Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 6 Number 1, April 2005
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Forman, Robert K. C. Grassroots Spirituality: What it is, Why it is here, Where is it going. Imprint Academic, 2004. 231 pages
Reviewed by
American University of Sharjah, U.A.E
In 1997 Robert Forman and his team of colleagues received a generous grant from the Fetzer Institute to conduct research on the range and extent of what they call the Grassroots Spirituality Movement in the United States. As they discovered, this movement includes “Buddhists, Neo-advaitan meditators, Esoteric Christians, Renewal Jews, Taoists, spiritual healers, the spirituality in business consultants, and so on” (17), with signs of Grassroots Spirituality erupting everywhere across the country. As the book documents, between a third and a half of all American say that their lives have been seriously impacted by spiritual experience; 23% say they regularly practice yoga, meditation or other exercises to reduce stress; 59% of Americans consider themselves both spiritual and religious, while 20% considered themselves only spiritual; 12% have had personal experience of a spiritual figure such as God, Jesus, Elija, Mary or Buddha; 41% say they have had a miraculous experience.
As Forman writes, one purpose of this study is to “determine if this loose gaggle of seekers could communicate or develop into something like a community across the great religious divides” (18). If so, Forman speculates that we may find a way to solve the ancient religious conflicts that have plagued humanity throughout its history. On the basis of extensive interviews with people from a wide range of religious and spiritual backgrounds, Forman and his team found that grassroots spirituality developed more or less spontaneously among ordinary people without a founder or the organization of a singular leadership. In fact, a new profession has emerged consisting of “spiritual leaders and teachers” who help people develop through their own first-hand spiritual experiences. A remarkable thing about this leadership, moreover, which is primarily non-traditional, is that it does not form a hierarchy but rather a collection of spiritual seekers from all walks of life.
Through extensive interviews, Forman found that spirituality carries the “inner” overtones associated with western and eastern schools of meditation, thus pointing to an introvertive experience that is not strictly rational. In the tentative definition Forman offers, “Grassroots spirituality involves a vaguely panentheistic ultimate that is indwelling, sometimes bodily, as the deepest self and accessed through not-strictly-rational means of self transformation and group process that becomes the holistic organization for all of life” (51). Not to be confused with pantheism (which holds that the deity is the universe and its phenomena), panentheism is the doctrine “that all things are in the ultimate, that is, all things are made up of one single principle, but that one principle is not limited to those worldly phenomena” (52). The analogy he gives is that all the fish in the ocean are constituted entirely by the ocean, but the ocean, instead of being limited to the fishes, is panentheistic to them. In describing the panentheistic ultimate that is immanent within yet transcendent to the individual, Forman provides testimonies from people of diverse religious traditions and spiritual paths, including Christians, Jews, Muslim Sufis, Buddhists, practitioners of the Transcendental Meditation technique, Yoga teachers, Eco-feminists and many others. He concludes that while the Grassroots Spirituality Movement springs from every major religious and spiritual tradition around the world, it shares a worldview and set of experiences of far greater depth and specificity than previously understood. Indeed, the evidence provided by Grassroots Spirituality supports the conclusions of Forman’s earlier book, Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness. (SUNY Press 1999), that spiritual experience, contrary to claims by constructivists such as Stephen Katz, is not a linguistic or cultural construct but rather a trans-cultural, trans-rational experience based on a pure consciousness event. People from all cultural, religious and spiritual traditions share common panentheistic experiences.
For example, a Jewish respondent describes the panentheistic spiritual ultimate as “a formless, eternal reality that lies at the heart of all forms. It’s something that is one, beyond our usual apprehension of space and time. . . . It’s like quietness within, the still point of the turning world.” Similarly, a Muslim Sufi leader describes the panentheistic as follows: “Spirit is behind everything. It is the hidden aspect of nature. Everything is a crystallization of spirit. Spirituality is looking beyond the surface, being in touch with the living energy. The spirit is the source behind everything we see, the invisible energy behind it all.” Contributing to this “majority report,” a Buddhist respondent says, “Buddhism talks of mind and body disappearing. This sounds like a negative expression. But it’s not nihilism. It is through this negation that life emerges. When as the Buddhists say, you disappear, then ‘It’ lives me” (55). Not everybody fits within this majority report. A Native American, for instance, did not describe a single panentheistic principle but a series of links or a web interconnecting all of us. Everybody in the Grassroots Spirituality Movement, however, longs for the intuitive or “not-strictly-rational” side of life largely neglected by the rational worldview of modern science.
