"Besides the current western interest in the mystical heritage of the world's religions, there exists another, quite different area of dynamic growth where religious insights are applied to the transformation of the social order. The message of spiritual freedom is related to the liberation of human beings from external structures of oppression, whether expressed in the liberation theology of South America or in socialist reinterpretations of Buddhism in South Asia. In a way, the greatest religious problem today is how to be both a mystic and a militant, as Adam Curle has said. In other words, how to combine the search for an expansion of inner awareness with effective social action, and how to find one's true identity in the synthesis of both.

"The necessary return to the center must not only be a journey inward, but it must help to weave new connections to the outer world. Interfaith dialogue that remains a monologue among monks, contemplatives, and a few individual seekers is therefore not enough. The need for a new spirituality, a new mysticism of action, is much greater and universal. The search for an adequate contemporary spirituality is in many ways a lay movement inside and even more outside different religions; it relates to the concerns of all rather than only to those of a social and spiritual elite. The new religious vision for today cannot be found in an eclectic spiritual syncretism or in a return to simpler states of inwardness and withdrawal based exclusively on eastern forms of meditation. Teilhard saw this clearly and, like Jung, he warned westerners not to seek in the East what they cannot find there: an integral spirituality for the modern world. Spirituality is not meant to be an alternative lifestyle, a road of retreat and escape; it needs to be an active leaven of life, feeding the zest and healing the wounds of life. Seen from an evolutionary perspective, spirituality can help us to grow and make the world advance."