A Contemplative Foundation for Peace Among Peoples of all Religions

Spiritual Paths offers classes, programs and contemplative processes in which contemplative teachers and practitioners from all traditions can find common ground for forging shared wisdom leading to peace, justice, and a healthy environment.  Our goal is the co-creation of an “InterSpiritual Wisdom” that is a unifying and healing force in the world.

It is a truism that most people throughout the world prefer peace to conflict.  And, it is a fact that most of the world’s people are affiliated with a religion or belief system.  Therefore, world peace will require people to find a shared foundation that is not in conflict with the beliefs and practices that have shaped their separate identities.

The world’s religions have much in common in such areas as compassionate values and ethics.  They share the hope of peace and freedom from suffering.   Yet just knowing about these similarities on a conceptual level is not sufficient to change attitudes and heal differences between them.  Attitudinal and behavioral changes will also require a unifying experience beyond just a rationale explanation of their similarities.

It is the contemplatives, meditators, and mystics within each religion who have taken it upon themselves to experience first hand the epiphanies of their founder.  Once these meditators attain this transcendent, non-conceptual experience and insight through their ‘hearts,’ in addition to their ‘heads,’ they become embodiments of the underlying experience of their founder. They become servants to a higher common cause and exemplify through their lives the nature and meaning of wisdom, compassion, and peace.

In our Spiritual Paths programs, we bring teachers and teachers of contemplation and meditation from different religions together in silent meditation, deep dialog, and teaching.  In so doing, we have witnessed a profound experiential shift in our ways of being and perceiving each other.  We have experienced a palpable sense of shared consciousness and purpose.  This experience is at the heart of our work and the foundation for a new paradigm for forging peace between people of different religions.  We call this new paradigm InterSpiritual Wisdom.

InteSpiritual Meditation, along with our other programs and classes, is a contemplative process especially designed for the development of InterSpiritual Wisdom that can bring peace to all beings everywhere.  It is a new paradigm for both personal spiritual development and for cooperation with others to solve the daunting challenges of our times.