By using Venn diagrams, Forman illustrates how the Grassroots Spirituality Movement draws from nearly all the religions and nontraditional spiritual groups, as well as millions of the unaffiliated, each overlapping the other on the introvertive level. He compares this movement to an ocean fed by a vast variety of spiritual rivulets, including many independent religious rivulets. Each of these may regard Grassroots Spirituality as the offspring of its own tradition, but that would be a mistake. As Forman says, “Grassroots Spirituality is its own thing, the bastard child of all and none of them” (93). This Movement, moreover, has many dialects, including the Men’s movement, TM, Ramana Maharshi, Havurah Jews, Traditional Judaism, Sufis, Transpersonal psychologists, Christian contemplatives, Theosophy, Aromatherapy, and others facets beyond the immediate boundaries of the Venn diagram.
Forman suggests that the cause of Grassroots Spirituality is “over-determined”; that is, it has many intersecting causes ranging from the attempt to overcome the alienation caused by demographic shifts from the rural to the urban and exurban; changes in gender roles, a loosening of family ties, and the rise of the feminine; the baby boomers and the 1960s revolutionaries; disenchantment with the Church; the influx of lay as well as priestly non-Europeans immigrants to American, including Vietnamese, Burmese, Chinese Buddhists, and Hindus, all contributing to a “stew of religions”; the declining faith in science and rationality; and the disillusionment with the American dream. In addition to these historical causes, Forman identifies a perennial cause, which he attributes ultimately to the possibility of “an innate human drive for spirituality” (132).
Added to these causes is the growing support for spirituality in society’s institutions, particularly the workplace. People are increasingly disillusioned with work, which in-and-of-itself is unable to satisfy the individual. Many corporations and hospitals now provide counseling centers, day care centers and meditation rooms to help foster people’s well-being and spiritual growth. Spirituality is now championed in the business world as an answer to morale problems, fatigue and stress. Health care is shifting in its orientation to include self-help through yoga and meditation. As Forman says, “At some point, we may have to decide whether health problems are the product of bad genes and environmental exposure, or if they stem from more transcendent causes, reflecting some imperfect match of a soul’s purpose and a body’s conduct” (152). Modern medicine he concludes seems to be moving toward accepting spirituality as a tool for healing.
Forman argues that Grassroots Spirituality provides an opportunity for the world to transcend its differences and unite on the basis of what he calls a “trans-traditional spirituality” (173). Instead of being divided by our different traditions, we should come together “in the light of our common spiritual depths,” recognize that these depths can encourage us to grow “beyond any single path,” and enjoy our common panentheistic ground while at the same time exploring our differences (173). Forman offers a realistic plan for achieving this integration through the organization of trans-traditional processes. These include ongoing local gatherings, non-dogmatic conversations between spiritual groups, integrating these local conversations within a national infrastructure—while always focusing on process instead of content.
Forman sees three challenges to the Grassroots Spirituality Movement. These entail learning how to work together across traditional divides, establishing local trans-traditional spirituality centers, and developing new ways of addressing social problems. The achieve these objectives, Grassroots Spirituality must would have to accept a multiplicity of voices, for the movement as a whole is too vast to be univocal. He also proposes a variety of other projects. These include “Spiritual Houses of Life Development,” a spiritual yellow pages, a “Life’s Consultant’s” Seminary, schools for youthful seekers, and a variety of other national and international initiatives.
Forman concludes by arguing that the Grassroots Spirituality Movement has another hidden cause: namely, the human quandary of what to do about “the death of God”? This movement has emerged in part as a way to compensate for the loss in modern civilization of a “plausible overarching theological model” (205). The drugged and tie-died New Age was a forerunner to this movement. In Grassroots Spirituality, moreover, “the ultimate, when it is identified, seems more like an ‘It’ than a ‘He’ or a ‘She.’ The ‘It’ here is no longer some personalized and judging God-figure. . . [but] a much more integrated and immanent panentheistic presence. It is directly available to each and every mind and heart, no matter what social role or station we enter or where we move” (208). One problem reported by participants of the Grassroots Spirituality Movement is that many feel alone and without support. To redress this isolation, Forman has helped to develop the Forge Institute, an educational organization designed to provide a spiritual home and support for people through a non-hierarchic leadership who can convey spiritual wisdom from a broad range of spiritual paths.
Forman’s book, while not without its editorial faults, provides an objective and insightful report on one of the most significant social developments in recent history. Not since the Middle Ages has the world seen the kind of spirituality movement that he describes. His survey of this modern phenomenon graphically illustrates the power of consciousness to know itself through a broad range of interconnected spiritual avenues. Millions of readers from around the world will be uplifted by the knowledge that their own panentheistic experience is shared by many.