The Next Enlightenment: Integrating East and West in a New Vision of Human Evolution

by Walter Truett Anderson

In The Next Enlightenment , Walter Truett Anderson treats Eastern spiritual traditions and Western philosophy, psychology and science as steps along the same evolutionary path rather than as completely separate and incompatible schools of thought.

In the opening chapters, he looks at five different "Liberation Movements" that emerged in the modern the eighteenth century European Enlightenment; the nineteenth century upheaval resulting from the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species ; and in the twentieth century, existentialism, psychoanalysis, and the human potential movement of the 1960s and 1970s. He then argues that this century's next surge of thought and action will regard the exploration of the physical universe and the study of human consciousness as two sides of the same coin, and equally important, come to understand personal enlightenment as a natural process of growth rather than a supernatural gift bestowed upon a chosen few.

Elegantly argued and written with a sense of humor, The Next Enlightenment offers a refreshing vision of how the ancient quest for enlightenment is taking on new life in a rapidly-changing, globalizing world.

Genres: Nonfiction, Religion

263 pages, Hardcover

First published August 7, 2003

About the author

Walter Truett Anderson is a political scientist, social psychologist, and author of numerous non-fiction books and articles in newspapers and magazines.

In his public lectures, he frequently speculates that, if we had a history of every advanced species in the universe, we would find that they all had to pass through two large, difficult and unavoidable transitions: (1) accepting conscious responsibility for the future of all life on their planets; and (2) recognizing that their systems of symbolic communication – such as language and mathematics – don’t merely describe reality, but participate in creating it.

Most of his major writing efforts have engaged one or both of these evolutionary themes. His defining statement on the first was To Govern Evolution: Further Adventures of the Political Animal. Its vision of human impacts on Earth’s life systems had been foreshadowed in his earlier book on American natural history, A Place of Power: The American Episode in Human Evolution, and was further developed in Evolution Isn’t What It Used To Be and All Connected Now. He is now at work on a new book that explores the evolutionary challenges and frontiers of the 21st century.

His major statements on the second (constructivist) theme were Reality Isn’t What It Used to Be and the subsequent anthology The Truth About the Truth. In other books on related subjects, The Future of the Self described changing ways that people are constructing personal identities in contemporary global society, and The Next Enlightenment points out the similarities between Western constructivist thought and Eastern spiritual traditions such as Buddhism.

He is currently President Emeritus of the World Academy of Art and Science (having served as president 2000-2008); a founding Fellow of the Meridian International Institute; a Fellow of the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute (LaJolla, CA); and a Distinguished Consulting Faculty member of Saybrook University in San Francisco.