, the Interfaith and interspiritual eras are part of a larger global era, the Integral Era—our global movement toward holistic, worldcentric worldviews. We hope our sustaining the presence of the Interspritual Network will be a further help to this ongoing unfolding.

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Feature Image by Bela Geletneky from Pixabay