i. the mirror
The Tower of Babel is a story that has functioned, for most of its 2,500 years, like a mirror for humanity. In nine verses, the tale describes a quandary that reappears in collective life: how to be many and one at the same time.
In the tale, the people settle on a plain in Shinar, discover brickmaking, and begin a tower whose top attempts to reach the heavens. The tower is their answer to the terror of becoming many. By concentrating everything into a single form, belonging may thereby be secured.
However, God senses the shadow inside belonging purchased with uniformity, and scatters the project into a thousand tongues that can’t reach each other - leaving behind a dream of reversal. Someday, the one speech will be restored, everyone will understand everyone, and the interrupted ascent will resume.
The collective forms we’ve built are versions of one side of the story or the other. The Tower - empires, churches, and ideologies, gathering the many into unison. The Scattering - a million private cosmologies, each dissolving what the towers calcify, none able to reach the others.
In our time, one could argue that the dream of reversal has arrived. Humanity didn’t return to a single language, but language stopped being a barrier. Machines now translate any tongue into any other in real time, and answer every person in their own words. And yet the Tower ascent did not resume upwards. Instead, the scattering deepened and widened. For millennia it moved outward, through thousands of languages, cosmologies, philosophies, sciences, arts, rituals, and contemplative paths. Now it moves inward, person by person: more worldviews, practices, and syncretic cosmologies held in one’s private pantheon, yet fewer shared contexts where maps can be compared, questioned, and touched by other maps. It seems that whatever was lost at Babel was never the vocabulary bur rather the relationship between maps.
I sense the work now is not to finish the reversal. That project perhaps succeeded, and it still wasn't enough. Nor is it to remain scattered indefinitely, each person enthroned inside an unchallengeable private revelation. The work is to build forms capable of holding the many without erasing them. We need a middle: a way of belonging that requires neither sameness nor a pluralism in which differences coexist without ever touching deeply enough to transform one another.
I believe this is the era in which that middle way becomes possible. Mystics across traditions have long demonstrated that deep communion does not depend on agreement about the nature of reality, but on a way of being capable of meeting difference without either collapsing into it or defending against it. What was once rare is becoming more widely available from three directions at once: greater access to direct mystical experience, unprecedented exposure to many maps of reality, and developmental and psychological tools that help us recognize where those maps reveal, where they distort, and where our own wounds distort the seeing.
ii. all of us, mystics
For most of history, direct contact with mystical depths was not absent, but interpreted through the cosmological maps into which one happened to be born.
Moses ascends the mountain alone. Muhammad enters the cave. The Buddha sits beneath the tree.
A human being withdraws from the ordinary world, passes beyond the threshold of familiar perception, and returns carrying some revelation of what lies beyond. That revelation is then codified into a tradition through which generations of people, most of whom may never reproduce the founder’s original experience, can nevertheless be shaped by its moral, imaginal, and contemplative force. A magnificent inheritance, yet with a cost. Over the generations, most people came to relate to the abstracted blueprint rather than experiencing the depths it described.
opening the archive.
What is changing now is not human nature itself, but the ecology in which mystical capacities might become more widely cultivated. Fragments of practices once held within monasteries, mystery schools, and initiatory lineages have entered wider circulation (though rarely with the ethical formation, relational transmission, and disciplines of preparation that once gave them their depth and coherence). Worldviews once separated by geography, languages, and civilizations are now immediately accessible with a single search or prompt. At the same time, psychological and developmental disciplines have made the instrument of perception itself increasingly available for examination, allowing people to ask not only what they believe or experience, but what within them is doing the believing and experiencing.
Firstly, meditation has long moved beyond the monasteries and psychedelics have upwelled from the underground and into living rooms and retreat facilities. By 2009 roughly half of Americans reported having undergone a mystical or religious experience, up from approximately one in five in the 1960s.1 (and this was over 17 years ago~) Experiences which were once the province of prophets, saints and visionaries have become imaginable as part of ordinary human life.
As Alice Bailey, the 20th-century esoteric philosopher and mystic, prophesized in 1934: theologies will dissolve into direct knowledge; doctrine becomes unnecessary because "faith will be based on experience"; institutional authority "will give place to personal appreciation of Reality"; and "the power of the Church over the group will be supplanted by the power of the awakened soul in men." So the temple is not a super-church. It's the infrastructural condition under which authority migrates from institution to experience.
