Practical Spirituality and Human Development: Creative Experiments for Alternative Futures

538 Pages·2019·4.532 MB·English

by  Ananta Kumar Giri

PRACTICAL SPIRITUALITY
AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
Creative Experiments for Alternative Futures
Practical Spirituality and Human Development
Ananta Kumar Giri
Editor
Practical Spirituality
and Human
Development
Creative Experiments for Alternative Futures
Editor
Ananta Kumar Giri
Madras Institute of Development
Studies
Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India
ISBN 978-981-13-3686-7 ISBN 978-981-13-3687-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3687-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018964110
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For Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, Thich Nhat Hanh, Swami Agnivesh,
Manoj Das and Guruma Arundhati Debi
F
oreword
The twenty-first-century world we live in reflects opportunity and
direct costs of the fracture of the harmony that governed the human,
spiritual and natural ecosystem and made the evolution of the human
race in Africa possible. This book, Practical Spirituality and Human
Development: Creative Experiments for Alternative Futures challenges
us to re-commit to embracing ways of thinking, acting and being as
spiritual beings so we can re-establish sustainable harmony.
Ananta Kumar Giri sets the tone of this important book in the pref-
ace to this book as well as in his introductory chapter to the first vol-
ume on Practical Spirituality and Human Development by making the
case that practical spirituality is “transformative practice which leads to
self-transformation, cultural transformation and world transformation.”
Transformation as an expression of the spiritual work of confronting the
self in its brokenness and striving for the wholeness that emerges from
seeing the Divine in all of the creation starting with the self, one’s society
and the whole world.
We have much to learn from indigenous cultures across the globe,
from the Khoi/San in Africa, the Intuits in the Arctic region, the
Aborigines in Australia, etc. Their cultures unself-consciously embrace
the Divine as manifest in all creation. Their cultures have no boundaries
between the spiritual, physical, human, nature and the cosmos.
Modern humans although bestowed with the capacity for a con-
sciousness of the inextricable links between body, mind and soul as well
as generations that have come before and would come behind us across
vii
viii FoREWoRD
time and space, have not done the practical spiritual work to give expres-
sion to this holism. our focus on materialism, the nature of economic
and social systems we participate in, alienate us from the imperatives of
holism as essential to harmony and peace in our lives, society and the
world.
I have been encouraged by a book I read recently The Nordic
Secret—A European Story of Beauty and Freedom by Lene Rachel
Andersen and Tomas Bjorkman, Danish and Swedish citizens respec-
tively. The book makes the case that at the core of the Nordic success
is a deep understanding of, and commitment to investment in the pro-
motion of a strong social fabric characterized by shared values and eth-
ics through the complex “inner work” in each citizen linking the body,
mind and soul. Each of the Nordic countries has over centuries invested
in Bildung defined as moral, intellectual and emotional transformation.
Transforming mindsets of feudalism that sustain hierarchical author-
itarianism and abuse, to helping citizens attain emotional freedom and
self-authorship, is an essential complex and painful process. Pastors of
the Reformed Churches ably led the transformation of Nordic coun-
tries from feudalism to prosperous social democracies over a period of
70 years. These pastors redefine their ministry from serving the elites to
focus it on practical spirituality of healing the wounds of feudalism and
weaving together societies characterized by caring human rights values.
Practical Spirituality and Human Development: Creative Experiments
for Alternative Futures provides a rich platform of insights by thinkers
across all faiths and cultures to forge diverse pathways to the transfor-
mation of the self, our cultures and the world. Each one of us needs to
become actively conscious of the Divine within us, within our fellow
human beings, and within nature and the cosmos around. This con-
sciousness of the Divine will guide us to contribute in a deliberate way to
a more harmonious sustainable world.
Camps Bay, South Africa Mamphela Ramphele
P
reFace
Spirituality is an integral part of life and is manifest in our aspirations
and relationships. It is also manifest in our quest for beauty, dignity and
dialogues in the midst of ugliness, disrespect and monologues of many
kinds which constitutes the vision and pathways of practical spiritual-
ity in self, culture, society and the world. This second volume in our
engagement with practical spirituality, Practical Spirituality and Human
Development: Creative Experiments for Alternative Futures, continues our
quest for understanding and realizing the vision and practice of practi-
cal spirituality which follows our first volume, Practical Spirituality and
Human Development: Transformation in Religions and Societies.
This book has been long in the making and I am grateful to all the
contributors to our volume for their kindness and patience. I am grateful
to Professor Mampehla Ramphele, an inspiring activist, thinker, fighter
