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By Root 452 0

the Yogis, by smoking a Native American peace pipe, or by climbing the Himalayas (both real and metaphorical) to reach some obscure Tibetan monastery. As we watched the great crisis of our era shift from the threat of imminent nuclear self-destruction to that of environmental degradation and the overconsumption of resources, the urgency of that quest only grew greater. Even Kabbalah, perhaps the best-known of Western esoteric traditions, has come to be considered a possible source of such alternative insight as to how to live in this new era.

This perceived weakening of modernity's hold on intelligent conversation pulled in several directions at once. Surely it reinvigorated the surviving circles of premodernists, those who had all along lived on the sidelines of the intellectual mainstream and continued in their classical premodern constructions of faith, based either on scriptural literalism (Protestant evangelicals and most Muslims) or on theological premises that dated from centuries before modernity (Catholics, Orthodox Jews, and Muslim intellectuals). These bastions of alternative visions of reality have all demonstrated surprising strength in recent decades, both in holding on to their own respective flocks and in attracting significantly numerous converts. To one degree or another, all of them have stood as challengers of modernity, insisting on holding on to truth claims (usually regarding both the twin pillars of Creation and revelation) that modern scientific scholarship denies. Traditionalist Jewish and Catholic intellectuals, following long internal traditions, found more room for accommodation with science but avoided dealing with some of the toughest issues. Muslims, who felt that modernity had been imposed on them from without by dint of imperialist conquest, were the most resentful. Only a few Muslim intellectuals were able to defend the old broad-minded traditions of Islam's hosting and embracing scientific truth.

During the same era, however, a very different turn toward religion as the source of an alternative vision has been taking place. Here the emphasis is on consciousness rather than on Scripture or doctrine as the source of truth. Beginning with the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s (quickly corrupted, to be sure, but also much too readily dismissed by both government and media), there arose an interest in altered states of mind, deeper realms of consciousness, and a sense that our notions of “truth,” based on sense perception and logical deduction, might be the limited vision of a narrow range of mental activity, challenged by the vast experience of prophets, mystics, and meditators through the ages. It may be said that this approach to religion took the existentialists’ awareness of inner reality as its point of departure, but sought to anchor it in a nuanced understanding of consciousness that was open to elements of both mysticism and scientific analysis. This new receptiveness generally embraced Eastern rather than Western teachings, primarily because they were offered more in the spirit of experiential learning and without insistence on either dogma or ritual. (Eastern religions in their native habitat are of course replete with both of these, but those who imported them to the West were able to repackage the essential insights, shorn of their traditional baggage.) This branch of the postmodern turn toward religion generally, though not always, eschewed orthodoxies and exclusivist claims, looking rather toward cross-traditional insights and teachings. Whether dressed in the trappings of Buddhism, Vedanta, Sufism, or Kabbalah, it tended to wear them lightly. Its essential faith claim is that there is a truth greater than that offered by the scientific worldview, one lying beneath the surface of reality and accessible by means of meditation, silence, chant, or other forms of disciplined religious praxis. The verbal articulation of such inner realities is often difficult; this too the “new mystics” have inherited from the existentialists. Here the relationship between the rational-scientific