Progressive Reform

Philosophical Interpretation of Progress

noreply@blogger.com (Progressive Development) — Tue, 31 Jan 2017 22:38:00 +0000

by P R Sarkar

Founder of PROUT

What is “progress”? There are two parts: one is “pro”, another is “gress”. “Pro” is the prefix, “gress” is the root verb. In the physical stratum, what happens? In each and every phase of movement there is a tendency to maintain the status quo. In each and every phase of our lives, when something new comes, when a novel idea comes, most of the people in the first phase will try to retain the status quo. They will say “No, no, no. What our foreparents did, and what is being followed even now, should be retained. There should not be any change.”

The psychic reason is that change is always risky; people want to avoid that risk; that’s why they want to retain the status quo.

When in a person or anything, any living object, even in the case of certain inanimate objects also, there is a tendency to retain the status quo, there cannot be any progress. In their lives, the age of the bullock cart still goes on. And that’s why in certain civilizations of the world, progress stopped. In certain civilizations, progress stopped when they couldn’t invent the wheel.

Those who want progress in the physical stratum, what are they to do? They are to change the status quo, they are to metamorphose the structure of the status quo and create another framework. In the second phase also, they will have to change the status quo, and as a result of metamorphosis create a third framework, a third structure; and the process goes on like this.

Hence we may say that in the physical stratum, progress means a never-ending process of metamorphosis. If there is any weakness in the mind of an individual or in the mind of a collective body, weakness for any particular status quo, weakness for any particular framework, then there cannot even be any relative progress in the physical stratum. So those who embrace progressive ideas must remember this fundamental fact – that if they are actually progressive, if they are not reactionary, then they should always be ready to change the status quo and create a newer one. If this process, this continuous process, of metamorphosis, goes on unbarred, then we may say that that person or those people are progressive, because they have understood the spirit of progress and they have developed the psychology of a never-ending fight against the status quo. Do you follow?

Then on the psychic level – humans move not only on the physical level, humans are even more mobile in the psychic stratum. And because of this dominating psychic stratum, humans are known as manusya [in Sanskrit]. Manusya means “the entity, the living body, where mind dominates and not the physical structure”. In mental progress also, there are tendencies to retain the status quo. And what is the status quo in the psychic stratum?

The status quo is so many irrational theories, so many irrational ideas, so many ritualistic weaknesses, and so many dogmas which are nothing but ideas having no legs to stand upon. These ritualistic weaknesses, or say, these irrational theories, they are also parts of “dogma”, they also come within the bigger field of “dogma”. So if one wants progress on the psychic level, one must be ready to change the structure of dogmas.

Suppose there is one dogma – just change its structure by psychic hammering, by logical hammering, by intellectual hammering. We should always be ready to hammer those old ideas which are dogmas in the proper spirit of the term, because they have no logical legs to stand upon. And in the realm of rationality, in the psychic realm, in the psychic sphere, if one idea comes, and if you see that that idea has no logical support, no scientific support, no support of rationality, just give up that idea, and be ready to welcome newer ideas, novel ideas. Don’t be guided by dogmas if you want any progress on the psychic level.

Although psychic progress is a relative progress, that progress has immense import for human society and humanity's future. If the future of humanity in all its layers, in all its strata, is to be assured, there must be psychic progress, and one must not discourage psychic progress. Psychic progress will help humanity in finding the true from the mist of so many years.

True progress is in the realm of spirituality. In spirituality the idea becomes one with the ideology, and the ideology coincides with the nuclear Consciousness. So in the realm of psychic progress the question of a continuous process of metamorphosis doesn’t arise, but in that case there is progress; and what is that progress? When you are one with Supreme Consciousness, when you are in love with Supreme Consciousness, when all your goals of life coincide with the Supreme Nave, then what progress is to be made?

Certainly there is room for further progress, and what is that thing? That thing is: go on loving the Supreme Consciousness, loving, still more loving, still more loving, till finally your idea, your “I” feeling, your everything, becomes one with Cosmic Consciousness. So, the true progress is in the realm of spirituality, but we must not forget that for all-round development of human society, physical progress, that is relative physical progress, and relative psychic progress, cannot be neglected, nor can they be ignored.

Political Democracy can and will be fortuitous

when Economic Democracy is established.

Explore this and other articles covering alternative economics, ethical leadership, economic democracy, and a society without the weal and woe of social and economic vicissitudes HERE

How does PROUT compare or contrast with capitalism or communism? Explore the answers HERE

What are essential ingredients assuring progressive sustainability bereft of the vicissitudes of economic or political predation, privation or disparity? Learn more HERE

Biggest Election Fraud in US History Discovered and Exposed by Bev Harris

noreply@blogger.com (Progressive Development) — Thu, 10 Nov 2016 00:51:00 +0000

Uncle Joe Led the Way

Are you a ten thousandth of a person [1/10,000] or are you a whole person? If you think you are a whole person, then shouldn't your vote count as a whole vote, a whole integer? All it takes is one person, and perhaps a software program, such as GEMS, to make you a minuscule of yourself for someone else's presumptive prerogative to marginalize you and your vote to meet their parasitic needs.

With GEMS voting software already in place in several states, and tens of millions of voters using them, you can bet for sure that major voting fraud in the 2016 election has occured -- not by "individual voters", but by nefarious people and enterprises in place to serve their needs at your expense.

Humanity continues to search for 'something better' than the hysterical extremities of bifurcated systems: left/right, Democrat/Republican, capitalism/marxism; the homeostasis of PROUT just may be exactly what we're searching for: http://bit.ly/BriefIntroductionOfPROUT

Guest article

by Jon Rappoport
October 31, 2016

The Election 'May Have Been' RIGGED!

Okay. She finally did it. On Monday, Bev Harris (blackboxvoting.org), the great investigator of vote fraud, appeared on the Alex Jones show and laid it all out. The GEMS vote-fraud system, “fraction magic,” the way the vote is being stolen. Not just in theory, but in fact. Listen to the whole interview and get the word out. Bev’s findings are staggering. Below the video is the original piece I did on this earlier this month.

High Alert: the election may still have been rigged

Votes counted as fractions instead of as whole numbers

…[A]mazingly, the vote-rigging system it describes has not gotten widespread attention. The system can be used across the entire US.

As we know, there are a number of ways to rig an election. Bev Harris, at blackboxvoting.org, is exploring a specific “cheat sheet” that has vast implications for the Trump vs. Hillary contest.

It’s a vote-counting system called GEMS.

I urge you to dive into her multi-part series, Fraction Magic (Part-1 here). Here are key Harris quotes. They’re all shockers:

“Our testing [of GEMS] shows that one vote can be counted 25 times, another only one one-thousandth of a time, effectively converting some votes to zero.”

“This report summarizes the results of our review of the GEMS election management system, which counts approximately 25 percent of all votes in the United States. The results of this study demonstrate that a fractional vote feature is embedded in each GEMS application which can be used to invisibly, yet radically, alter election outcomes by pre-setting desired vote percentages to redistribute votes. This tampering is not visible to election observers, even if they are standing in the room and watching the computer. Use of the decimalized vote feature is unlikely to be detected by auditing or canvass procedures, and can be applied across large jurisdictions in less than 60 seconds.”

“GEMS vote-counting systems are and have been operated under five trade names: Global Election Systems, Diebold Election Systems, Premier Election Systems, Dominion Voting Systems, and Election Systems & Software, in addition to a number of private regional subcontractors. At the time of this writing, this system is used statewide in Alaska, Connecticut, Georgia, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Utah and Vermont, and for counties in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming. It is also used in Canada.”

“Instead of ‘1’ the vote is allowed to be 1/2, or 1+7/8, or any other value that is not a whole number.”

“Weighting a race [through the use of GEMS] removes the principle of ‘one person-one vote’ to allow some votes to be counted as less than one or more than one. Regardless of what the real votes are, candidates can receive a set percentage of votes. Results can be controlled. For example, Candidate A can be assigned 44% of the votes, Candidate B 51%, and Candidate C the rest.”

“All evidence that [rigged] fractional values ever existed [in the GEMS system] can be removed instantly even from the underlying database using a setting in the GEMS data tables, in which case even instructing GEMS to show the [rigged] decimals will fail to reveal they were used.”

“Source code: Instructions to treat votes as decimal values instead of whole numbers [i.e., rigging] are inserted multiple times in the GEMS source code itself; thus, this feature cannot have been created by accident.”