Furthermore, printing, mass literacy, global migration, the internet, and now artificial intelligence have placed an unprecedented range of humanity’s spiritual and philosophical inheritance into immediate proximity. A person can move, within an afternoon, from a Buddhist account of emptiness to a Christian account of divine love, from Indigenous cosmologies of kinship to neuroscientific theories of consciousness, from nondual metaphysics to philosophies that reject metaphysics altogether.
This doesn’t mean that the traditions themselves are fully accessible. A tradition is not merely its information, and no archive, however comprehensive, can replace relationship, cultural context, initiation, ethical formation, or the slow education of perception that unfolds through years of practice. What has become accessible is the encounter of thousands of maps.
the art of the frame.
To be immersed in a thousand maps produces a peculiar kind of dizzying vertigo. And that confrontation forces a choice. One can retreat into a single map and declare the others false, or skim across them all, accumulating spiritual identities without allowing any of them to penetrate deeply enough to transform the self that collects them. There is, however, a more demanding possibility, one that asks us to enter a worldview deeply enough to receive what it reveals while refusing the seduction of mistaking that revelation for the whole of reality.
Mystics across traditions seem to converge across this shared recognition: that reality exceeds every account made of it. This does not mean that all traditions are secretly saying the same thing, nor that their differences dissolve at some imagined summit. It means that no inherited frame, external teacher, sacred text, or ideology can substitute for first-hand contact with that which all frames arise from - a deeper layer of value.
What mystics have encountered experientially, a number of contemporary philosophers have articulated through the language of value.234 That is, value is not merely manufactured by the conceptual systems through which we perceive it. Rather, beauty, obligation, sacredness, vitality, and mattering belong in some sense to the texture of reality itself, and they become visible to us only through particular frames of perception. In other words, that value itself, the felt dimension of mattering woven into the cosmos, is something we perceive through frames rather than invent with them. Every cosmology can therefore be understood as a partial crystallization of a deeper field of significance that precedes and exceeds it, neither arbitrary nor complete.
This does not render every map equally accurate, ethical, useful, or profound. A frame may illuminate one dimension of experience while obfuscating another. It may liberate a person in one season of life and confine them in the next. It means that no map is identical with the territory nor final, and that ontological maturity includes learning where a frame reveals, where it distorts, and what kind of life and state of being it tends to produce in this season. And to ask oneself iteratively: is that state of being aligned with coherence - the act of flowing with what is good, beautiful, and true - for not anyone else, but me personally?
The question evolves from: Which system contains the final truth?
To: What does this way of seeing allow me to perceive? Where does it break down? What does it ask of me? What are its fruits? Which lens, taken up now, in this particular time in my life, with the history I have, unlocks my ability to directly experience a deeper layer of value?
The mature seeker therefore does not simply circulate among many frames, but rather allows each encounter to rearrange them. They learn to receive the gift of a tradition without merging with it as an identity, and to surrender to a practice without hardening its revelations into frames that others must take on as well.
the view from outside the view.
Developmental thinkers have described this capacity through different conceptual languages.
Robert Kegan calls it the self-transforming mind, the stage at which a person can hold their own system of meaning-making as an object of awareness rather than remaining unconsciously enclosed within it.5 Ken Wilber associates it with the movement into second tier, where worldviews, including one’s own, begin to appear as partial expressions of a larger developmental field rather than as mutually exclusive claims to totality.6 Jean Gebser describes an integral, aperspectival consciousness capable of allowing multiple perspectives to become transparent to one another without flattening their differences into sameness. Terri O’Fallon locates a related capacity at the threshold she calls MetAware, where awareness begins to take awareness itself as its object.7
They all point toward a set of meta-capacities that become indispensable in a pluralistic age: recognizing one’s worldview as a lens rather than reality itself, receiving its wisdom while remaining conscious of the horizons it establishes, and meeting another perspective as a possible enlargement of perception rather than a threat to one’s own.
the purification of perception.
Nevertheless, the ability to see one’s frames does not ensure the ability to choose wisely amongst them.