for freedom and public intellectual from South Africa for her Foreword
and Paul Schwartzentruber, a deep thinker, activist for non-violent
change, theologian and friend of the world, for his Afterword for our
book. I am grateful to friends in Palgrave Macmillan especially Connie
Li and Sarah Crowley Vigneau for their kind interest and support for
this project. I am also grateful to colleagues and staff at our Institute—
Madras Institute of Development Studies—for their kind interest.
We dedicate this book to five inspiring spiritual seekers of humanity—
Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, Thich Nhat Hanh, Swami Agnivesh, Manoj Das
and Guruma Arundhati Devi. Buddhadasa Bhikkhu was the great seeker
from Thailand who inspired a deep creative rethinking of the Buddhist
ix
x PREFACE
Path of spiritual realization. He also inspired democratic transformation
of religion, society and polity in Thailand and the world. He challenged
us to think about challenges such as Nibbana (Nirvana) in practical terms
as developing our capacity not to cling to things and practice non-attach-
ment in our day to day lives. He also inspired the movement of Engaged
Buddhism which has contributed to self-development and social transfor-
mation in Thailand, South East Asia and around the world. Thich Nhat
Hahn has been a seeker of spirituality and peace in our contemporary
world. During the Vietnam War, he courageously strove for peace. He
has inspired many people around the world with his meditation works,
books and poems. His ideas like inter-being inspire us to transform it
into trans-being in our day to day lives where interactions and rela-
tionships become sites both of creative immanence and transcendence.
Swami Agnivesh has also been a great fighter for peace and social jus-
tice. He has worked for the downtrodden and for the emancipation of
bonded labourers. His kindness and struggle for justice attract many
souls and inspire us to practice practical spirituality as struggle for dig-
nity, beauty and dialogues in our lives. Manoj Das has also been a fighter
for dignity and creator of beauty in words and worlds. In his young
days, he took part in the Communist movement of odisha and India
and struggled for dignity and justice. He then heard the call of a dif-
ferent related vocation of transformation and joined Sri Aurobindo and
the Mother in their spiritual laboratory, Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Das has
been teaching there for nearly six decades and has been exploring deeper
dimensions of the journey of self, consciousness and society through his
many deep works in literature and human relationships. His short sto-
ries, novels, and essays such as his novel Akahsara Ishara in odia invite
us to discover the meaning of our lives and realize its higher purpose of
transformation of consciousness in the midst of the manifold challenges
of our lives, especially the pull of desire to bring us down into the pits of
destruction, hatred and death. Guruma Arundhati Debi is an inspiring
embodiment of practical spirituality as an effortless and smiling dedica-
tion to the betterment of humanity through education and social work.
She embodies the spirit of a Divine Mother and relates to all concerned
with love, care and karuna. Guruma joined the Sobhaniya Movement
for education, peace and dignity launched by Kumara Bhai and has been
with many schools inspired by this movement. All our five seekers whom
we humbly dedicate this work invite us to explore new dimensions of
PREFACE xi
practical spirituality in manifold webs of our lives—religion, education
and intractable fields of domination such as caste and gender.
I hope this humble effort of ours inspires many seeking souls and
movements around the world to engage with the vision and practice
of practical spirituality. our humanity today is going through several
catastrophes and many of us are feeling helpless as orphans. Here prac-
tical spirituality can help us regain hope and courage and in this journey,
we can get inspiration from the following thought of Janusz Korczack1
which he used to share with the outgoing students from his orphanage:
We have not given you God; because you must search for Him and find
Him within yourself. We give you no country, because you must make
your own choice, the choice of your heart and reason.
We give you no love of Man, because there is no love without forgiveness.
You must search for it through hard work.
We do give you one thing, however. We give you a longing for a better
life, based on truth and justice, which you are destined to build for
yourself.
We hope that it will be this longing that will lead you to God, to your
country and to love.
But as we come to God it is a different God that we meet and play
together in practical spirituality. We get a glimpse of this in the song “oh
God” where Annika Norlin writes that God comes and sits by her side
and smiles like a toothless child. She also writes about her being with
God: “I only go under your spell how you spell my name.”2 We also
find a similar invitation for a different path of God realization as an
act and art of playing and dreaming together in the following poem,
“Homework,” by the deep and heart-touching Brazilian poet Jaci
Bezerra, a creative soul from Recife, Brazil:
It was God’s time, and God used to come
Unforeseen and, almost always, towards the end of the afternoon:
Upon arrival, He would open the doors I had closed
Revealing, at a pace, eternity.
God had the splendor of a holiday
open to innocence and toys: