Walking the Dusty Road
I have been walking a long dusty road all my life and have found friends to share the journey all over the world. These fellow travellers all bring something to share: a story, a piece of cake, some wisdom or a smile. Sometimes I get caught up in a caravan of travelers and we share and laugh and cry; dream and evoke. This past two weeks has been one such convergence of hearts and minds. It began in Bangalore with a meeting at the Fireflies earth-spirituality ashram (without a guru) where some 80 people converged to explore the idea of Sustainable Journeys.
This was a four day intimate and diverse meeting involving many reflections and accounts on real projects going on in rural India. It came with an analysis of the political economy of the Sustainability discourse and included enacted representations of stories of Hope and a soulful alignment with the struggles of people at all levels of society. Ashish Kothari described his project and the challenges of the future; Marakand Paranjape gave an overview of the world historical predicament we face; Rama Mani enacted the power of women to heal the local and dream the global; Prashant Olalekar offered body wisdom through the InterPlay method. For all of us it was clear that for sustainability to be relevant it had to become a cultural force that brought expanded meaning to peoples’ lives.
This theme was continued at two interrelated seminars held at the Indus Business Academy (IBA) on 1. Practical Spirituality and 2. Gandhi, Aurobindo and the State. Here a range of thinkers were invited by Ananta Kumar Giri to come together for another four days of dialogue around issues of engaged spirituality and what it means in the contemporary context. For me, the key was the role tradition plays in shaping any meaningful pathway to rich futures. Religious traditions must play a part in whatever transition occurs in the sustainable turn. This is so because the majority world is religious and not secular. Despite the limitations — historical, theological, aspirational, structural etc — of religions they a rich sources of cultural material that has real relevance today. Bring in spirituality and the pragmatic tradition, add a good dose of poetry and dreaming, and the result is surprisingly stimulating.
We were not seeking answers but rather trying to identify sign posts to the future and also practice the openness and tolerance that deep dialogue demands. Discussions were often challenging, and shifted from the theoretical explorations of thinkers such as Pierce, James and Dewey to grounded reflections of culture and the implications of spirituality not as a panacea but as a critical tool for social transformation. For me critical spirituality is a key plank in rethinking how we as social and individual beings can engage with the injustices that accompany our rush towards unsustainable futures.
It is clear that cultures and their social structures are all in the business of legitimation and socialisation and, to a greater or lesser extent, domestication and pacification of populations. Yet they also represent repositories of possibility. We inherit stories of meaning from our traditions but these are often distorted and twisted by the passage of time. We need to stop trying to be worthy of such limited stories and strive instead to find stories worthy of us. Being part of this caravan of seekers enables us to partake in this reframing.
The caravan then sped up and transported me to Holland and the city of Den Bosch. Here I just spent three days with a group of educators from around the world looking to take the story of Neohumanism as a road map to the future. In general terms the mission of Neohumanism is to expand the love of the human heart to include all creation. There is an implicit pedagogy in this aspiration and this is what we focused on. It seemed to us that Love of course was the driving force. Love expands us in all ways — physically (love of one’s body, ones environment), intellectually (love of learning, curiosity and questions), intuitionally (love of imagination), aesthetically (love of creativity and subtlety) and spiritually (love of Cosmos, the Sacred). Yet we knew this had to be given specific forms so we linked this to service to humanity and the planet exploring a service oriented pedagogy. Of course education in today’s world also needs to be practical and relevant so we looked at how Love can inform the curricula of maths, language, science etc. These elements all folded together and mutually informed our discussions.
On the dusty road Neohumanism promotes a pragmatic and critical spirituality that measures relevance in curriculum by the ability of learning to liberate our minds from blind traditions, dogmas, conditioning etc. It is an effort, through love, to be less conditioned by present reality and open to new stories not simply as passive receptors but as active cultural and spiritual agents.
So two weeks on the dusty road involved a whole range of rich encounters and I must stress these conversations were not left in the air. Projects, new relationships and old friendships were all consolidated. Many actions have flowed from these encounters. Here I will mention only one. I am involved with neohumanist educator Yolande Koning and others in a research project to explore the curricula potential of the yogic notion of ‘layers of the mind’ — kosas in Sanskit. I am looking forward to developing this fascinating inquiry.
Key thought: To live as unreflective cultural beings is to be dead to the possibilities of culture!
