The West

The homelands of the West are a place of ambiguity — full of great promise and peril, and the headwaters of a dynamic culture that is influencing societies everywhere. Its technological prowess drives the world’s economic engines and military-industrial complexes. Yet the social orders in the West languish from the lack of a spiritual center leaving men and women only on the surface of a world replete with competition and consumerism as its philosophical and practical underpinnings. At this juncture, Light from the Orient has reached its shores, and so it is that each is influencing the other. The freedoms of thought and social norm that are the West’s hallmark and heritage have catalyzed an evolution in traditional religious thought and spiritual practice. For example, men and women now share equally and competently leadership in the responsibility for the transmission of wisdom. The West lays claim to certain freedoms of perspective and individuation that, with quickened hearts and minds, we bring to bear upon our Abrahamic roots and those qualities that lie in the innermost regions of the Christian orient.

Oriental wisdom is helping men and women everywhere to regain the stability of a spiritual center, and reestablish metaphysical foundations upon which the spiritual edifices of wisdom can be built. It is in this dynamic context that the Order works, taking up its mission to create a wisdom culture in a post-modern world of competitive individualism, radical indeterminacy and doubt, and the oppressive codification of a reductionist worldview. Here we labor for a new flowering of spirituality, the reconciliation of opposites and extremes, the reintegration of lost streams of perennial wisdom into modern thought, and a true union of the human and the divine that will become the seedbed for transformative change in the West. The women and men of the Order share these same values and objectives in solidarity with contemplatives of other faith traditions.

Further Reading