What if we all accepted and embraced our own specific cultural or religious identities, yes, but stopped seeing any of these as ultimate, and started seeing them all as expressions of our shared humanity? Herein lies the potential politics of the flip. We are not our thoughts. We are not even our beliefs. We are first and foremost conscious and

I strongly suspect that mystical experiences of light and energy are experiences of light and energy “from the inside,” whereas the physics of light and energy is mathematically mapping light and energy “from the outside.”

materialism only “wins” as long as it gets to declare the rules of the game.

Human nature is irrepressibly spiritual in nature in the simple sense that human beings will generally want to orient themselves to some larger whole or purpose. I would go so far as to suggest that it is quite correct to do so, since as individuals they are parts of a larger whole (the entire universe). They will do this in many ways, including

Deep ecology is a broad spiritual and philosophical movement that can be traced back to the Norwegian intellectual and activist Arne Næss, who was a trained philosopher and a student of Mahatma Gandhi. Its basic claim is that we are an intimate part of a larger ecobody or ecosystem and so should care for the ecosystem not as a collection of dead

More radically still, we will have to become the mirror mirroring us. We will have to move from third-person observation to first-person awareness. For this, it is useful to listen to those who have been flipped, and to take their collective witness as one possible key to where we ourselves might look now. What we need is a new way of knowing, a

Put a bit differently, our conclusions are really a function of our exclusions. What we think the stuff on the table means is mostly a function of what we have taken off that table.

Sometimes one can best understand an idea by looking at those who reject it.

That is precisely why these truths are so important, and why colleges and universities are so important—because these are the only institutions that nurture and support professional humanists and intellectuals in large numbers. These institutions fill a vital function of any healthy modern society: the function of robust and unflinching self,