A contact who, so far, apparently wishes to remain anonymous states the following about the history of the GEMS system:

“The Fractional vote [rigging] portion traces directly to Jeffrey W. Dean, whose wife was primary stockholder of the company that developed GEMS. He ran the company but was prohibited from handling money or checks due to a criminal conviction for computer fraud, for which he spent 4 years in prison. Almost immediately after being released from prison he was granted intimate access to elections data and large government contracts for ballot printing and ballot processing.”

I see no effort on the part of the federal government, state governments, or the mainstream press to investigate the GEMS system or respond to Bev Harris’ extensive analysis.

It’s not as if media outlets are unaware of her. From shesource.org, here is an excerpt from her bio:

“Harris has been referred to as ‘the godmother’ of the election reform movement. (Boston Globe). Vanity Fair magazine credits her with founding the movement to reform electronic voting. Time Magazine calls her book, Black Box Voting, ‘the bible’ of electronic voting… Harris’s investigations have led some to call her the ‘Erin Brockovich of elections.’ (Salon.com)… Harris has supervised five ‘hack demonstrations’ in the field, using real voting machines. These have been covered by the Associated Press, the Washington Post, and in formal reports by the United States General Accounting Office…”

So far, her analysis of GEMS seems to be labeled “too hot to handle.” Press outlets prefer to report the slinging of mud from both Presidential candidates’ camps. Meanwhile, the actual results of the coming elections—including Congressional races—appear to be up for grabs, depending on who controls GEMS.

Update: From what I understand, each state government appoints a “consultant” to manage GEMS on election night. That person would be capable of rigging the vote.

Jon Rappoport

This article originally appeared here
Updates to November election challenges can be found here

Political Democracy can and will be fortuitous

when Economic Democracy is established.

Explore this and other articles covering alternative economics, ethical leadership, economic democracy, and a society without the weal and woe of social and economic vicissitudes HERE

How does PROUT compare or contrast with capitalism or communism? Explore the answers HERE

What are essential ingredients assuring progressive sustainability bereft of the vicissitudes of economic or political predation, privation or disparity? Learn more HERE

Best Democracy Money Can Buy -- Greg Palast Offers FREE Stream, Through Election Night

noreply@blogger.com (Progressive Development) — Tue, 08 Nov 2016 17:38:00 +0000

Greg Palast gives FREE ACCESS to his

new hit movie

The Best Democracy Money Can Buy:A Tale of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits

Now Through Election Night

The Scheme to throw the election is Exposed by Greg Palast, investigative reporter for Rolling Stone and The Guardian, showing the methodology and the evidence implicit of massive voting fraud in the millions, performed NOT by Voters, rather by capital interests conniving to parasitically achieve totally selfish results through massive voting fraud, in both local elections and for the Presidency of the United States.

Officials in Republican-controlled states are Turning Off Vote Verification Functions on Voting Machines!

Yes, the hit film featuring a real live investigation exposing the scheme swiping millions of votes in North Carolina, Ohio and the states that pick our President and Senate.

>> FREE, no tricks! <<

Palast says: "America needs the film more than we need the money (though, we DESPERATELY do need money).

While Greg is offering this FREE, through election night, if you can, please make a donation to furthering this and future successful investigative expose's furthering a more ethical society for all, bereft of the malignant cancer prevailing in society today.

Political Democracy can and will be fortuitous

when Economic Democracy is established.

Explore this and other articles covering alternative economics, ethical leadership, economic democracy, and a society without the weal and woe of social and economic vicissitudes HERE

How does PROUT compare or contrast with capitalism or communism? Explore the answers HERE

What are essential ingredients assuring progressive sustainability bereft of the vicissitudes of economic or political predation, privation or disparity? Learn more HERE

When Edward Snowden Speaks [about Privacy and Security], Smart Gadget Users Listen!

noreply@blogger.com (Progressive Development) — Fri, 07 Oct 2016 20:09:00 +0000

When Edward Snowden tells you NOT to download something, LISTEN!

In late September, 2016, Google delivered a new messaging service, Allo, they intend as a competitor to similar products such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

Whistleblower Edward Snowden promptly responded, on Twitter, with denouncements of Allo, to his 2 million plus followers, that Allo is "a Google app that records every message you ever send and makes it available to police upon request." [Snowden himself follows only one account: the NSA.]

Posting 'In Their Face' the Freedoms of Humanity,
and the Constitution, of which Licensed Hoodlums
wipe their asses.

Snowden refers to Allo as “Google Surveillance” because the new service stores all non-incognito messages by default, retaining them until they’re deleted by the user, something many, and perhaps most users, will not have done during the tenure of their account use.

While Google claims this improves the service’s smart-reply feature, it also means that standard Allo messages will be accessible to legal requests from law enforcement [licensed hoodlums] by default. Whereas Snowden is certain that function serves another purpose as well: “Thinking about Allo? Last year, our secret court approved 100% of requests for surveillance. They would cover Allo.”

Big Brother is Watching!

If you prefer conspicuous, or stealth exhibitionism, even to Big Brother, more power to you. But if you'd prefer to keep your private messages private, inaccessible to the nefarious shenanigans of licensed hoodlums, Mr Snowden advises using Signal Messenger.

Political Democracy can and will be fortuitous

when Economic Democracy is established.

Explore this and other articles covering alternative economics, ethical leadership, economic democracy, and a society without the weal and woe of social and economic vicissitudes HERE

How does PROUT compare or contrast with capitalism or communism? Explore the answers HERE

What are essential ingredients assuring progressive sustainability bereft of the vicissitudes of economic or political predation, privation or disparity? Learn more HERE

http://gplus.to/ProgressiveSustainability

Water Conservation, Progressive Solutions to Extraordinary Challenges Facing Humanity

noreply@blogger.com (Progressive Development) — Tue, 04 Oct 2016 03:19:00 +0000

by P R Sarkar, Founder of PROUT

At the beginning of this earth, there was absolute silence – there were no living beings or even plants. This condition continued for hundreds of millions of years, until the earth was properly formed. Then a phase came when rain and storms started, and by a gradual process, life emerged. As a result of the rain, carbon atoms got infused with vital energy (práńa shakti). Carbon atoms along with protoplasmic clash and cohesion formed this vital energy.

Water was an essential factor in the evolution of the planet, and now it is most essential for the survival of human beings, animals, plants and the planet as a whole. If it does not rain anywhere on earth for only one year, all life on the planet will be destroyed. This is because all creatures – from the smallest organisms to the largest animals – need water.

If there is no water, first the small creatures will die, then the ecological balance of the planet will be lost. Next, human beings will also die, and soon the earth will become a barren wasteland.

Global Water Crisis

In the near future there will be a severe crisis in many parts of the world. Many large rivers like the Ganga, the Jamuna and the Thames are already very polluted. People cannot drink this water, and if they even wash their hands in it they can become infected. The only solution is to rely on rainwater. We must collect the rainwater, develop the science of making artificial rain through helium or any other process, and bring the clouds which rain over the ocean onto the land. Constructing more deep tube wells is not the answer. Rather, we must catch the rainwater where it falls. Many ponds, canals, dams, lakes and reservoirs should be immediately constructed to catch the rainwater and store it for drinking water. This is the only way out of the water crisis that will confront humanity in the very near future.

In the physical sphere there are two types of calamities – natural calamities and those caused by human beings. Today most calamities are caused by human beings, but sometimes natural calamities like typhoons, floods, droughts, earthquakes, etc., also occur. Although different types of calamities may confront humanity, doomsday will never happen. The very idea of doomsday is based on dogma.

The calamities caused by human beings are mainly of two types. First, many calamities are caused by the bifurcation and trifurcation of society. The bifurcation of society is exemplified by the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians and the recent war between North and South Vietnam. The division of India into India, Pakistan and Bangladesh is an example of the trifurcation of society.

Calamities are also caused by the destruction of the environment and the indiscriminate exploitation of subterranean resources such as coal, oil and water. One of the greatest causes of environmental destruction is deforestation. Due to deforestation, the rain clouds coming from the Bay of Bengal travel all the way across India and rain on the Arabian Sea. That is, clouds which once rained on Magadh now rain on the Arabian Sea. Consequently, the water level in the Arabian Sea is gradually rising and the Bay of Bengal is becoming more salty. The result is that the water level around the coast of India is rising, the land area of the Indian subcontinent is decreasing and soil erosion is increasing. Approximately two-thirds of the surface of the globe is water and one-third is land, but due to deforestation the water portion is increasing and the land portion is decreasing.

