REFLECTIONS ON NEOHUMANIST SOLUTIONS FOR A WORLD IN CRISIS

BY DR. MARCUS BUSSEY

Change is in the air! Change of course is disruptive, scary, often tumultuous and definitely challenging! Change requires us to change: rethink, even caste aside, old habits; devise and explore new pathways into the future. Sometimes change is so intense, so widespread, layered and omnipresent that we experience it as crisis. In recent years the acceleration of change elements has increased exponentially as each dimension of change intersects with other change processes. 2020 seemed to be the perfect storm for change-as-crisis and, as such, it was fitting to end the year with a global conference hosted by Ananda Marga Gurukula on the theme Neohumanist Solutions for a World in Crisis.

As conferences go it was highly successful drawing over 1000 people from 80 plus countries, offering an Eastern and Western hemisphere selection of 33 sessions drawing on the skills and insights of 70 experts. And all this over an action packed four days from December 11 to December 14. Furthermore all sessions were recorded and can now be accessed on line through the dedicated Neohumanist College website. Of course, none of this would have been possible without the efforts of a wide range of people working on concept, infrastructure, networking and more! Thanks to you all!
As noted above, change is not a singular ‘thing’. Change on the scale we are currently experiencing is profoundly rooted in a world of interconnected systems. Economic change, political change, environmental change, existential change, cultural change, technological change and more are coalescing to create a deep sense of emergence, spiritual expansion and (dare I say it) dread.

Neohumanism is a gift for such times as these as it offers a positive and practical philosophy of engagement with the world. It links the internal work on self we need to do with action in the world. It offers a vision of the world as a connected and living consciousness in which we all participate. It gives us the chance to participate as conscious, spiritually aware beings rather than as sleepwalkers into the future. It is rational and devotional in that it looks at the world and our place in it critically, from a spiritual perspective asking questions such as: “In whose interests are we working? How can we increase all beings’ access to the generosity of our planet without depleting its resources or favouring a particular group/species? What new skills, practices or ideas do we need to embrace to further and birth a new relational, Neohumanist, consciousness on the planet? How does the personal and the planetary, the social and the cultural, the economic and the environmental, and so on find a win-win story to carry us beyond crisis? How can I love that which I fear or do not understand?”
Such questions require us to be clear headed and yet approach all problems as devotional challenges in which we draw up what Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, the founder of Neohumanism, called ‘loving stamina’. To date, our world has been viewed as the stage upon which humanity enacted its evolutionary story. The world was a resource, like a mother giving endlessly of her bounty. This is no longer possible as we are discovering the world has physical limits. It is now time to explore other pathways and to give back to our mother Earth with loving devotion. This conference lays out a clear agenda for this work.
The 33 sessions showcase a wide variety of approaches to the challenges of our time. If we divide them into sections we can see workshops on self-development, socio-economics and governance, agriculture, education, the new science of Microvita, rural development projects, the arts, history, social justice, devotional practice, sustainable energy, futures thinking, indigenous values and of course meditation, spirituality and yoga. To map this we can turn to the four quadrant model offered by integral theorist Ken Wilber (2001) in which Neohumanism deals with the external world of things; the social and structural world of processes; the cultural world of values, beliefs and aspirations; and finally, the personal/subjective world of each individual’s hopes and fears, ethics and spirit. Such a model looks like this (Figure 1):

Currently, all quadrants are under pressure and experiencing crisis. Thus, we find that the material world is suffering degradation, climate change, fires and deforestation but also resource scarcity and distortions in distribution. The social world of institutions and infrastructure is struggling to manage the structures we have created to support our societies and failing to take account of the environmental impacts of our clever handiwork such as cities, industries and agriculture. The cultural world is failing to provide positive and inclusive ‘stories’ to manage these pressures and in many parts of the world it is retreating into socio and geo-sentimental positions that privilege specific slices of humanity over others. The personal sphere is under multiple pressures and given the stresses faced by the other quadrants is caught between terror of social and environmental collapse and a sense of promise that maybe all these crises are leading to something profoundly new and special.

Slaughter, R. A., & Bussey, Marcus. (2005). Futures Thinking For Social Foresight. Taipei: Tamkang University Press.
Wilber, K. (2001). A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science and Spirituality. Boulder: Shambhala.