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Tapping the Spiritual Sources of Culture

By Kitty Wolf
President of the Kautilya Society

This article is an attempt to outline foundations for the inter-religious journey, and wishes to provoke proposals for an itinerary.

Inter-religious dialogue is like different families of the same village getting together to dig a common well for the irrigation of everyone’s fields. But I’m dreaming of tapping the common Spirit to flood culture with symbols and messages of unity in respect of diversity.

Religions carry in them centuries of traditions that have transmitted knowledge of the mystery of the human person. Once upon a time, when the spiritual essence of the human person was a value, cultures generated expressions of that essence through liturgy, sacred texts, music, art, theology, philosophy, etc. Nourished in such a milieu, families and societies gravitated towards an intrinsic order. An interior sensuality delighted in the customs regulating daily life and human relationships, and sustained the poetic mind. Obviously, wars and subjugation were also a part of that heritage. Today, inter-religious dialogue is emerging as a global vaccination against the imposition of one world view on the others. United with members of different religions and persons of good will, we can create a voice loud enough for the human spirit to continue to express itself in its myriad of forms instead of being silenced by the deafening roar of the market.

The spirituality of religions ultimately converge on the experience of the core of one's being opening onto eternity. In one way or the other, in every religion, this is the door that a human being must go through in order to tap the creative energy of the Universe. This creative energy lies in the non-phenomenological side of reality for Buddhists. Similarly, for many Hindus, there is a non cosmic reality upon which the forms of nature rest. When one takes the inward journey and discovers that the centre of his/her self is neither one with, nor separated from the Self, but is "Advaita" non dual, then one reaches that place of enlightenment, where one can be the instrument for divine intelligence and creative power. This "Principle without principle" is what Christians perceive is the Father who created the universe through the Son, the ordering principle. The Holy Spirit is at that centre of man/woman's being where he/she realizes she is created in God's likeness, that is, with the capacity to create through the divine consciousness. The Holy Spirit is the fusion between the created and uncreated, the "Advaita" for the Hindus, the "Ten Thousand Worlds in One Instant", for the Buddhists, where all spheres of one's psyche are penetrated by Buddha consciousness.

Ultimately, culture is the way in which a human group understands and expresses itself. Values emerge from this understanding. Norms to regulate the group are formulated according to these values. Institutional structures and decisions are determined by the norms. In other words, the vision a group holds of the human person determines the values, which create the cultural milieu through which members of the group express themselves and other members become formed in their identity. This cultural milieu determines the group's choices in political, social, and economic policies. We live in a pluralist society, where many different human groups hold different visions of the human person, so a dialogue on the identity of the human person is necessary. Otherwise, the so-called "global village" will see the growing imposition of the dominant group's vision on the others, and consequently the imposition of its values, cultural expressions, and norms and thus its social and economic policies.

The dominant group in the world today says it respects the beliefs of each group, and that the best way to secure the liberty of each group is to make sure that religious beliefs stay out of the public arena so that no religious beliefs influence political and economic policies. The problem is that by relegating religion to the private sphere the human person is only considered in his social and economic role. In the western democratic model, the shrinking voice of the religious sphere in the public arena means that the spiritual dimension of man has little room to contribute to the formation of values in the expressive systems of culture. It is true that the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a great attempt to guarantee the safety of all dimensions of the human person in a pluralist society. However, at this moment, the libertarian-economic vision of man holds the arena and thus the channels for expressing values, creating norms and formulating policies. Human rights become relative to meeting economic objectives.

The reaction of religious groups to this vision is defensive and the tendency is to become more authoritarian, and intolerant to other groups and beliefs. The attitude seems to be that the more rigid the stance on religious dogma, rites, values, and norms, the greater the possibility for survival against the secular onslaught. Such a position by religions is of no use in contrasting the western materialistic view of man which tacitly justifies the exploitation and annihilation of weaker groups. Either religious-minded people ally themselves in the effort to become a strong voice in the public arena, or the spiritual in man will lose all influence in culture, social policy, and the directing of history. The condition necessary to bring about such an alliance is for all groups to agree not to impose their world view on the others, but to tap together the Source of all faiths in order to rebuild a society which promotes the well being of all men and women.

Ironically, by threatening to extinguish the influence that man’s religious dimension has traditionally exercised in society, globalisation is obliging religions to transcend their differences and recognise their common Source. The encounter can bring the parties together if, for the purpose of dialogue, each "brackets off" the unessential baggage in their tradition in order to reach the depths to which their religion is supposed to be the means. Sharing that depth is like tapping the village well, it becomes the Source that can guide us to create a society which expresses our common divine reality.

Religions have been more or less successful in different periods of their history at transmitting their knowledge of who the human person is, and thus more or less successful in promoting basic human values for society. However, because the great religions are the embodiment of centuries of experience in elaborating powerful symbols, they are an essential vehicle by which we may make our journey towards cultivating the fullness that is in man and woman. Religions guide the human person towards the door which connects finitude with eternity which is the door that allows our divine or higher intelligence to influence social matters.

The idea is not to return to a medieval theocentrism, but to counter balance the weight of anthropocentrism in modern culture. Since the age of enlightenment, western culture has been marked by an optimism that believed science and technology could solve all of mankind's material problems, and that human reason with secular philosophies would put an end to the insanity of war and the exploitation of the weak that raged in the era of theocracy. Instead, science and technology have created environmental disasters which threaten our future, war rages on, and no one could care less about the weak. The 1989 political events in China, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe herald the rejection from within of the most explicitly secular movement of the modern era. The result is a general feeling of doubt, fear and anxiety about the capacity of science and technology to offer us a safe future. The point is that the humanist philosophies, which are the foundation of science, have run their course and no longer offer today's culture the stimulus to generate the new ideas it needs to resolve the big problems we are facing in every dimension of our existence. Until now, secular culture has accepted as valid only that which is empirically demonstrable or self-evident. However, the crisis in contemporary culture has put into question the criteria of its own methodology. A new paradigm concerning our understanding of reality is struggling to be born. The converging insights of physics, biology, and ecology are leading to a profound shift away from the mechanistic understanding of space and time, cause and effect, and most revealing of all, matter itself. Nature is beginning to be seen as an interconnected process of dynamic relations. A new process-philosophy is building bridges between a more subtle science and a deeper religion.1

The founding members of the Kautilya Society are united in their conviction that the spark for formulating ideas to create a more "reasonable" society will come from a re-evaluation of the spiritual dimension of man/woman, and its integration into the process of the human search for knowledge. Instead of being an alternative world view, science should become a means, together with all other forms of knowledge and skill, to enhancing the quality of human life. Our goal for inter-religious dialogue is to give birth to a "new humanism" that goes beyond the dichotomy of spirit and reason, towards their integration for the realization of human potential.

The role of inter-religious dialogue in this process is to guarantee that a return to our spiritual roots is not characterized by the will to impose one world view on the other, but by the desire to discover in the others the same attempt to express the mystery of the human person's capacity to create the environment in which he/she lives. The current return to religion that mankind is experiencing today because of the great insecurity created by western technological culture, will otherwise continue on its course towards fundamentalism, exclusivism and intolerance. The contribution which Kautilya feels it can give to this dialogue is to create a meeting point. This meeting can be virtual, through this newsletter, or in Banaras which is India’s traditional city for dialogue.

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