In 1984, Father Thomas Keating invited spiritual teachers from all of the world's great wisdom traditions to gather at St. Benedict's Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado. They continued to meet over a 20-year period and then put together a statement of their points of agreement:

1. The world religions bear witness to the experience of Ultimate Reality, to which they give various names.
2. Ultimate Reality cannot be limited by any name or concept.
3. Ultimate Reality is the ground of infinite potentiality and actualization.
4. Faith is opening, accepting, and responding to Ultimate Reality. Faith in this sense precedes every belief system.
5. The potential for human wholeness — or, in other frames of reference, enlightenment, salvation, transcendence, transformation, blessedness — is present in every human being.
6. Ultimate Reality may be experienced not only through religious practices, but also through nature, art, human relationships, and service to others.
7. As long as the human condition is experienced as separate from Ultimate Reality, it is subject to ignorance and illusion, weakness and suffering.
8. Disciplined practice is essential to the spiritual life; yet spiritual attainment is not the result of one's own efforts, but the result of the experience of oneness with Ultimate Reality.

Many of the participants in this dialogue summarize their thoughts and feelings in this paperback edited by Netanel Miles-Yepez, the co-founder of The Sufi-Hasidic Fellowship and a Murshid of the Chishti-Maimuniyya Order of Dervishes and the Director of the Reb Zalman Legacy Project in Boulder, Colorado. Participants include Fr. Thomas Keating, Roshi Bernie Glassman, Swami Atmarupananda, Dr. Ibrahim Gamard, Imam Bilal Hyde, Pema Chodron, Rabbi Henoch Dov Hoffman, Edward Bastian, Grandfather Gerald Red Elk and many others.

These spiritual teachers discuss the foundations of dialogue, boundaries and differences, tense situations and the safety net, spiritual authority and ethics, and spiritual practices. There are also excerpts from Snowmass 1 on the gates of unity, East and West on the path, commitment and attainment, mantra, sacred land, blessing and more.

In an afterword, Father Thomas Keating observes: "Those who seek Ultimate Reality perceive themselves as citizens of the Earth. Their first loyalty is to the entire human family. They transcend the particularities of race, nationality and religion without reacting against them or trying to destroy them. They recognize the profound human values that the world religions enshrine. They work to preserve and enhance these values, but not at the cost of dividing the fundamental unity of the human family. They belong to an emerging global community."