No doubt it is news to no one that planet Earth is in a period of escalating interlocking crises. We need a response that addresses all the hidden as well as the obvious dimensions of these crises—before they spin out of control into irretrievable chaos. (For the moment, let us leave aside the geophysical crises, including climate change, increasing seismic activity, and the ozone holes, as well as pollution, radiation poisoning, mass extinctions of species, increasing solar flare activity, and the like. They cannot be dealt with effectively so long as the current political system endures.) The system is in process of collapsing of its own weight, its own internal contradictions. At the same time, spontaneous social movements are arising on a global scale that are confronting the system and increasing the level of stress to the breaking point. Our concern is to assure the optimal outcome of this titanic face-off.

The crisis we face at the sociopolitical level is one of legitimacy of authority. The OWS movement (Occupy Wall Street) and the Indignado movement in Spain and other anti-austerity movements all over Europe, following on the so-called Arab Spring, not to mention student movements and general protest movements in many parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, are simultaneously rising to a crescendo.

Spiritual development can be thought of as the double passage from one mode of perceiving reality to a second and then a third, specifically from the mode of experience to that of imperience, and finally to that of sumerience.

In the experiential mode, consciousness is divided into subject and object, on the one hand, and identified as an objectified subject, on the other. Awareness is funneled through the imaginary and symbolic grid of meaning, and the value differentiations of the ego distort perception through the curvature of perceptual space produced by the unconsciously determined egocentric selectivity of data and reactivity impulses that organize the dimensional projection of the primordial energy of Being into structured world-appearance and egoic physical identification plus ongoing repetitive mentalization, plus the absent heart of the Ground of Being, creating a sense of lack and a nostalgic desire for an impossible fulfillment. This can be mythologized as a religious feeling, or converted into an aesthetic, ethical, or scientific discourse, or de-sublimated into an addictive craving for an existent object.