Another cause of environmental destruction is the exploitation of subterranean resources. Deep cavities have been formed in the earth after extracting subterranean resources, and these cavities should be properly filled. In some countries it is the practice to use sand to fill the cavities created by mining underground coal. If these cavities are left unfilled, the surrounding regions are more likely to experience earthquakes than other areas. Moreover, the unfilled cavities can severely weaken the surface structure of the earth, causing whole regions to collapse.

In some Arab countries, huge amounts of money have been made by extracting oil from under the ground. Several years ago the leaders of these countries realized that the supply of oil would not last forever, so they started to think about the future of their countries after the supply of oil was exhausted. They became concerned that the level of the water-table was falling and the sizes of the deserts were increasing. To solve this problem, they decided to import soil and sweet water to create dense forests. Now the trees that they planted are eight to ten years old, and last year it was reported that they experienced floods for the first time. Many of the local people had never seen floods before, and young children even cried in alarm at the sight of the rain!

The exploitation of subterranean water reserves is contributing to desertification in many parts of the world, and as the subterranean water level recedes, the soil near the surface dries out and plants wither and die. This has already happened in many parts of Rajasthan. Afforestation is the only solution to desertification. Human beings have suffered from water scarcity and drought in the past, and this problem will continue unless proper care is taken in the future. If deforestation and the indiscriminate exploitation of subterranean water reserves continue, it is likely that many parts of the world will face severe water shortages from 1993 to at least the year 2000. The only way to avoid such a catastrophe is to immediately implement a decentralized approach to water conservation.

The Causes of Drought

Why do droughts occur? What are the most important causes of drought? There are three main causes. The first is the wanton destruction of plants or indiscriminate deforestation, the second is low pressure systems over oceans and big seas, and the third is sudden changes in the angular movement of the sun and other celestial bodies like comets, nebulae and galaxies.

Deforestation causes drought because it prevents the plants from nourishing the earth. The fibrous roots of plants absorb and hold considerable amounts of water which is slowly released into the soil. In the paddy fields of Bengal, for example, during the dry season water will trickle down the channels beside the fields. Where does the water come from? It is released from the roots of the standing crops. But when the paddy and the associate crops are harvested, the supply of water dries up. Deforestation is caused by human beings, and it is within their power to solve this problem through their own efforts.

The second and third causes are presently beyond human control. In the future, with the development of the meteorological and marine sciences, human beings will be able to partially influence and overcome the second cause, but not fully. The third cause can only be controlled by Supreme Consciousness. However, if human beings follow the path of positive microvita and have the grace of Supreme Consciousness, they can also control the third cause.

How do the sudden changes in the angular movement of celestial bodies cause drought? The paths of some comets are predetermined and astronomers can ascertain their arrival dates and possible effects on the earth, but there are other comets that appear suddenly without warning. When there is the sudden appearance of powerful celestial bodies or a sudden change in their angle of rotation, their gravitational pull may disturb the seasons and the natural order of creation. For example, as a result of the strong gravitational pull of a powerful comet or meteor, clouds may not be formed. This phenomenon is called bakudashá in Sanskrit.

Certain deviations of celestial bodies like meteors, comets and satellites take place due to the concentration of a huge number of positive and negative microvita. Movement in universal space is subject to the movement of positive and negative microvita, and this also affects life on earth.

The angularity of the movement of celestial bodies also affects the minds of human beings. Suppose you are outside enjoying a cool breeze on a calm full moon night. A soothing, painless feeling will arise in your mind. But if the feeling continues, the nerve cells in your body may become dull, and if the experience of dullness goes beyond a certain limit, your thinking power may be impaired, even causing some psychic ailment. This occurs because the ecological balance within the human structure is lost.

Say a certain incident took place in your life at the age of eight. Now we know that there is nothing identical in this universe, only similarities. If similar circumstances reoccur after a gap of say eight years, a similar incident could take place when you are sixteen. You have to ensure that people are not put into an environment which is similar to one that caused them pain and suffering in the past, as this may adversely affect their progress in the spiritual sphere. This also applies to the physical and psychic spheres.

Human movement is movement towards ecological equipoise – towards the supreme synthesis. In the inner world, balance must be maintained as this leads to spiritual progress. Ecological order is not only for the earth but for the entire universe, and it must be maintained both within and without. The angular displacement of any celestial body may affect the human mind as well as the physical universe, so balance must be maintained between the internal and external spheres. In all aspects of human life this subtle balance must be maintained. This is ecological balance.

The Defects of Well Irrigation

I have already said that constructing more deep tube wells is not the solution to the water crisis. What are the drawbacks of well irrigation? Well irrigation causes the level of the water-table to drop, while the continuous use of well irrigation dries up the subterranean flow of water. Initially the effects of continuous well irrigation may not be easy to perceive, but eventually a fertile region will be transformed into a desert. In fact, if the subterranean water level stays at above twenty to twenty-five feet, the surface vegetation will not be affected, but if it drops below fifty feet, the surface of the earth will become a barren wasteland.

The negative effects of well irrigation include the following:

1) Neighbouring shallow wells dry up creating the problem of lack of drinking water.

2) Trees, orchards and large plants do not get sufficient subterranean water so they wither and die. Green countryside will become a desert after thirty to forty-five years of intensive well irrigation.

3) In some deep tube wells enemy elements – that is, elements which are harmful to the soil such as heavy minerals and mineral salts – get mixed with the water, causing problems such as salinity. As a result, the land eventually becomes infertile and unfit for cultivation. When the flow of well water stops, irrigation tanks supplied by these wells also dry up.

Well irrigation should be used only as a temporary measure because of the devastating effects it can have on the surrounding environment. Alternative methods of irrigation include river irrigation, irrigation from reservoirs, dams and small ponds, shift irrigation and lift irrigation. Irrigation water is like the apex of a spinning top. Without it, agriculture is not possible.

The Best Methods of Irrigation

The best method of irrigation is the conservation of surface water through a system of ponds, canals, dams, lakes and reservoirs.

Take the example of Ráŕh and Orissa. The potentialities of this region have not yet been fully developed and utilized. The major portion of the wealth is subterranean, and these treasures should be properly harnessed, but practically nothing has been done in this respect. The surface potentialities should also be properly developed, but these too have been neglected.

How should the surface water potentiality in this region be utilized? The rainfall in this area is very meager – rain only falls part of the year, and the rest of the year it is dry. Well irrigation is underdeveloped, and there is hardly any lift or shift irrigation. Sixty-five percent of the land is rocky and sandy, and traditionally only coarse grain is grown there. So in Ráŕh we have to do two things – construct many new small-scale ponds, dams and lakes, and undertake large-scale afforestation on the banks of all water systems.

Ráŕh has undulating land, so large-scale reservoirs cannot be easily constructed, but many small lakes and ponds can be built. Large, deep reservoirs will not be as beneficial as small-scale ponds and should not be encouraged. Moreover, large reservoirs rely on lift and shift irrigation to supply water to a system of canals. In such a system the water pressure will fall because as the water travels along the canals leading from the reservoirs to the fields, the canals will be obstructed by the hilly terrain. So, if there is a big investment in reservoirs, the money will be wasted. Instead, many small ponds and dams can be constructed with the same investment. If many small-scale dams are constructed at a cost of about one hundred thousand rupees each, this investment will give a return of hundreds of millions of rupees.

In a system of small-scale ponds and dams, any surplus water in the canals leading to the fields can be rechannelled back to a main water source to avoid wastage. Water will only be carried a little distance in a small-scale canal system, so most of the time the surrounding fields will be properly irrigated. Sometimes however, as in the rainy season, surplus water will be created which should be rechannelled back to the water source or used further downstream. Such a system will also help check flooding in the rainy season and avoid damage to the small-scale dams constructed along the rivers. Farmers should take care that they do not use excessive non-organic fertilizers, because the chemicals will pollute the water system and have a harmful effect on humans, animals, fish, plants and the environment. Organic fertilizers are preferable to non-organic fertilizers.

What is the method to irrigate a rain-shadow region? When the rain clouds move from the sea and strike high mountains on the land there is rain. The part of the mountain range which faces the sea gets ample rain, whereas the region on the other side of the range facing inland gets little rain. The region which gets ample rain is the rain-front area, while the region which gets little rain is the rain-shadow area. The entire Telengana region is a rain-shadow area, and so is the Pune region of Maharashtra.

