much matter what form this practice takes, or, again, what historically colored images are used to describe it. Prayer, meditation, ritual, selfless service, fasting, retreat, physical disciplines—all such practices serve to disidentify the person from conditioned, habitual ways of being. They nourish a center of personality, a “Self,” in Jung’s terms, that lies outside, or beyond, or “higher” than the largely unconscious personality that is driven by fears, desires, insecurities, appetites, and fantasies. This realm that lies beyond our limited ego is regarded as sacred; it is, presumably, unpolluted by ideology or our petty desires. Obviously, religious beliefs and practices have often, and very tragically, used the human longing for the sacred to sanction hatred and unspeakable violence, so it becomes vitally necessary to distinguish genuine transcendence or disidentification from spiritual fanaticism. The greatest teachers in all traditions have declared that genuine spirituality results in loving nonviolence, so any ideology that leads to division, hate, and killing, no matter what spiritual language it uses to justify its claims, is still just ideology. It is psychological distortion mixed with cultural prejudice, projected onto the transcendent realm and blinding us to its true radiance. On a transpersonal level, a spiritual understanding of the Cosmos recognizes that there are vast evolutionary forces at work, far beyond our immediate experience or understanding. Secular modern culture has no place in its worldview for these mysterious formative energies, regarding any spiritual cosmology as superstition. Yet mystics (Rudolf Steiner being a notable modern example) maintain that these energies are real, and in fact shape the course of human destiny. Cultural and intellectual historians refer sometimes to thezeitgeist of a certain age, meaning the “spirit of the times” in a metaphorical sense, yet Steiner, for one, holds that there literally is a spiritual intelligence or being with a particular temperament or tendencies, that rules each period of history.