My contribution to the UN “United and Present” Conference on Mindfulness and Public Policy, Geneva, December 9-10, 2025.
There is a piece of wisdom from the great scientist Albert Einstein that gets mentioned often these days. The exact quote is from 1946, as the human race entered the era after the first atomic bombs. He said:
Often in evolutionary processes a species must adapt to new conditions in order to survive. Today the atomic bomb has profoundly altered the nature of the world as we knew it, and the human race consequently finds itself in a new habitat to which it must adapt its thinking.
A simpler version of that might be: “The problems we face in our day and age are not going to be solved by the same consciousness that created those problems in the first place,” especially the poly-crisis which the UN says we are facing. And so––we need a new consciousness, what I would call a transformed consciousness or an evolved consciousness.
If the atomic bomb profoundly altered the nature of the world as we knew it in 1945, what is it that has further altered the world by the first quarter of the 21st century? If we would substitute 9/11 and the rise of terrorism, or globalization and nationalism, or the worldwide web and the promise/threat of AI for Baby Boy and Fat Man––those cute nicknames for the two horrendous bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki––it seems obvious to me that “The problems we face in our times are not going to be solved by the same consciousness that created those problems in the first place.” Therefore, we need a new consciousness.
Speaking from my own tradition, in St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, he writes a very strong line. He says, Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your…—the next word is usually weakly translated in English as “mind.” But the Greek word Paul uses is actually nous, which is something very specific. In the Aristotelian sense, our nous lies beyond our sense perception, beyond our memory and imagination. According to classical and medieval philosophy, the individual nous is connected to and stems from the divine-cosmic nous, the creator of order. You might say it’s the closest thing that human beings have to “the mind of God.” Of course, from both a Stoic and Christian perspective, this is also the broadest understanding of the logos, which is related to chit of Sanskrit and the tao of China. Since there is not an adequate satisfying translation for nous in European languages, I usually just translate it, “be transformed by the renewal of your consciousness.”
And what the spiritual traditions have shown, or at least what they have claimed, is, first of all, that it is at this depth level of our consciousness that the actual transformation of consciousness takes place. We need to be transformed by the renewal of our consciousness. And this happens at a depth we rarely access.
What the spiritual traditions have also claimed and shown is that, provoked by the deep work of spiritual practice, an actual transformation takes place at this deepest level of human consciousness––an evolution you might say. A contemplative or mystical experience can lead to a new way of understanding and articulating both the nature of human being––what we might call “spiritual anthropology,” and the nature of reality itself––what philosophy and theology refer to as ontology and cosmology,
Apropos the topic at hand, what I have found over and over again in studying the world’s authentic spiritual traditions, is that the enlightenment experience, if and when it is provoked by the deep work of spiritual practice, brings about an experience of the unity of all being as a collateral effect of this transformation of consciousness. And that in turn carries with it an aspiration for peace among people and peoples as an obvious and logical consequence. How Einstein articulated his solution was simply this: “Today we must abandon competition and secure cooperation.”
My conclusion for this august assembly is this: Those who are making policy decisions are in dire need of this transformation and evolution of consciousness that can only come about from this deep work if we are to not only thrive but even survive as a race. No government leader to the left or the right or in the center has adequate solutions to the problems that we face unless and until they are doing this work because… the problems we face are not going to be solved by the same consciousness that created those problems. Some kind of conversion-transformation-evolution has to take place in our collective consciousness. And I believe that the deep work of mindfulness and meditation is the surest time-tested engine of that transformation.
Cyprian Consiglio, OSB Cam.
