Earlier this week, my wife read my son a story that no one would have read to me when I was growing up. It was about Diwali, the festival of lights celebrated annually by Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, and others around the world.

I first heard of Diwali when I was much older than my nine-year-old. I’m not Hindu, and I’m not from India, where the festival originated centuries ago as a harvest celebration. Growing up in a very Christianized portion of north Texas, Hanukkah served as the limit of my experience with the world’s religions. So why does my kid know about Diwali when I didn’t? After all, is this simply the sort of thing that happens when you have a father with expertise in religious history?

Perhaps, but there’s more going on here than the accidents of birth. The world is changing spiritually, and in profound ways. It is more alive, more accessible, and becoming alloyed through the exchange of ideas and practices, than ever before.

The Human Phenomenon that Didn’t Die

For much of the past 150 years or so, many educated people throughout the world have held that spirituality, along with its sources in religious and wisdom traditions, has been on the decline. Evolutionary biologists, Marxist revolutionaries, and cultured despisers of religion have waited for the day when what they view as “superstition” would dwindle away.

Except, that day never arrived. The world is still a very religious, and spiritual, place. If anything, we are more awash in the spiritual than 150 years ago.

Oh, sure, the spiritual deck has been reshuffled in terms of how and with what people affiliate themselves. And yes, there are tons of people who now separate spirituality from religion. But neither scientific nor political revolution wiped out the impulse animating human spirituality—to look both within and without to find purpose and meaning.

Even avowedly nonreligious folks are discovering—indeed, embracing—spirituality. Atheists now have humanist chaplains that advise on spiritual practice. Chew on that fact for a moment. Not only did spirituality not die, it converted nonbelievers into practitioners.

Migrating Traditions

As the global population expanded in the twentieth century, migration brought the world’s spiritual traditions to your local neighborhood. This is a recurring historical phenomenon, for war, disease, famine, and opportunity have driven previous waves of global migrants. But the scale of the past century of migration has meant that more people are exposed to families and communities with different ways of being spiritual. And that exposure happens at school, at the neighborhood barbeque, at the grocery store.

And thanks to the internet, that migration has occurred virtually as well. My nine-year-old self would have had to somehow hear the term “Diwali,” go to the library, try different spellings searching the physical card catalog, and pray to the gods that my library had an encyclopedia, book, or periodical that happened to mention it. My son just has to ask Siri.

This is all a way of saying that spiritual traditions are both more visible and accessible than they ever have been in human history. You no longer have to be one of the Fab Four and go to India to learn about transcendental meditation. All you do is go to Google, our modern-day oracle.

Brittle Absolutisms

If there is a note of caution in this story of expansion and accessibility, it lies in the discomfort such change can evoke in groups committed to the spiritual and religious status quo. Some see the arrival of strange traditions on their shores with hostility, feeling that something in their own spirituality or culture is threatened, in danger of being lost.

This, again, is a recurring theme in history. When the printing press facilitated an explosion in access to knowledge, it created a kind of crisis of thinking: with all these diverse and opposed thoughts, how did you know what was true and right? There is a kind of parallel crisis in our current information explosion, and it can create the opportunity for competing absolutisms to take hold. What we call “polarization” is in fact a fixing of absolute opposites, a way to resolve complexity into graspable terms. And we can transpose this mindset onto competing ways of being spiritual. It makes for a brittle form of spirituality.

And yet the masters of every spiritual tradition see more in common with each other than with this kind of fixed mindset. Those who have spent their lives scaling the heights of the human spirit—whatever range they know best—have more affinity with other climbers than those who haven’t dared the climb at all.

A New Axial Age?

When you consider the increasing expansion, accessibility, and vulnerability of spirituality today, it suggests to me that we are the midst of great change. There is considerable exchange, mixing of practices and beliefs, organizations and institutions dying and renewing and being born, relationships that sift what works and what doesn’t.

What seems clear to me is that none of our traditions, from wherever we hail, will remain the same. They are all changing, all at once.

Centuries ago, there was a period when all the spiritual traditions that we now think of as the world’s “great religions” underwent a period of refining, gathering, and consolidation. It was the time of the Greek philosophers, the Hebrew Prophets, Confucius and the Buddha and others. Scholars call it the Axial Age—and around the results of that age our spirits have turned for millennia.

I believe we are in the beginning throes of a new Axial Age. And that these changes are more important, more enduring, more consequential for our global future than any political or national or cultural reality. Spirituality has more capacity to harness the best of human potential than any other way of being we know. If we take the strengths and insights we learn from our neighbors, and add them to our own traditions, we might emerge with a kind of “spiritual alloy,” a new form that’s stronger, more durable, and more flexible than that with which we started. We best seize the opportunity to shape the human spirit for the next millennia.