What does it mean to go beyond our ordinary perception of reality? Why has almost all of humanity, throughout our history, had the concept of transcendence and connection to “the other” – to “the spirit world,” to “God,” or to “the One behind it all?”

This remarkable work coalesces findings from the shamans of the Ice Age (God 1.0), to the first temples, priests and gods of the Neolithic era and Mesopotamia (God 2.0), to the Axial Age prophets and the three major monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam (God 3.0). It reveals how verbal descriptions of a nonverbal transcendental experience, always intended to be metaphorical, gradually became taken by many as literal truth.

In a stunning unification of modern science, religion and spirituality, God 4.0 presents a provocative new view of transcendence and connection as the activation of an innate quiescent faculty in the brain, a second system of cognition we all share. If developed, it can help to dissolve religious, tribal and cultural biases and usher in a higher level of conscious connection — a new “spiritual literacy.”