A psyche can become remarkably sophisticated about perspectives while continuing to gravitate toward those that flatter its defenses, spiritualize its hungers, or transform old injuries into cosmic certainties. Even meta-awareness can become an instrument of avoidance, a way of hovering above experience rather than being changed by it.
The old mystical orders understood this danger. In nearly every serious lineage, illumination was joined to purification because the human instrument through which revelation passed was known to be vulnerable to distortion. Access to the depths was therefore embedded within years of ethical formation, discipline, surrender, relationship, and preparation.
Our era has, in some respects, reversed that sequence. Experiences of illumination have become increasingly available while the forms of preparation that once surrounded them remain optional.
Yet, with a strange grace, the same era that disrupted the old initiatory structures has also made practices of “purification” more publicly accessible. Depth psychology, therapy, trauma work, internal family systems, somatic practice, shadow work, and a multiplicity of healing modalities allow the instrument of perception to become more likely to be perceptible to itself.
And as that instrument becomes clearer, attraction to a frame may become less a wound searching for confirmation and more a dimension of value seeking a form through which it can enter the world to reveal a timely wisdom.
iii. after Babel
I believe this middle, the space between the Tower’s enforced unity and the Scattering’s isolated worlds, is becoming newly conceivable as a collective form.
It does not require humanity to agree upon a final account of reality. It requires people capable of entering a worldview deeply, recognizing the limits of what it reveals, and remaining open when another way of seeing unsettles their own.
Direct contact loosens the authority of inherited belief, meta-awareness allows us to move among frames with greater freedom, and psychological work helps us discern when what feels like revelation is being shaped by fear, hunger, or projection.
The question is no longer only whether individuals can develop these capacities, but what kind of institution could gather them into a shared life. A unified though not uniform approach to God. (some essays where i’ve attempted to articulate this: A Civic Hearth for Dharma, The Future will be Mystical)
In theory, movements and frameworks such as Unitarian Universalism, Theosophy, and Perennialism have each tried, in different ways, to hold multiple religious perspectives within a shared field. Theosophy and perennialism tend to understand them as different lenses upon an underlying truth, while Unitarian Universalism gathers wisdom from many sources without requiring a single metaphysical account. Yet these forms of pluralism can remain at the level of tolerance, dialogue, or representation. They create a room in which many identities and perspectives may appear, but do not necessarily create the conditions through which those perspectives transform one another or disclose something none could have reached alone.
The deeper question is what becomes possible when those differences enter into a relationship capable of changing what each participant can perceive. How do we move from social peace and into collective revelation?
moving beyond pluralism.
There are several depths at which differences can meet:
Tolerance says: You may exist beside me.
Dialogue says: I am willing to hear you.
Pluralism says: Your difference belongs within our shared world.
Polyphony says: Our encounter can generate something neither of us could create alone.
Communion says: Through our difference, a deeper reality becomes available to us.
A possibility beyond pluralism is polyphony. In polyphony, difference does not merely survive contact but becomes generative through it.
My way of seeing reveals something yours has missed, while yours exposes the boundary I had mistaken for the edge of reality. A third voice interrupts the reconciliation we were reaching too quickly, and a fourth perceives the question beneath the one we thought we were answering.
The aim is to let distinct perspectives meet without flattening them into neutrality or compromise, so their encounter can reveal something none could reach alone.
This is less like perennialism, in which many traditions are imagined to be describing the same truth beneath their apparent differences, or universalism, which seeks a common ground broad enough to hold those differences within a shared frame, and more like stereoscopic vision, in which depth becomes visible precisely because two eyes do not occupy the same position. Their slight divergence is not an error to be corrected, but rather the condition through which another dimension appears.
Communion begins when this generativity passes beyond the exchange of perspectives and becomes a shared quality of attention, when people do not simply think together but become capable, however briefly, of sensing this shared field of depth and value. Historically, such communion has usually been secured through a common ritual world, a shared account of the sacred, or an agreement about what kind of reality the community has gathered to face. The possibility now before us is that communion might no longer require complete agreement about the nature of that reality.