How can the Pune region be irrigated? There are two main methods. One is to pump water up the coastal side of the mountain range so that it can run down the inland rivers, and the other is to dig a tunnel through the mountains from the rain-front area to the rain-shadow area. The second method of irrigation is far cheaper. A well constructed tunnel should last about 150 years.

Rivers

There are three types of rivers – ice fed, rain fed and subterranean fed. Ice fed rivers cause flooding when there is an increase in the temperature, whereas rain fed and subterranean fed rivers only cause seasonal flooding when there is heavy rain. However, an increase in the temperature can dry them up.

Are the rivers in Ráŕh perennial or seasonal? Are they ice fed or rain fed, or do they get water from subterranean sources due to the high level of the artesian water? Many rain fed rivers are only supplied with water in the rainy season and not in other seasons. The rivers in central Ráŕh are rain fed but they are also supplied with artesian water. We should not depend only on rain fed rivers, because while they may accumulate water in the rainy season, in other seasons they may dry up. And even if rain fed rivers are also fed by subterranean sources which supply water throughout the year, there should still be every effort to conserve the surface water.

There are four categories of rivers – small rivulets, rivulets, rivers and big rivers.
Rivers also have three stages – the hill, plain and delta stages. Some rivers, however, do not have their delta stage in the ocean because they expire before reaching the sea. Take the example of the topography of Mithila and Magadh. In Mithila in the rainy season, sufficient water passes through rivers such as the Bagmati, Gandak and Koshi. The hill stage of these rivers is in Nepal, the plain stage is in Mithila, and the delta stage is in Bengal. The plains of Mithila contain very soft soil, which is why these rivers always change their course. No rivers have their delta stage in Mithila. To tame these rivers, the cooperation of Nepal and Bengal is required.

In Magadh, unlike Mithila, the hill and delta stages of the rivers are in Magadh, except for the Suvarnareka, which flows just on the border line between southern Magadh and northern Chattisgarh. The Koel River should be tamed through cooperation between Magadh and Kaoshal. In fact, Magadh and Kaoshal share many common problems.

In controlling or taming rivers, powerful boards of experts should be established which contain representatives of all three stages. This will ensure the successful implementation of river projects. Under international law no country should be allowed to use water according to its own wish. The hill stage must consult with the plain stage and the plain stage must consult with the delta stage. Nepal, for example, must consult with the plain and delta stages of its rivers which flow through India. If there is want of cooperation among the three, the river water coming from the hills or blocked at the delta may submerge a large area of plain land. Magadh is in a relatively convenient position as both the hill and plain stages of its rivers are in Magadh.

Afforestation

The banks of all water systems should be covered by dense forests. The science behind this is that the roots of the trees retain water. When the water-table subsides, the roots of the trees slowly release water. Hence, a pond surrounded by trees will never run dry. The foliage of the trees also minimizes evaporation. Besides this, the leaves of the trees have very small pores which attract clouds, so the trees help to increase the rainfall. Only one hundred years ago there were large rain forests in Ráŕh, and at that time in the Manbhum district the rainfall was seventy to eighty inches per year. Now it is hardly forty to forty-five inches.

A scientific programme of afforestation should include two aspects. In the first phase fast growing trees should be planted. Trees which grow to their full height in six months to two years and provide dense green cover should be selected. In the second phase, trees which take longer to grow but also provide dense green cover should be planted. This approach will quickly restore the ecological balance of a region.

Afforestation must be carried out both intensively and extensively. The best approach is to plant both fast growing and slow growing trees together. Planting only slow growing trees is uneconomic because we will have to wait thirty, fifty, seventy or one hundred years to get the desired result. And planting only fast growing trees will not provide any long term benefits. So both intensive and extensive afforestation should be done immediately. After reaching maturity, the trees can be selectively cut and sold.

Afforestation should be carried out on the banks of ponds, canals, dams, lakes, rivers and reservoirs. For example, babula [Acasia arabica Willd.] or kheyer [Acasia catechu Willd.] should be planted. In between these trees we can plant bukphul [Sesbania grandiflora Pers.], and in between these, Indian rosewood. The reason for this is that bukphul grows very fast and within five years it will be a tall tree, but babula takes a little longer to grow. Indian rosewood grows very slowly but it lives a long time. Thus, first bukphul will grow fast and attract rain which will help the other trees to grow. When it has fully matured after five or seven years it can be cut, and by this stage we will have a dense forest of Indian rosewood trees.

These trees are very useful in other respects also. For example, bukphul leaves increase the milk supply in cows, while thread can be produced from the leaves and stem. Indian rosewood trees increase the rainfall and hold water in their roots. The flowers provide a plentiful supply of honey, the leaves can be used to make plates, the sap is used to produce gum for the incense industry, and the tree may be used in sericulture to produce tasar silk. The seeds are also edible and are taken by poor people, while the honey has medicinal use and economic value, so it can earn foreign exchange as an export commodity. Piyasal [Pterocarpus marsupium Roxb] can also be planted in between Indian rosewood trees if need be. In this way, step by step, we have to proceed.

Scientific crop management is also an essential aspect of water conservation. For example, a field of barley requires less water to grow than a field of vegetables. If there are two fields side by side, one of barley and the other of vegetables, the vegetable crop will consume only seventy-five percent of the water normally used to irrigate it. If the other twenty-five percent is allowed to run off to the barley crop, that water will be sufficient to irrigate the barley. The barley crop will not require any special irrigation facilities.

Fruit trees can store a large amount of water in their roots, so they should be planted along river banks and near paddy fields to help conserve water. After the paddy harvest at Ánanda Nagar, for example, the water flows into the two rivulets – the Alkananda and the Paragati – leaving the fields dry. After a short time the rivulets also dry up as their supply of seepage water from the fields stops. To solve this problem, fruit trees should be planted beside the rivulets. The water stored in the roots of the fruit trees will keep the soil moist and fertile. Care should be taken so that the branches of the fruit trees do not block the sunlight from the crops. If this system is followed, when the paddy is cut and the fields are drained of water, the rivulets will remain flowing. If fruit trees are planted along the banks of a river, it will always retain water.

Foolish human beings, however, have cut down all the trees along the river banks, so now many rivers have dried up. Who would believe that 150 years ago large boats used to travel along the Mayuraksi Rriver in Bengal? Today it is a small river, and in the rainy season small boats only ply along it. The forests around the river have all gone. The forest trees contain water in their root systems and release it in a controlled way which enables the rivers to flow regularly. Now you understand the utility of the forests.

Adjacent to the Mayuraksi River is the Katasu village where I once saw a fossilized mast of a ship. This proves that at one time large ships used to travel along the river. I have also seen the same thing along the Damodar River. Due to deforestation, these rivers are now drying up, and consequently there is less rainfall.

The inner spirit of our water conservation programme is that the amount of existing surface water should be immediately doubled. But it is preferable if it is increased tenfold. This can best be done by a decentralized approach to water management which increases the depth, the area, or both, of water storage systems. The first step is to increase the depth of those ponds, tanks, dams, lakes, rivers and reservoirs which are already being used for storing water. The second step is to increase the area of these storage facilities, while the third step is to increase the plantations around them. How can these plantations be increased by a factor of ten? By increasing the number of rows of plants around each water storage system five times, and by reducing the distance between each plant by half. In addition to this, many new small-scale ponds, tanks, dams, lakes and reservoirs should also be constructed. As a general rule, surface water should always be utilized in preference to subterranean water.

You must prepare yourselves. The sphere of knowledge, the span of knowledge and the expansion of knowledge starts with the self. Humanity is waiting for you. You know what you are and what the world expects from you. You have to solve all the problems in the world today. You should prepare detailed plans and programmes and act accordingly. You must be the vanguard.

March 1989, Calcutta

Political Democracy can and will be fortuitous

when Economic Democracy is established.

Explore this and other articles covering alternative economics, ethical leadership, economic democracy, and a society without the weal and woe of social and economic vicissitudes HERE

How does PROUT compare or contrast with capitalism or communism? Explore the answers HERE

What are essential ingredients assuring progressive sustainability bereft of the vicissitudes of economic or political predation, privation or disparity? Learn more HERE

http://gplus.to/ProgressiveSustainability

Test Page 01

noreply@blogger.com (Progressive Development) — Wed, 28 Sep 2016 04:20:00 +0000

I'm confident folks will find this information compelling, graphic artist Neal Adams has produced some short videos illustrating that most, if not all of the planets in our solar system are growing constantly with several million tons of solar matter falling upon each planet and their satellites, adding material, along with the gravitational pulls upon each other for stretching them continuously.

