there are many indications of the possible emergence of a trans-modern picture of reality differing both from the scientific worldview and the traditional religious worldview.

The core of the current challenge to the scientific worldview can be taken to be "consciousness," which has come to be a code word for a wide range of human experience, including conscious awareness or subjectivity, intentionality, selective attention, intuition, creativity, relationship of mind to healing, spiritual sensibility, and a range of anomalous experience and phenomena.

The critical epistemological issue is whether we humans have basically one way of contacting Reality (namely, through the physical senses) or two (the second being the deep intuition).

whether consciousness is caused (by physiological processes in the brain

or causal (in the sense that consciousness is not only a causal factor in present phenomena, but also a causal factor throughout the entire evolutionary process).