This implies that religious experience and religious metaphysics belong to different, though inseparable, layers. The experience may involve a loosening of the ordinary self, a love without obvious object, an intimacy with existence, a silence beneath thought, or the felt presence of something immeasurably larger than one’s own life. Metaphysics begins when a person turns back toward the experience and tries to say what happened through the Mind - one calls it emptiness, another God, another consciousness, and another an alteration of the neurochemical structures of the brain.
Interpretations may genuinely contradict one another, yet the people who hold them may still become capable of shared attention, mutual recognition, and reverence before what neither account can exhaust.
a covenant of posture.
Communion without compulsory metaphysical agreement is not communion without any agreement. Something must still bind the participants, or the middle dissolves into a marketplace of private revelations in which every intuition is sovereign and no one owes anything to anyone else.
Thus, the binding element shifts from a creed of content toward a covenant of posture. It’s less about an agreement about reality’s finality but about how we will stand together before it and become changed by it. The task is to cultivate a form of coherence that comes from how we practice, how we attend, and how we meet the sacred together.
This matters because revelation does not become trustworthy simply by feeling sacred. A private insight that cannot survive contact with other people, with consequence, or with the life it produces has not yet earned public authority. The sacred is not only what we encounter in solitude. It is also what remains true when another person enters the room and into a broader community.
As Tibetologist and Dzogchen teacher Dr. Daniel P. Brown argued, the final test of realization is conduct: how one lives and how one treats other people.
Metaphysical disputes may remain unresolved, but people standing in different traditions can still ask what their encounter makes possible. What kind of person emerges when our frames are allowed to touch? What forms of relationship, institution, and collective life begin to gather around them? Do we become more honest, less defended, more responsible for our power, and more capable of loving what we do not fully understand? Or do our beliefs make us increasingly insulated from correction?
If the encounter enlarges our capacity for reality, then difference has done more than coexist. It has become revelatory.
As in stereoscopic vision, depth appears not because the perspectives have converged, but because each remains distinct enough to disclose what the other could not see. Communion works in much the same way. Its measure lies in whether the encounter expands what we can perceive and how we are able to live. When enough people meet at that depth, difference serves to sharpen the resolution of the whole.
It’s 9pm on a chilled autumnal evening. You step into the misty streets of downtown New York and breathe in. The pavement is slick with rain, yellow cabs move like streaks of light through the dark, and somewhere beneath the city’s low mechanical hum, a saxophone is barely perceivable beneath the concrete.
You follow it down a narrow flight of stairs into a small jazz club. The room is dim and close, lit by amber lamps reflected in brass instruments and half-finished glasses. Coats hang damply over the backs of chairs. People speak in low voices, leaning toward one another in a sweet stupor of flirtation.
Onstage, four musicians are gathering around a piece of music that does not yet exist.
Silent descends and it begins. The bassist offers a slow pulse. The drummer brushes against its edges. The pianist sets down a chord, listens, then chooses another that changes the energy of the unspooling composition. Suddenly, the saxophone enters with a phrase that rises like a question. The pianist answers by opening a door inside it. The drummer catches a fragment and turns it sideways. The bassist holds the ground, then releases it. For a moment, the whole thing seems close to falling apart. Then, without discussion, they find another center.
This is polyphony.
At this depth, the ensemble is no longer simply exchanging gestures. It has become responsive to something emerging through the exchange itself. Each musician is shaping the music, but each is also being shaped by what the others make possible. The next note remains unwritten until the instant it is needed, and when it comes, it feels both surprising and inevitable. Belonging to everyone and no one, it is the living pattern that becomes perceptible when distinct forms of intelligence enter sufficiently disciplined relationship.
the center no one owns.
In improvisational jazz, musicians are in devotion to the emergent center, while the center simultaneously becomes in service to them. How could this kind of emergent pattern hold in other patterns of human communion as one long continuous brushstroke of unfoldment?
For such a form to endure, it seems that the institution that holds it must be built around an open center. Where traditional communion often placed a shared metaphysics there, the same God, or sacred history, the new form cannot simply replace one authorized metaphysics with a collage of many. If every worldview arrives only to compete for possession of the center, the Tower has merely been rebuilt from more colorful bricks.
The center must remain open, not because there is nothing there, but because whatever is there exceeds any participant’s right to define it for the others. As an openness that is structural rather than metaphysical, it requires no claim that ultimate reality is empty, divine, conscious, material, or anything else. It requires only that no single account be allowed to occupy the place of the reality all have gathered to face.