Earth is an expanding planet.

Neal's video narratives and other informative links are below.

In addition to all these documents, animated videos below, you may be interested in the movie "The Day After Tomorrow", a fictional story derived from a nonfiction book titled The Coming Global Superstorm, written by Art Bell & Whitley Strieber.

This has info about past ice ages in PDF

http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/ice_age/

And more documents can be found here:

http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/

National Geographic offers this video file to illustrate the probable trigger for our pole shift:
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0407/feature1/zoom6m.html
(Illustrates intense solar wind storm that can and may cause Earth's poles to shift, the 'killshot')

Linda Moulton Howe's Earth Files website

http://www.earthfiles.com/

Search using terms such as [global warming] and [ice age]

The most common element on Earth, by a huge margin, is "iron", diatomic [two-atom sets], with each of the two atoms in a ferrous molecule being charged either positive or negative complementively. Iron pervades Earth's crust and throughout Earth's mantle. If Earth's magnetic poles shift, then what of all these jillions of iron molecules, in the crust and mantle, which have laid in their respective magnetic alignments for several thousand years to match the relatively constant placement of Earth's magnetic poles?

Most everyone will realize such a global magnetic shift will put Earth into massive convulsions, perhaps for centuries to come. The magnetic poles have shifted a few times since the assumed period of the dinosaurs, a time in which the Andes Mountains and the Rocky Mountains did not exist [see video below for how mountains are formed]. What might we do about our survivability, infrastructure, commerce, food, peace of mind, safety, social conventions and ethics in establishing a brave new world after this crimson dawn in human evolution? Fundamental principles, relatively universal principles are at the core of this website and its theme of PROUT, the Progressive Utilization Theory.

Neal Adams' Animations

Illustrations and video animations, most from NASA films, demonstrating planetary expansion/enlargement as an ongoing process in our solar system, from master illustrator, Neal Adams, with audio.

Planetary Expansion Videos

Illustrating planetary expansion of Earth

Growing Earth -- Earth Grows, and Implicit Disproving of Pangea theory

Europa Video from NASA: Neal demonstrates Europa is "growing"

Earth's Moon -- An Expanding Planet

More evidence illustrating that Mars has been and continues to "grow"

Shows in a small section of Mars, how current state is from planetary expansion, not from erosion by water, air or meteorite

Shows Earth's expansion, focusing on how the Great Lakes region and the St Lawrence river in North America were created.

Clears up misconception of how India and the Himalayas were created, and other implicit disproving of Pangea theory.

Illustrates, through NASA video, how Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter, has been expanding

More illustration of Earth's expansion, featuring video from Heinz Haber, 1965, propounder of the "Expanding Earth" theory, proclaiming that Earth was about half the size it is today a few hundred million years ago: ideas suppressed by many contemporaries.

Earth's Estimated Growth Chart

How Mountains Form

Extract of Geologist Dr James Maxlow of his research into our expanding Earth, refuting the popularly held theory of plate tectonics.

Crustal Age Map of Earth with Hidden Subduction Zones

Globe Illustrations:

North Pole Backwards In Evolution

South Pole Backwards In Evolution:

Globe Videos

http://www.continuitystudios.net/keith/GlobeA.mov

http://www.continuitystudios.net/keith/GlobeB.mov

Global Warming? Coming Ice Age? Earth Changes? Yikes!

It includes, though is not limited to more precipitation from the current warming redistributing water, including new accumulation in cold areas, something coming in time. Another is that the water currents that keep temperate climates in what should be cold areas, such as the way the Gulf Stream keeps ports open in northern Europe, such as in Britain and St Petersberg, will redirect and consequently freeze over, affecting commerce and causing migrations to move southward.

There's evidence of GIGANTIC cooling winds, as illustrated in the movie "The Day After Tomorrow", a fictional story derived from a nonfiction book titled The Coming Global Superstorm, a book written by Art Bell & Whitley Strieber. Woolly mammoths have been found in Siberia and Alaska that had been eating buttercup plants, plants that grow in warm climates, were frozen in motion as if running. How does such a huge animal in a warm climate "freeze" in motion? Just such a superstorm is exactly what happened, has happened many times and will happen in the future, perhaps even in our lifetime, considering what Baba has implicated to us.

The bulk of the current warming is coming from "within" the planet, particularly under the oceans, which warms the ocean water, causing increased precipitation. The sun has been going through humongous upheavals in recent years that have shattered known precedents and rhythmic patterns determine from geologists' research. There's evidence that the vitality distributed by the sun as energy becomes mass as it integrates with the planets, thus as to whether the planet will shrink or expand, it appears the expansion evidence by our planet is due to this feeding from the sun. We can anticipate that further upheavals from the sun may also blow so hard that this is what will shift the magnetic field, which is at its weakest now since geologists have been researching it throughout Earth's history.

Convulsing Sun may portend extraordinary changes in our planet, very likely within your lifetime.

While this solar shower remains constant, during the life of our sun, on occassion, perhaps many thousands of years apart, extraordinary flares emanate from the sun, some so strong that they affect the magnetic fields of several or all planets in our solar system, flipping the polarity which will last another several thousand years until some similar event occurs, or perhaps a massive object transits through or near our solar system, it's own mass and/or magnetic resonance affecting planets in our solar system. This video below illustrates what may happen in such events, indeed, what may happen within the next few years:

You may want to expedite your viewing by forwarding the time to 5:00 minutes into the video.

Meet “Beware” – New Police Tool Data Mines Your Life

noreply@blogger.com (Progressive Development) — Wed, 21 Sep 2016 23:21:00 +0000

"We've determined you are a threat to our plans"

In PROUT's concept of both cosmology and human life within it, liberty is an essentiality as diversity is the nature of the Universe and humanity alone, on Earth, has within its grasp the faculties to pursue infinity, while rationality also plays an essential role in the exercise of liberty -- it being anti-rational, for example, for some persons or enterprises to accumulate so much excess wealth -- in any arena of life -- that others suffer, while perpetrators of such values and actions offer the anti-rationalism that it's the sufferer's fault rather than the predator's.

Contemporarily, Monsanto is an excellent example, winning every case concerning wind-blown seeds onto other's land, or disease sufferers, often reaching their demise, due to Monsanto's patented chemicals denaturing people's health as well as that of insects, while those same sufferers continue losing suits for suffering the consequences of Monsanto's inventions -- an enterprise operating as a malignant carcinoma on the body of humanity, as well as within the bodies of humans, for no other reason than the unbridled parasitics of insatiable accumulation of wealth, at the expense of human life.

At the consecutive edge of societal surveillance and threat levels as perceived by a "source" -- precedent to predicting future events and pre-arresting people for crimes they have not committed -- a new software used by police to assess contrarian values or presumed "threat" levels for persons or addresses, a software purveyed by Intrado called "Beware" is being sold to police departments and other 'security' enterprises.

The next time you call the police for help, they may very well consider "you" the enemy based upon Beware's algorithms. Read more below.

Guest article

by Michael Krieger

As officers respond to calls, Beware automatically runs the address. The searches return the names of residents and scans them against a range of publicly available data to generate a color-coded threat level for each person or address: green, yellow or red.

Exactly how Beware calculates threat scores is something that its maker, Intrado, considers a trade secret, so it is unclear how much weight is given to a misdemeanor, felony or threatening comment on Facebook. However, the program flags issues and provides a report to the user.

– From the Washington Post article: The New Way Police are Surveilling You: Calculating Your Threat ‘Score’

When it comes to life on planet earth in 2016, it increasingly feels as if we are all livestock constantly being monitored, prodded and surveyed by the oligarchy and its minions. The latest example revolves around a software program for police called Beware, developed by Intrado, which consists of a secret algorithm that determines an individual’s threat levels based on a multitude of unknown factors.

Does it work? Does it violate civil liberties? Is there any public debate? These questions and more are addressed in a recent Washington Postarticle. Here are a few excerpts:

FRESNO, Calif. — While officers raced to a recent 911 call about a man threatening his ex-girlfriend, a police operator in headquarters consulted software that scored the suspect’s potential for violence the way a bank might run a credit report.

