Likewise, across the board with goodness, truth, and beauty. The world today has access to all of the great premodern Wisdom Traditions (and their meditative access to ultimate Truth and Enlightened Awareness) plus all of modernity’s staggering advances in the natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, hygiene—stretching from a cure for polio, to putting a human on the moon, to the invention of radio, television, and computers that now contain more information than the sum total of all human brains) plus all of postmodernity’s sophisticated understanding about the contextual and constructed nature of relative truths, and the central role of perspective in all relative ideas. Shouldn’t the world’s Great Wisdom Traditions keep up with the modern and postmodern additions to our knowledge and understanding? After all, what is it that is evolving in all of this? Why, of course, Spirit! Evolution is simply Spirit-in-action: Brahman, Tao, Buddha-nature, Godhead, Allah, YHWH, the Great Perfection, Ati, the Ground of all Being, One without a Second. Whitehead, we noted, divided Spirit into two dimensions: the “Primordial Nature of God” (timeless and unchanging; for us, Emptiness) and the “Consequent Nature of God” (the sum total of all evolution to date; Form). And while the Primordial Nature of God has not changed one iota from the Big Bang and before, the Consequent Nature of God has grown magnificently and substantially. There are commonly understood truths now that would have simply staggered the premodern mind, from the nature of brain activity (a brain that, as noted, has more neural synaptic connections than there are known stars in the entire universe) to the extraordinary unfoldings of a self-organizing and self-transcending evolution, to the nature of the Big Bang itself in its first nanoseconds. Not to mention the Singularity that is in all likelihood bearing down on us now in technology and will change the world more than any other single change in human history.
