I started writing this article on Oct 10, 2005. According to the Hindu Calendar this is a very auspicious day of pooja offering to the Goddess Durga, the divine mother. It reminded me of the spiritual culture that was India, a spiritual culture in which I myself grew up. But now India is undergoing deep changes in its socio-cultural fabric. Materialism is coming to India in a major way along with the highly touted economic growth. Can Indian spirituality survive this materialist affront let alone guide the rest of the world in its spiritual future?

My wife, Uma, and I for many years have taken groups of Westerners to spiritual journeys in India. And we have noticed changes, very serious changes in Indian spirituality during this period. When we started, there were many places of India where we could take our group to get a glimpse of what it means to live in a spiritual culture. The biggest change that we have seen in these years is that now there may be only two or three major places left in the entire sub-continent where such a glimpse is available. In most places, temples and ashrams notwithstanding, spirituality has been commercialized, quite unable to thwart the onslaught of tourism and vices of material affluence and global economics. From this perspective, the spiritual future of India, like that of the rest of the world, does not look very bright.

At first sight, it may also seem that we should blame everything on capitalism--American style, globalization and all that. But I submit this would be a short-sighted conclusion. I submit all that is taking place in India and in the West right now is a part of an evolutionary movement of consciousness--East-West integration.

Integrating East and West
In early last century, we would have seen the conflict of science and spirituality as one between West and East. The Western cultures ignored the spiritual and the Eastern cultures ignored the material--the domain of science. The poet Rudyard Kipling wrote:

East is East, and West is West
And the twain shall never meet.

And this was true then. West was already a scientific culture, but the Easterners stubbornly held on to their spiritual cultures and it seemed they would never budge. Of course, many people still believe that this is so. Alas! The East is now also rapidly giving way to a materialist culture.

Eastern spirituality fundamentally professes oneness of consciousness and spirituality was a way of life for Easterners. But in the Western old science, consciousness is assumed to be brain-based, to be individual by nature, and to be conditioned (via biological and socio-cultural evolution) to operate on the survival of the fittest kind of competitive individual mode.

But rapid change is under way. A brain-based consciousness conflicts in a major unsolvable manner with quantum physics. So science is undergoing a paradigm shift. In this new paradigm, the Eastern model of oneness of consciousness is found to be the right way to think about consciousness. Thus this paradigm is paving the way for an integration of science and spirituality, of modern West and the old East.

There is another subtle conflict between the Eastern and the Western approach to life. Easterners, by and large, consider spirituality as the goal of their lives. It is believed that the individual “soul” (a deeper level of conscious identity beyond the ego of one life) reincarnates many times. Only when the soul learns the secret of its spiritual being of oneness and incorporates the knowledge in its living is the individual liberated from this birth-death-rebirth cycle. In the West, even outside of science, reincarnation is not popular. Anyway, most people in the West believe that there is only one life, and this life should be spent in the service of “doing”--accomplishments. You can see that this “accomplishment orientation” contributes to environmental overload, the ever widening gap between the rich (the accomplishers) and the poor (the nincompoops), and to the skyrocketing of medical costs via costly technology to prolong life (so that production can continue).

But here again, quantum physics, by reviving the concept that we are all potentially God the creator, is giving us a new theory of creativity, is coming to a new resolution of the conflict. When we understand creativity as a quantum process, we find that both doing and being are important, neither can be ignored. So the integration of the Eastern be-be-be way of living and the Western do-do-do way of living is the do-be-do-be-do way of living that Frank Sinatra crooned!

Rudyard Kipling's poem that I quoted above had other telling lines:

But there is neither East nor West, Border nor
Breed nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face,
Though they come from the ends of the earth.

When the doing people of the West come face to face with the being people of the East and they become one and the same people, then the new age!

Individual and Collective Movements of Consciousness
Spiritual traditions of the East also understand the individual movements of consciousness very well and that is what they emphasize. Living in the world produces an individual identity (ego) superimposed upon the cosmic God-consciousness. This is the ignorance that obscures the wisdom of oneness. Through many incarnations, the ego identity gives way to God-consciousness, and knowing that one is God, one is liberated from the death birth rebirth cycle. Hence the adage from this point of view: you cannot change the world, you can only change yourself. Whatever change the world undergoes will come through these individual changes.