"To Serve and Protect" HA!

The program scoured billions of data points, including arrest reports, property records, commercial databases, deep Web searches and the man’s social- media postings. It calculated his threat level as the highest of three color-coded scores: a bright red warning.

As a national debate has played out over mass surveillance by the National Security Agency, a new generation of technology such as theBeware software being used in Fresno has given local law enforcement officers unprecedented power to peer into the lives of citizens.

In many instances, people have been unaware that the police around them are sweeping up information, and that has spawned controversy. Planes outfitted with cameras filmed protests and unrest in Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo. For years, dozens of departments used devices that can hoover up all cellphone data in an area without search warrants. Authorities in Oregon are facing a federal probe after using social media-monitoring software to keep tabs on Black Lives Matter hashtags.

But perhaps the most controversial and revealing technology is the threat-scoring software Beware. Fresno is one of the first departments in the nation to test the program.

"Data proves you have differing opinions to the State."

As officers respond to calls, Beware automatically runs the address. The searches return the names of residents and scans them against a range of publicly available data to generate a color-coded threat level for each person or address: green, yellow or red.

Exactly how Beware calculates threat scores is something that its maker, Intrado, considers a trade secret, so it is unclear how much weight is given to a misdemeanor, felony or threatening comment on Facebook. However, the program flags issues and provides a report to the user.

Nabarro said the fact that only Intrado — not the police or the public — knows how Beware tallies its scores is disconcerting. He also worries that the system might mistakenly increase someone’s threat level by misinterpreting innocuous activity on social media, like criticizing the police, and trigger a heavier response by officers.

“It’s a very unrefined, gross technique,” Nabarro said of Beware’s color-coded levels. “A police call is something that can be very dangerous for a citizen.”

The Fresno City Council called a hearing on Beware in November after constituents raised concerns. Once council member referred to a local media report saying that a woman’s threat level was elevated because she was tweeting about a card game titled “Rage,” which could be a keyword in Beware’s assessment of social media.

Councilman Clinton J. Olivier, a libertarian-leaning Republican, said Beware was like something out of a dystopian science fiction novel and asked Dyer a simple question: “Could you run my threat level now?”

Burgeoning expanse of annular surveillance

Dyer agreed. The scan returned Olivier as a green, but his home came back as a yellow, possibly because of someone who previously lived at his address, a police official said.

“Even though it’s not me that’s the yellow guy, your officers are going to treat whoever comes out of that house in his boxer shorts as the yellow guy,” Olivier said. “That may not be fair to me.”

The number of local police departments that employ some type of technological surveillance increased from 20 percent in 1997 to more than 90 percent in 2013, according to the latest information from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The most common forms of surveillance are cameras and automated license plate readers, but the use of handheld biometric scanners, social media monitoring software, devices that collect cellphone data and drones is increasing.

The surveillance creates vast amounts of data, which is increasingly pooled in local, regional and national databases. The largest such project is the FBI’s $1 billion Next Generation Identification project, which is creating a trove of fingerprints, iris scans, data from facial recognition software and other sources that aid local departments in identifying suspects.

This FBI project is something I’ve written about previously. See the 2014 post: The FBI Unveils its Controversial Facial Recognition Database with 52 Million Photos to be Stored.

This is not what freedom looks like.

This article originally appeared here.

Political Democracy can and will be fortuitous

when Economic Democracy is established.

Explore this and other articles covering alternative economics, ethical leadership, economic democracy, and a society without the weal and woe of social and economic vicissitudes HERE

How does PROUT compare or contrast with capitalism or communism? Explore the answers HERE

What are essential ingredients assuring progressive sustainability bereft of the vicissitudes of economic or political predation, privation or disparity? Learn more HERE

http://gplus.to/ProgressiveSustainability

A Brief Introduction to PROUT, Progressive Utilization

noreply@blogger.com (Progressive Development) — Thu, 08 Sep 2016 21:12:00 +0000

During the 20th Century, Marxism and capitalism were the contending economic theories and the world was almost engulfed by a Third World War due to the struggles between them.

Yet, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the other communist bloc governments laid the way for the triumph of capitalism. Today, however, half of the world’s population lives on two dollars a day or less, and the developed countries are in an economic recession reminiscent of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Once again, people are asking, “Is there an alternative to capitalism?”

In 1959, Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, an Indian philosopher and historian, answered this question when he presented the Progressive Utilization Theory (known by the acronym, PROUT). PROUT is an economic theory addressing the defects of both capitalism and Marxism, offering the promise of a new economic order in which the world’s resources are distributed in an equitable and rational manner, anchored in homeostasis of society en whole.

Explore more Praise for PROUT http://bit.ly/PraiseForPROUT

We can understand PROUT by looking at six essential features of this new progressively designed socio-economic system:

1. Spirituality: Both capitalism and Marxism are materialist philosophies with a worldview that gives little (in the case of capitalism) or no importance to spirituality. PROUT, on the other hand, is founded on a spiritual outlook -- of the Universe as a singularity and all life as a diversity of its experiential expression. According to Sarkar, the material world is but an expression of consciousness and humans are stewards rather than ultimate owners of any physical wealth. The goal of society is to provide a base from which humans can expand their full mental, physical and spiritual possibilities. This spiritual basis of PROUT has important implications for the management of physical resources, for the development of human resources and for the establishment of proper governance.

Adopting such an inclusive worldview envisioned by Sarkar, our relationship with the environment will change. Similarly, when we regard other beings as manifestations of that one Consciousness, our relationships with each other will change. When such a transpersonal worldview permeates our whole society, we will derive the kind of service-minded and selfless government that is currently lacking in the world today.

2. A “Floor and a Ceiling”: Welfare economists have always emphasized that the minimum necessities of life should be provided for everyone in a properly structured society. Efforts to make a minimum wage or to provide various kinds of welfare systems to help impoverished people are all part of such concerns.

P R Sarkar agreed with some aspects of welfare economics, stating that the minimum necessities of life should be guaranteed to all members of society. However, he recognised that if society would just give people a check at the end of the month, with their required income, then this would only encourage laziness. According to Sarkar, the best arrangement is that society should provide people with the purchasing power to procure the minimum necessities of life in exchange for their labor. Full employment providing everyone with the proper amount of purchasing power thus provides the “floor” of the economic system. No one should be allowed to “live in the basement”.

Where PROUT breaks new ground is in its attention to the “ceiling” of the economic system. The poverty of many is tied to the affluence and over-accumulation of a few, and if we really want to bring about a harmonious society we need to think about putting limits on the amount of physical wealth a person can accumulate.

In the first principle of PROUT, it is stated that “no individual should be allowed to accumulate any physical wealth without the clear permission and approval of the collective body of society”.

The splattering of Reaganomics "for the people"

This concept is sure to evoke howls of protest from the super-rich, the very rich and even middle class people aspiring to wealth. The classic argument of wealthy people is that by their effort, wealth is created and this wealth will trickle down to the rest of society. Apologists of laissez faire capitalism have been very successful in convincing people that this is the truth, but the starving, sick and homeless people of the world have been waiting for a long time for the wealth to trickle down, and it does not seem to be happening.

Sooner or later, we will come to our senses and realize that the over-accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few is not in the best of interest of society as a whole and this principle of PROUT, curbing excessive accumulation, will surely be put into practice around the world.

3. Economic Democracy: In the past century, a great deal was said about making the “world safe for democracy”. But, the “democracy” that was talked about was political democracy. In many of the impoverished countries of the world, the same ones where people struggle with $2.00 per day, the people have the right to vote but they do not have any say in their economic life. Similarly, even in developed countries a person can vote to decide who will be the next president, but he or she usually has no vote in deciding economic matters that are very close to home, such as keeping a job.

According to PROUT theory, society should be organised in a manner that will empower as many people as possible. One of the best ways to do this is reorganize the ownership and operation of economic enterprises. Under capitalism, the primary business form is the corporation. The owners of the shares of a corporation have all the votes and decide how the enterprise will be run. Those who work in the enterprise have little or no say in the vital economic decisions affecting their lives.

PROUT's system establishes co-operatives as the most meaningful business form. Most enterprises, except the very large key industries and very small businesses, would be organised as co-operatives, particularly those enterprises engaged in producing basic necessities of life. Those who work in the enterprise will be the owners and will elect management and will vote in elections governing the running of the enterprise.

