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World Religion

We need a new World Religion as a shared grammar of universal value that serves as a context for our diversity.

Planetary civilizational crises require planetary-scale solutions at the level of culture. Key to the future is a World Religion that unites the great truths still dormant in the many profound wisdom traditions. At the same time, World Religion is the culmination of the Neo-Perennialism of CosmoErotic Humanism, which seeks to clarify the core structures of value and meaning that make human civilizations possible.

Click here to explore papers, articles, podcasts and books by Dr. Marc Gafni on ‘World Religion’ on the Center for World Philosophy and Religion website.

From the archive on World Spirituality

Watch these clips below to get a sense of what World Spirituality is all about:

On the Possibility and Necessity of a World Spirituality

By Marc Gafni

For the first time in the history of planet Earth, in the history of consciousness, a World Spirituality is utterly possible and utterly necessary.

A World Spirituality is one that trance-ends. It ends the trance of any particular religion or nationality. It weaves together the best medicines of every great system of knowing into a larger whole.

It’s a World Spirituality which tells us that what unites us is far greater than that which divides us. We understand and live the common truths and calls and obligations that are laid out by all the great systems of spirit.

And we also experience and benefit from the unique gifts of the systems of spirit woven together in a large great tapestry, and all people of earth can find themselves as citizens of a World Spirituality. That is a possibility that exists today in a way that never did before in the history of planet Earth.

This vision is an utter necessity today and this vision of a World Spirituality is only possible today and was never possible in any other time in the history of the planet.

Why? Because the new life conditions, the world’s challenges, need a world response. The beginning of that response is a World Spirituality.

So the evolution of a World Spirituality is Spirit’s next move… the beginning of creating a genuine felt sense of wholeness of all the peoples of the Earth, a sense of the interconnectivity of the All with the All which can only be led by a shift in consciousness to a World Spirituality which is an utter necessity today.

The second reason why this necessity is a possibility: for the first time in the history of the world, there’s a huge piece of good news. There are for the first time hundreds of millions of people who are living at world centric consciousness.

Egocentric consciousness means my caring and my concern and my love is for me and the people who give me security in the world. Me. My immediate, my family. The people around me, the people I work with.

A higher level of consciousness is ethnocentric consciousness. Ethnocentric means I care not only about my immediate people, I care about my tribe, my nation.

A higher evolution is world centric consciousness. My circle of caring and concern expands to include all the peoples of the Earth.

That’s amazing! That leap of consciousness from ethnocentric to world centric has never happened before at this level, where there is a public culture with hundreds of millions of people who are holding a world centric consciousness.

And it is that group that will be the formative group in the creation of a World Spirituality. That’s the second factor. It makes a World Spirituality necessary and utterly possible today.

Third, for the first time, the best and greatest teachings of all the great systems of spirit, every great religion, the sciences, physics and psychology. Every great religion, its medicine, it’s available online, in books, libraries, and through living teachers.

You have living teachers and books today which are being disseminated way beyond the boundaries of a particular system. Buddhist systems don’t only teach Buddhists in Nepal or China but all over the world. Jewish teachers teach all over the world. Christian teachers teach all over the world, but not in the way of coercive missionizing, but in a beautiful new way of opening up the systems of knowing to all the people on Earth.

That’s a new reality that never existed before in the history of planet Earth.

All three of these factors come together to yield the necessary evolutionary emergent, a World Spirituality … which is Spirit’s next move.

It’s what we need to evolve into the next generation, to evolve Spirit, to create joy, to create sustainability, to create responsibility, to create depth and meaning for the future generations of this world.

The most urgent need we have today is to participate in the gathering of all of us who want to participate in this great evolutionary unfolding. It’s already happening all over the world.

World Spirituality is breaking out all over the world. When? Right now. Who? We are. All of us need to participate. If we feel we are beyond the religions or if we are dual citizens. The time is now. Welcome to this great necessity and the great privilege of our generation.