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lthough there have been many advances in physics, the implications of quantum theories have not been incorporated into the humanities. As a result, much of academia has remained in a seventeenth or eighteenth century worldview, with some scholars still seeking to analyze spirituality in dualistic, reductionistic, and materialistic terms that in fact have been superceded. Such perspectives often result in mistaken thinking based in category errors. In this article, we point the way beyond such dualism, and argue in favor of transdisciplinary approaches to the study of religion and in particular, spirituality. We posit a new model for understanding interiority prefiguring a unified, transdisciplinary approach that engages quantum physics and the humanities.

W~ thout doubt, the most radical changes in the history of higher educaion have come about through technology. Certainly the huge universities and giant enrollments that began in the 1950s and 1960s could not have happened without the advent of all the technology that makes possible a university larger than many small cities. Nor could the phenomenal growth of regional "commuter" universities during the late twentieth century have come about without the automobile and its essential complement, cheap gasoline. ~ I myself attended exactly such a commuter university for my own undergraduate degree, and received a very good education there. It was an inexpensive, but good traditional liberal arts school: I experienced mostly small classes and engaged and engaging professors. By the early twenty-first century, though, there was a new kind of higher education emerging, one again brought about by technological change, but representing a total, revolutionary shift in the nature of higher education. This new kind of education was virtual, and it represents a potentially significant decline in the nature and quality of higher education.Despite the tremendous changes in higher education made possible by technology in the latter third of the twentieth century, for the most part the university at core retained much of its traditional structure, (if not its traditional values) during this period. Admittedly, this period saw the phenomenal growth of huge state and regional universities, the development of classes of more than 500 students at a time (made possible by computer-scanned tests and machines that track attendance with the swipe of a student's identification card), burgeoning technical and business degree programs, and much else. Truth be told, the basic structure--a professor in a room with twenty or thirty students--continued from the past. Videotaped courses and the like were mostly failures: for the most part, the give-and-take of the classroom was not essentially different in 1999 from 1899.But this ageless social structure of the classroom was to change radically with the advent of virtual education. As anyone knows who has engaged in electronic communication, exchanges in this medium always have a flattened, two-dimensional character.

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