If you know how to look, no matter where you stand you can see truth.  And while our experience of truth is paradoxical it can never be self-contradictory because truth is that which transforms us and aligns us with Source.  Whether we look through the eyes of deep science, mystical theology, soaring poetry, creative stories, insightful psychology or endorphin-releasing humor we will discover that the ultimate truth is “God” because ultimate truth is that which transforms us radically and aligns us permanently with Source.  Since truth is experienced at many levels and in many dimensions, we have to make our maps of reality from data culled in all of these states.

“Bíonn blas ar chuid an chomhairsin” is an Irish proverb meaning, “there’s a special taste to the neighbor’s food.”  Over the last 40 years, we have tended to compare exoteric Western religion with esoteric Eastern spirituality i.e. not just apples with oranges but bad apples with luscious oranges.  We have embraced Eastern religions shorn of their institutional baggage, which is good, while throwing the spiritual Western baby out with the muddied waters, which is not good.

The way forward can’t be about choosing sides but about mining the treasures hidden on all sides.  The West has a treasure trove of mystical insights and enlightened teachers and has long differentiated between merely literal interpretations of its scriptural traditions, or even symbolic renditions of them, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the mystical pearl within the oyster of the words.

The current gaping chasm dividing the Cultural Creatives from the fundamentalists will only be healed by uncovering the treasures of both.  It is inaccurate, unfair and utterly unproductive to make one group the problem and the other group the solution.  All of us have helped create the problem and all of us must be part of the solution.  There is neither individual salvation nor idiosyncratic enlightenment in a globe as beautifully interconnected as ours.

Spirits In Spacesuits is a website that seeks to seamlessly weave a tapestry of all traditions and find their common origin.  Its unifying theme is that, basically, there is only God, who is the transcendent ineffable Source which we can experience but about whom we can say nothing, but whose immanence shines through in evolutionary panentheism, the ever-developing story in which we are participant observers.

Also see Other Writings.