In a PROUTist economy, the very small enterprises with a few employees and dealing in nonessential goods could be privately owned and operated, and the medium enterprises would be owned and operated as co-operatives. Large-scale key industries (energy, communication, transportation, etc.) would be publicly managed either by local governments or by special public bodies (in unitary political systems). This three-tiered system of private, cooperative and publicly run enterprises would provide the base for economic democracy.

4. Economic Reorganization (Decentralized Economy, Balanced Economy and Regional Economic Self Sufficiency)

If we want to bring about the economic well being of all of the people, then we must also make sure that some geographic areas are not depressed while other areas are thriving. The best way to bring about economic development and prosperity for everyone is to decentralize the economy, develop all sectors of the economy and to strive for regional economic self-sufficiency.

One of the biggest reasons for economic imbalance within any particular country is the modern trend of urbanization. Usually most manufacturing and many other services serving the manufacturing sector are situated in cities. The metropolitan areas thrive, and people in the countryside are either unemployed or work in low-wage or subsistence agriculture.

The best way to reverse this situation is to place some industries, and supporting services and industries in rural areas. In this way, excessive congestion of urban areas will be avoided and strong regional centers will provide employment and services to previously neglected rural areas.

Economic decentralization should also be coupled with balancing the various sectors of the economy: industry, agriculture and services. In some countries, more than 75% of the people work in agriculture and a small minority in industry and services. Underdeveloped countries with poor economies are usually structured in this way. In industrialized countries a huge majority of the population work in industry or in services, and very few people are engaged in agriculture.

Sarkar said that a more ideal set-up would have approximately 20% of the population in agriculture, 20% in agro industries (producing goods using agricultural produce), 20% in agrico-industries (supplying machinery and tools for agriculture) and the rest of population in industry and services.

A society with this kind of economic balance would be better able to achieve economic self-sufficiency. Currently “globalization” is the buzz-word of the era, and economic self-sufficiency is not in vogue. But, is it really healthy for any country to neglect its agricultural sector and rely on imported food? Similarly, should some countries remain with little or no industry and rely on far-away countries for all their finished products?

Generally, countries which depend solely on agriculture or which export raw materials like wood and minerals remain poor while heavily industrialized countries thrive. This is not good for the non-industrialized areas, but it is also not healthy for the developed countries as well. In times of war or in time of any disruption to transportation, their vital food supplies will be in danger.

On top of this, in a world where climate-warming and ecological difficulty have become major problems, does it continue to make sense to rely on centers of supply (for either raw or finished products) that are halfway around the world?

We all lend a hand for the welfare of
community and society

PROUT recommends that countries in a particular geographic region come together and form economic zones that have balanced, decentralized and self-sufficient economies. Such an arrangement would be ecologically advantageous, provide for economic security in times of war or unforeseen disruptions of transportation, and most importantly would ensure that no particular country or region will remain in poverty while others thrive.

5. Moral Leadership

The various plans for a better organisation of the economy and for economic democracy are good in theory, though the problem of materializing these noble ideas depends on the quality of the human beings of our society. If elected and appointed, corrupt officials will prevent the implementation of policies designed to bring about social and economic wellbeing for all. For example, the social equality preached by the Marxists was belied by the reality of corrupt government officials living in luxury while the masses remained in poverty, and all too often, operating as a monopolistic organized crime syndicate of state.

The only way out of present economic and political problems is to elevate the moral standard of our society. If people are properly educated, conscious of their social and economic responsibilities and morally fortuitous, then democracy can thrive and moral leadership will come to the fore. The hope of the future will rest on the shoulders of men and women who will enter public office with the spirit of service and sacrifice rather than for the selfish purpose of lining their own, and others' pockets or enhancing their prestige.
A proper spiritual outlook coupled with an educational system that is free from political interference and focused on the all-around development of human beings is the best way to bring forth leaders who are morally fortuitous and working for the wellbeing of society.

6. Global Governance

Against the backdrop of the universe, the earth is a small planet and human beings find it necessary to learn how to live together in harmony on this small planet. The best way to minimise the possibilities of war and to safeguard the rights of all people is to establish a global governance based upon universal principles. Previous attempts in the 20th Century in this direction, namely the League of Nations and the United Nations, have not been adequate and it is time to move onto a better threshold of global coordination.

In his book, Problem of the Day, P R Sarkar laid out a concept of world government that should be achievable in the near future. He advocated the establishment of a bi-chambered world government. One chamber, the lower house, would have representation based on population and the other chamber, the upper house, would provide equal representation for all nations. The upper house will not be able to pass a law unless it has first been passed by the lower chamber, but the upper house will also have the right to reject bills passed by the lower chamber.

Sarkar envisioned a stage-wise movement towards world government. In the first phase, the world body would only be able to frame laws and administration would be in the hands of governments of the individual countries, as a confederation. In a later stage, the world government would also have administrative authority and a world militia at its disposal. In the past, world government was considered a utopian dream, but in the near future, it will become a necessity. Today, larger countries with various states or provinces do not experience any of their various states or provinces going to war against each other due to the practical implementation of centricity while accommodating and flourishing the sanctity of each and ever dominion within their borders. Such a threshold of excellence in government can also occur on global realms in a progressive manner.

These are the core economic and political ideas that form the backbone of the Progressive Utilization Theory. In the years ahead, they are sure to be the pillar of efforts to solve the thorniest problems that confront humanity today.

This article redacted from an original appearance here.

Political Democracy can and will be fortuitous

when Economic Democracy is established.

Explore this and other articles covering alternative economics, ethical leadership, economic democracy, and a society without the weal and woe of social and economic vicissitudes HERE

How does PROUT compare or contrast with capitalism or communism? Explore the answers HERE

What are essential ingredients assuring progressive sustainability bereft of the vicissitudes of economic or political predation, privation or disparity? Learn more HERE

http://gplus.to/ProgressiveSustainability

Event: Public Screening of Michael Moore's Latest Movie: Where to Invade Next, Saturday, August 20

noreply@blogger.com (Progressive Development) — Thu, 18 Aug 2016 22:02:00 +0000

Event

Join us this Saturday for a FREE screening of Michael Moore's Latest Creation, Saturday, August 20th at 3:30PM

Academy Award®-winning director Michael Moore is back with WHERE TO INVADE NEXT: a provocative and hilarious comedy in which Moore will stop at nothing to figure out how to actually make America great again.

RSVP on our Event Page [Required]

Just in time for election season, America's favorite political provocateur, Michael Moore, is back with his new film, WHERE TO INVADE NEXT. Honored by festivals and critics' groups alike, WHERE TO INVADE NEXT is an expansive, hilarious, and subversive comedy in which the Academy Award®-winning director confronts the most pressing issues facing America today and finds solutions in the most unlikely places. The creator of FAHRENHEIT 9/11 and BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE has returned with an epic movie that’s unlike anything he has done before—an eye-opening call to arms to capture the American Dream and restore it in, of all places, America.

"One of the most genuinely, and valuably, patriotic films any American has ever made... Optimistic and affirmative, it rests on one challenging but invaluable idea: we can do better."
— Godfrey Cheshire, rogerebert.com

Join Us! RSVP on our Event Page

What are they saying?

ONE OF MOORE’S BEST FILMS. A surprisingly endearing set of suggestions for a better tomorrow. Eric Kohn, Indiewire

MOORE HAS MADE AN ACT OF GUERRILLA HUMANITY. Owen Gleiberman, BBC

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Political Democracy can and will be fortuitous

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How to Unite Human Society

noreply@blogger.com (Progressive Development) — Tue, 09 Aug 2016 22:53:00 +0000

by Prabhat Sarkar, Founder of PROUT

While trying to bring about the development and prosperity of individuals and society, we should encourage the common points only among different communities – not the points of difference. It is natural that there are differences in society concerning dress, customs, cultural expressions, food habits, language, etc. Though, if these points of difference are given undue importance, social problems will only be aggravated, and as a result the unity and very existence of society will be jeopardized. If nothing is done immediately to check the deterioration of contemporary society, then as a result of different factors, in due course society will automatically evolve some common principles. So the points of difference should never be encouraged in any way.

Social and political leaders should refrain from harping on the points of difference in society. Rather, they should continually emphasize that it is not the appropriate time to bring up complicated divisive issues. For example, take the case of Indian languages. There are many people in India who unnecessarily fight over the issue of language, but is now the proper time to raise this issue when there are so many people suffering from hunger, famine, disease, educational backwardness, economic distress, etc.? Can the people of India afford to waste their valuable time over the comparatively unimportant issue of language? On the contrary, they should immediately launch a campaign against exploitation, as this will keep the divisive forces under control. If this is not done, the fissiparous forces will create impediments and dissension in society, and the important burning issues confronting the people will remain unsolved.