But in the West, the belief in only one life has undermined the drive for self-realization and transformation; instead the emphasis has been on ethics--the following of certain rules of behavior to bring oneself in alignment with God. Even under the aegis of materialism, the West has developed a social consciousness in which there clearly is some imperative for social ethic. So today we also have the activist who try to change the world (but often has no spiritual notion of changing himself or herself). Can we see the necessity of both trends and integrate them? I submit that Indians are the naturals to be able to carry out this integration in their lives before any other culture. And I want you to consider if this should not be the fitting contribution of India to the spiritual future of the world--to show that such an integration is viable en masse and how.

Evolution
In both East and the West, whether we believe in reincarnation or in one life, the emphasis of spirituality has been to unite with a transcendent God. Spiritual philosophers, of course, are quite aware that God is also immanent in the world, but somehow they more or less have managed to undermine people's pursuits in the immanent world. To some extent this has contributed to make the world culture materialistic. More recently, spiritual traditions have been forced to let the affairs of the world to be dominated by science which until recently propagated materialism in the world without any challenge. Only in the last few decades, a challenge to materialism is surfacing from within the tradition of science itself.

In dualist cultures, spiritual philosophers have wondered why a perfect God creates an imperfect world. In nondual cultures, spiritual philosophers have occasionally wondered aloud, why the imperfect immanent world at all when God could have forever stayed in heavenly perfection. The answer to both concerns is of course: evolution. In both cultures, spiritual thinkers have missed evolution. God becomes manifest in the immanent world to manifest its unmanifest possibilities. It begins the journey of evolution with imperfection, no doubt, but that is only a beginning. Consciousness evolves toward perfection, towards seeing its perfect nature in manifestation.

Because of the neglect of worldly affairs in general it is not surprising that spiritual traditions have not recognized evolution to be a major part of the play of consciousness. Coincidentally, materialist science that discovered evolution (and used evolution in a major way to obstruct the influence of religion in society) has not seen evolution as a major force in our life either. More or less, biologists are content with an inadequate theory of slow and gradual evolution--neo-Darwinism. In neo-Darwinism, evolution is posited to occur in two steps. First, variations are created in the hereditary components (the genes) of living species; second nature selects those variations that lead to better survival of the species. In this way the materialist thinking is that evolution is relevant only to our survival, no more. If better survival requires a de-evolution of ourselves to a less complex species, less oriented toward meaning and values, it is okay with the neo-Darwinists.

But this, too, has been changing. Until now, materialist scientist in general, and neo-Darwinists in particular had a stranglehold on science education in American schools. But highly significantly, out of the blue, a widespread movement is under way to institute some opening in the school curriculum in biology to make room for alternative ideas of evolution such as the intelligent design theory. Now you maybe totally sold on the neo-Darwinist propaganda that intelligent design theory is all bosh and nonsense. Maybe it is; but is neo-Darwinism any better when it cannot explain the fossil gaps, when it has no room for the evolution of feeling, meaning, and consciousness (except as adaptation which is ridiculous because these qualities matter cannot even process!)? Anyway the public debate is refocussing much needed attention on evolution and eventually I think when the dust settles there will be a new theory of evolution based on the primacy of consciousness that will gain wide acceptance.

In the last century, two philosopher/sages, one in India, Sri Aurobindo, one in the West, Teillard de Chardin, had the revolutionary insight that evolution does not end, cannot end, with the evolution of humans. Said Aurobindo, Just as animals are the laboratory for nature to evolve humans, similarly human beings are the laboratory to evolve superhumans. And in superhumans, we will see the heavenly qualities--love, beauty, justice, good, etc that we strive for but never quite attain--come forth and evolve toward perfection as never before. The end of evolution is when we reach the omega point, said de Chardin.

We have to recognize that evolution is also a play of consciousness, a purposive, collective play. The collective movement toward social consciousness that is going on in the West (mainly) is important and a part and parcel of the movement of manifest consciousness, the evolution of consciousness. So here again the Eastern and Western views of life can be integrated, must be integrated. We have to proceed toward individual salvation like the Easterners do, but we also have to contribute to evolution. And possibly, we contribute to evolution better as we more and more shed our ego identity in our journey toward God. We need a new kind of activism with a new adage: you cannot change the world, but you can change yourself always with the perspective of the movement of the world (evolution, in other words) in mind. This is what I call quantum activism.

Quantum activism
Quantum activism then is activism in which we work on transforming ourselves but always paying attention to the evolutionary movement of consciousness as a whole, always trying to heed God's will. We don’t get stymied by our imperfections; we do the shadow cleansing on the job. The problems of the planet have reached such crisis proportions that we all must respond to the calls for looking inward for consciousness and looking outward for planetary wellness at the same time. Fortunately, they are the same call. But they do require an integration of the practices of creativity in both inner fulfillment and outer accomplishment that is uniquely suitable to the people of this twenty-first century.