What becomes shared is the practice of attending. Different traditions may approach through prayer, meditation, study, movement, grief, music, philosophy, service, or silence. Their doorways remain different, as do the languages through which they understand what they encounter. But they agree to stand together before what exceeds every map, to offer what they see without claiming possession, and to let their perceptions become answerable to relationship and to life.
Such an institution would not merely host many spiritualities. It would cultivate the capacities through which their meeting becomes generative. Its task would not be to manufacture agreement, but to create a field strong enough for people to risk being changed by what they meet, bringing the full depth of their lineage, intelligence, and experience while relinquishing the demand that the whole organize itself around any one of them.
Perhaps this is what a temple after Babel would be. Not another tower built by concentrating all difference into one authorized form, and not another scattering in which every person speaks a private sacred language no one else may question. It would be a place where many languages remain many, while the people who speak them learn to listen for what becomes audible only between them.
It is how we listen deeply enough for difference itself to become an organ of communion, and to build institutions in which what passes among us is wiser than anything any one of us could have known alone. It is to make music out of it all.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2009/12/29/mystical-experiences/
Zachary Stein, “Opening the Eye of Value,” paper presented at Metaphysics and the Matter with Things: Thinking with Iain McGilchrist, The Center for Process Studies, California Institute for Integral Studies, San Francisco, 2024. Available at zakstein.org.
Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt Toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism, trans. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). Originally published in German as Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik, 1913–16.
Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2 vols. (London: Perspectiva Press, 2021).
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Edinburgh, 1927–28 (New York: Macmillan, 1929). The corrected edition, edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, was published by Free Press in 1978 and is the standard scholarly reference.
Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization (Harvard Business Press, 2009). The self-transforming mind is introduced earlier in Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life (Harvard University Press, 1994).
Ken Wilber, A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science and Spirituality (Shambhala Publications, 2000). See also Ken Wilber, Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy (Shambhala, 2000).
What a wonderful text. I find your reflections extremely progressive. Not too long ago, I revisited Ken Wilber's work and read his book Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (published in German as Eros, Kosmos, Logos), because I wanted to understand how he approaches these questions. It seemed quite clear to me that, although he developed an integral model, he ultimately did not live up to his own aspiration. Whenever he turns to spirituality, he slips into a way of speaking that gives the impression of describing a metaphysical cosmology—that is, a very specific interpretation of reality itself.
From my perspective, this once again represents an attempt—perhaps without him being fully aware of it—to treat the culmination of this kind of development, which leads to nondual unity consciousness, as a metaphysical framework. As a result, it ultimately becomes a complete unification of all other religions, philosophies, and perspectives. It amounts to a kind of supreme perspective. Consciousness is understood as something universal rather than individual, and this universal consciousness is regarded as one with the manifested cosmos. That is roughly where it seems to end up. This cosmos is then supposed to encompass everything else. But this is itself a metaphysical interpretation under which all other perspectives are expected to gather.
In your text, however, I read something quite different—something I find much more compelling. Namely, that the proposed common center, or reality itself, must remain open to interpretation in order to avoid a situation in which different experiences and interpretations of reality simply dissolve into one another whenever they come together, causing individuality to disappear.
As you have articulated so well, something else is required to make such a constructive and mutually enriching coming together possible without the need for a completely unified interpretation of reality placed at the top of a hierarchy. What is needed instead is a shared attitude—one that people consciously agree upon and under which they come together.
What emerges as something genuinely new—both for the individual and for the community as a whole under such an attitude—is not the attempt to arrive at a single, final interpretation of reality. Rather, it is the ongoing expansion of each person's individual experiences and perspectives, examining them for possible limitations and shortcomings, and continuously refining and developing them without striving for any ultimate or definitive claim to truth.
In this way, an ever more comprehensive shared perspective might gradually emerge—one that nevertheless remains open-ended, dynamic, and alive. Thanks for your effort. Really refreshing and inspiring!
Patricia, such depth and clear articulation. I love the bringing in of inmate value and the image of a structural centre. Very compelling indeed, one of the most fresh and timely new perspectivea for me. Thank you.