http://www.pathsoflearning.net/articles_Quaker.php
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Quaker practice seems to confirm the pattern of spiritual development that Ken Wilber (1983) has identified in the history of consciousness: Over the course of many centuries and throughout diverse civilizations, he explains, religious understanding has evolved from magical practices to archetypal mythologies to intellectual models to direct apprehension of transpersonal reality.
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In so doing, they began to break free of cultural (mythological and ideological) identities that differentiate human beings and make them adversaries; they saw instead that a more fully realized spirituality reveals the universal source of human identity.
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A Spirituality of Social Justice
This religious viewpoint leads to potentially radical social and educational ideals, as the Society of Friends has amply demonstrated.
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Quakers have been led to proclaim “testimonies” against slavery, war, and exploitation, and their moral passion has supplied potent leadership and ideals to movements for social justice and peace. Numerous Friends have been moved by their spiritual awakening to “speak truth to power”—to confront injustices perpetrated by governments, armies and others with authority despite personal risk. At many times in the past three and a half centuries, Quaker activists in both England and the United States (and increasingly elsewhere) have sought to arouse a greater public commitment to values such as community, equality, simplicity, and nonviolence or “harmony.”
Friends have been involved in movements for prison reform, improved medical and psychiatric care, gender equality, human rights for Native Americans and other marginalized populations, conscientious objection to military service, environmentalism and other forms of political and humanitarian action.
Indeed, Quaker spirituality has had a profound influence on modern social movements, though it is not explicitly recognized very often. Recently, however, sociologist Paul Ray, who has studied so-called “cultural creatives” and the social vision they have carried forward from the 1960s, was asked about the “earlier struggles” that influenced the rise of social activism in that decade. “Well,” he replied, “you could argue that the Quakers started the whole thing.…” centuries earlier, along with a handful of other groups. “Those people did the first versions of [cultural] reframing—it’s just that the rest of the culture didn’t pick up on it at the time” (van Gelder, Ray and Anderson, 2001, p. 17).
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