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In New Business thought, intuition usually crops up in management decision-making. Rationality does not fade away altogether, but its exercise in business—such as cost effectiveness analysis and statistical quality control—serves intuition.

As Gary Zukav writes in "Evolution and Business" in The New Paradigm in Business (coedited by Stanford University's Michael Ray of the World Business Academy), "Intuition will replace rationalization as the primary source of data in the development of long-term strategies, the means of implementing those strategies, and in the resolution of everyday challenges."

To be sure, in her survey of Christian CEOS (Believers in Business), Laura Nash of Harvard Business School found that successful executives leave room for intuition. But New Paradigm adherents encourage intuitive powers that tend to steer people away from trust in the transcendent God.

One way of developing intuition is through visualization. Traditionally, visualization was merely a means of clarifying goals by beginning "with the end in mind"—that was the sense in which Stephen R. Covey used it in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

But in the New Paradigm, visualization becomes a means of tapping into the powers of the Universal Consciousness to create or manipulate reality. Businesspersons create a vivid mental image of the goal, which then "works through the individual's intuition and unconscious mental processes as he or she makes the multitude of everyday decisions that bring the goal ever near," the late futurist Willis Harman wrote in Global Mind Change.

In the cosmic scheme of the New Paradigm, these intuitive powers form part of the means by which humanity evolves toward spiritual utopia. In Harman's vision, this is the "Transcendental Monism" of consciousness as a "causal reality."

Work in Christ, by contrast, helps build the kingdom that only the Second Coming will bring about in fullness.

Copyright © 2003 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Also appearing on our site today:

The Higher Self Gets Down to Business | An old movement appears anew—in the corporate world.

Prosperity Consciousness | How the higher self gets down to business.

Organizations or conferences mentioned in the article include:

• Spirit in Business
  
  
• Institute of Noetic Sciences
  
  
• World Business Academy
  
  
• The Message Company
  
  
• Spirit at Work
  
  
• International Conference on Business and Consciousness

Scruples' online sites offer resources, articles, and web forums on spirituality in the workplace.

Marketplace Ministries exists to share God's love through chaplains in the workplace by on-site Employee Assistance Program for client companies.

In November 1999, BusinessWeek looked at the growing presence of spirituality in Corporate America in the article, "Religion in the Workplace."

Beliefnet.com has an archive of articles on spirituality and religion in business.

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February 2003, Vol. 47, No. 2