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Visualizing the future, several businesspersons at a Manhattan hotel are acting out what the ideal corporate board meeting will look like in 2012. "May all the decisions we make today be guided by values and by love," the board chairman says. "Let's meditate on it. Tune in to your intuition on all levels."

It's the Spirit in Business World Conference, where more than 500 businesspeople and assorted "change agents" have come to help unleash each other's inner powers. They will spend three days spurring each other on to positive thoughts at the Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers, a sanctuary from the grit and litter outside. Then they will go to the ends of the earth as part of a fledgling movement to transform the world.

Yes, they're believers—in human potential. They believe in the power of enlightened business to imbue life with meaning. Many of them, especially their leaders, believe business will help usher in a universal shift in consciousness.

They mean many things by the term shift in consciousness, including the notion that businesspeople should rely less on rational thought and more on intuitive "inner wisdom." On a less esoteric level, the envisioned business revolution would affirm values—rather than shareholder value—as the driving force of business. Paradoxically, most of those values have biblical roots.

The spirit-minded consultants, executives, and academics are, after all, into ethics as much as energy fields. One of at least 15 such conferences taking place yearly (up from two in 1994), this event is sponsored by Greenfield, Massachusetts-Based Spirit in Business Inc. It is one of a cluster of conference organizers unifying the disciples and doctrines of a constellation of neopagan and panreligious philosophers, metaphysical futurists, and self-proclaimed gurus who recognize the power of business in today's society.

They grapple with what to call their movement, which is growing behind the wedge of spirituality in the workplace. Outsiders, such as Regent College professor of marketplace theology R. Paul Stevens, call it the New Business Spirituality. One of the institutional hubs of the movement, the Ojai, California-based World Business Academy, uses the term New Paradigm business. That term, after all, denotes a "paradigm shift" or change in fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality.

That is what the visionaries in the movement advocate: business playing a key role in a paradigm shift from scientific materialism to a metaphysical outlook—the mind influencing or dictating reality. Going global will help. The conference goal of launching a Spirit in Business World Institute & Global Network is meant to unify member institutes around the world and help corporate leaders to connect with a transforming divinity—the god within, or something.

This may sound like that ol' time New Age religion, but only because it is. Having shed fringe elements like crystal gazing, the New Age movement's fundamental tenets—both human-centered spirituality and its oddly compatible neopagan cousins—are moving into the mainstream.

In this movement, infiltrating the daily world of business is paramount. The New Age movement of the 1980s discovered the business world in the 1990s. New Age bookstores planted business sections, and the business sections of mainstream booksellers began sprouting New Age-tinted titles by authors from pop guru Deepak Chopra (The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success) to Michael Ray (The New Paradigm in Business), a professor at Stanford University's graduate business school.

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February 2003, Vol. 47, No. 2