The question can be asked, Aren't the world's mystics already doing some of the things that I am proposing? If so, why don’t we see some effects from it? There seems to be no dearth of ignorance all through the ages.

This is not hard to answer. Have you wondered what might have been the case if the mystics did not do their work? We are seeing the effects of the mystics' work, but it is not enough.

If there is a paradigm shift going on from materialist science to science within consciousness, what are its signs? There are two signs to watch for when a paradigm shift takes place. Initially, when the logical incompleteness and experimental anomalies of the existing paradigm become clear (as has been the case for the materialist science for three decades at least), lots of new ideas compete to take its place. The first sign of a successful paradigm shift occurs when these competing new ideas settle down to a few fundamental ideas. I think that this is happening now.

All new paradigm thinkers agree that both the traditional objective scientist's third person view of the exterior aspects of consciousness must be complemented with the subjective and interior first person aspect. In addition attention must be given to intersubjectivity. There is still debate as to how to integrate these aspects. Some researchers believe that the integration of the different sectors of the quadrant of consciousness requires the vantage point of higher states of consciousness. What I envision is a dynamical scientific integration based on quantum physics and primacy of consciousness requiring no privileged access to special states of consciousness.

I am not alone in this vision. The physicians Deepak Chopra and Larry Dossey, the biologists Rupert Sheldrake and Michael Behe, the psychologists Carl Jung and Abraham Maslow, the philosophers Ken Wilber and Christian de Quincey, the physicists Fred Alan Wolf and Arnie Wyller, the spiritual teachers Sri Aurobindo and Dalai Lama, all have contributed among many others to this aborning paradigm shift.

The second sign appears when the people of the establishment also begin to contribute to the new science thinking. This is also happening to some extent. Several new books have cited consciousness as one of the few unsolved horizons for science to address. But the dissolution of the old yielding to the new will take a longer time. Somebody said that we may have to wait until the old paradigmers die away.

So what are you doing about all this?
I declare. The time has come for acknowledging the rediscovery of spirituality within science. If it requires a paradigm shift of our science from matter base to a consciousness base, so be it. We must also proceed to actualize the God potency within us (as far as practicable in our given individual situation) if at all we are interested in the welfare of the world. If you are so interested, here are a few questions for you to ponder:

*How do you think of the world right now? Is matter its building block? Is consciousness?
*If your answer is consciousness, has your heritage of a spiritual culture helped you in reaching this revolution in your consciousness that goes contrary to the prevalent worldview?
*Now ask yourself, now that I have this revolutionary worldview how deep is it? Is it aimed only at personal salvation or do I also care about my environment and the world?
*If you do care about the welfare of the world, can you believe that there is an evolution of consciousness going on?
*Can you entertain the idea that spiritualization of the material West and materialization of the spiritual East are parts of the same evolutionary movement of consciouness?

The last comment perhaps needs some further elaboration. In India, some of us are proud of our spiritual culture and rightfully so. We also have every right to mourn and complain about the changes that are happening now to this culture. But please note that our spiritual culture more or less always has been elitist. The culture permitted a spiritual pinnacle to be reached by a few people (the brahmins). And a substantially larger number, the kshatriyas and the vaishyas, partook in the processing of meaning in their lives. But at what cost. A huge infrastructure consisting of the shudras, had to support these higher castes to do their thing. And the shudras were almost totally denied the pursuit of meaning in their lives.

Evolution takes place in stages. The first stage, purely biological evolution, was over with the development of the huge human neocortex when the processing of meaning, a mental phenomenon began to take place in a major way. And we are still in the mental stage of evolution.

The objective of this stage of evolution is to bring meaning processing to a fulfillment. How can such a fulfillment be accomplished when a vast majority of a culture is denied access to it? Hence evolution demands that the Indian culture revisions itself to make meaning accessible to its masses. If materialism and capitalism are the vehicles for it, and Gandhian economics is not, so be it. At least, India is lucky that the vehicle is not communism in part as in China and Tibet.

The last question I want you to ponder is the question of middle path. Do we have to go through all the evils of Western culture before we are back to integrating spirituality in India? Can we, in India, find a middle path in which we don't totally destroy the spiritual culture (as the West has done, but then they did not have Vedanta; esoteric Christianity was not even studied in the Western academe)? If your answer is no to this last question, then please ponder what we can do to find this middle path in the way business is done in India. In other words, can we organize our businesses in India from the get-go with spirituality integrated in them? Is that possible?