Points of Unity

The progress of a country depends on unity, so emphasis should be placed only on unifying factors. To eliminate fissiparous forces, we will have to fight a relentless war against disunity in the following three spheres.

Socio-Economic Sphere

While some people are enormously rich, a large percentage of the population is languishing in poverty. Naturally, to build up a strong society, socio-economic disparity must be completely eradicated.

With the eradication of socio-economic disparity, the collective wealth of society will have to be increased progressively. Only then can the growing demands of the population be successfully met. Let us take the example of Orissa. Agricultural production, particularly in the rainy season, depends almost entirely on the monsoons. But if the irrigation system was properly developed, the total agricultural production in the state would increase 300 percent, and an additional 40 million people could be fed. Today only 15 million people are being fed with the present levels of production. Orissa is also rich in mineral resources. Abundant coal, bauxite, manganese and other minerals are readily available in the state, but many of these minerals are being exported to other countries. If these raw materials were properly utilized to manufacture finished goods in the state, Orissa could establish at least four large-scale steel plants. This would substantially increased the purchasing power of the people. Unfortunately, the incompetent political leaders of the country do not think in a rational way. On the contrary, they formulate plans that neither remove socio-economic disparity nor increase collective wealth. These leaders have committed a major blunder by placing the cart before the horse.

In all countries of the world, economically deprived people can be united through a common programme of socio-economic struggle and by fighting against cruel capitalist exploitation on the one hand, and by implementing developmental programmes to enhance the amount of collective wealth on the other. By undertaking extensive irrigation, mining, agriculture and industrial development, the collective wealth of a country can be easily increased.

Self-sufficient socio-economic zones should be established throughout the world to smoothly eliminate social disparity and increase collective wealth. The formation of states on political grounds should be carefully avoided. In one political unit there may be several socio-economic zones which can live unitedly together with their respective problems. For example, the state of Bihar is a political unit but while the Chotanagpur Hills are confronted with the problem of irrigation, the plains of North Bihar are suffering from the problem of drainage. In Royalseema, Srikulam and Telengana areas of Andhra Pradesh are situated in the political unit of Andhra Pradesh, but their socio-economic potentialities are quite different. To derive the maximum benefit from these areas, distinct socio-economic zones should be formed, regardless of whether or not they remain in the same political unit. It is a great mistake to form states on the basis of politics or language. If a capitalist and a labourer speaks the same language, who will think that they are friends because of their linguistic affinity?

Psycho-Sentimental Sphere

In the psychic sphere, there are certain factors that serve to unite different linguistic groups of people. For example, all North Indian languages and a few South Indian languages originated and developed from Sańskrta. These languages have been greatly influenced by Saḿskrta. In such circumstances, the study of Saḿskrta should not be opposed by anybody. This may appear to be a trivial matter, but if it is encouraged it will be a great unifying factor in Indian society.

In social traditions also, some common points may be developed. Research and archaeological excavation on glorious past civilizations and great personalities will help arouse a strong national sentiment. For example, the excavation of the Mahenzodaro and Harappa civilizations highlighted the accomplishments of ancient Indian culture.

The study of history should also be encouraged. Itihása is not synonymous with the Saḿskrta word itikathá which means “history” and is the chronological record of past events. The word itihása means that part of history which has great educative value. The study of itihása or the cultural history of a country arouses a sense of unity amongst the members of society, and they become aware of their impact on cultural legacy. For example, the study of the historical epic Mahábhárata creates a sense of pride and inspiration in the minds of the people, and this fosters the spirit of collective unity.

The memory of illustrious saints and sages also binds people together with common bonds of affinity. When people cherish their past leaders and saints, it creates a strong foundation for collective unity.

Spirituo-Sentimental Sphere

The sentiments of a common spiritual heritage and a common spiritual goal are the only sentiments which can bind people together permanently. Socio-economic and psycho-sentimental issues are extremely useful for creating social unity and cohesion, but the sentiments arising out of these issues are temporary. Cosmic sentiments are permanent. By inculcating universal sentiments, socio-economic unity and fraternity will be based on a strong fundament. People will think in terms of cosmic paternity and universal fraternity. My firm conviction that we have all come from the same Entity and we will all merge in the same Entity will generate a unique unifying sentiment. All people will feel united by the ties of universal love and friendship, which will ultimately pave the way for a universal society. The poet Satyendra Dutta, the great universalist, has eloquently expressed this sentiment in the following poem:

Ráge anuráge nidrita jáge ásal mánuś prakat́ hay
Varńe varńe náhika visheś nikhil bhuvan Brahmamay!
Nivir aekye yáy mishe’ yáy sakal bhágya sab hrday
Mánuśe mánuśe náiko prabhed nikhil mánava Brahmamay.

[When love awakens in sleeping souls, then true human beings will emerge.
There is no difference between one person, one race, and another, for the entire universe is pervaded by one Infinite Consciousness!]

Wherever there is a common point among people it should be encouraged, while the points of difference have to be discouraged and eliminated. For fostering unity and enhancing the prosperity of the people, this must be the fundamental approach. We should always remember:

Jagat juŕiyá ek ját áche
Se játir nám mánuś játi
Eki prthiviir stanye pálita
Eki ravi shashi moder sáthii.

[There is only one race in the entire world,
And the name of that race is the human race.
We are bound together with the same breast milk of mother Earth,
And the same sun and moon are our common companions.]

Points of Difference

There are conspicuous variations in four main areas of human society – food, dress, language and religion.

Food

In India there are four distinct food zones where either coconut oil, mustard oil, sesame oil, or vegetable oil or ghee are used. In the Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, most people prefer bread, whereas in eastern and southern India, people prefer rice. The food that people eat depends upon geophysical conditions. If all the people of India are made to eat the same food, regardless of their geophysical necessities, it would be a great mistake.

Dress

Similarly, dress and customs also depend upon various geophysical factors. For example, take the case of the Arabs who live in dry deserts. Hot winds and burning sands are their constant companions. Naturally, they are compelled to cover their bodies from head to foot and build their houses underground, otherwise it is next to impossible to survive. On the other hand, the people who live in North Bihar have to be careful that their clothes are not soiled by mud or dirty water caused by the heavy rainfall. Obviously, the 1 dress that people wear in a particular area is largely determined by climatic considerations. It is ludicrous to prescribe uniform dress for people, disregarding environmental conditions. People living in extremely cold countries automatically wear warm clothing, while people living in tropical regions do not.

Language

In every country, languages originate and develop according to racial and cultural factors. Though the origin of languages is fundamentally the same everywhere, languages vary from place to place.

Racial characteristics are defined by the nature of the blood and the structure of the nose, eyes, hair and skin. The differences in the formation of these factors account for the variations in racial characteristics. There are four main races in the world – Aryan, Mongolian, Austric and Negroid. Aryans have red or fair complexions, Mongolians yellow complexions, Austrics dark brown complexions and Negroes black complexions. Austrico-Negroids are called “Dravidians”.

The Aryans can be divided into three groups. First, the Nordic Aryans have reddish white skin, reddish or golden hair, brown coloured eyes like those of cats, warm blood and parrot-like noses. Secondly, the Alpine Aryans have milky white skin, brackish blue hair, blue eyes, slightly cooler blood than the Nordics and hawk-like noses. Thirdly, the Mediterranean Aryans have fair skin, black hair, black eyes, ordinary noses, cooler blood than the Alpines and are of medium stature. The people living in southern France, Arabian countries and the Balkan states belong to the Mediterranean sub-race.

The Mongolians can be divided into five groups. First, the Nipponese have big faces, flat noses and big bodies. Secondly, the Chinese have flat noses and slanting eyes. Thirdly, the Malays have small bodies and flat noses. Fourthly, The Indo- Burmese have flat noses and comparatively big bodies. Fifthly, the Indo-Tibetans have flat noses and are quite good looking. All the people in these groups have yellowish skin and little hair on their bodies.

The Austrics have medium-sized bodies and mud-black coloured skins. The Negroes have black skin, kinky hair, thick lips, slightly colder blood than the Aryans and are often tall in stature.

There are several racial divisions in India which include the Indo-Tibetans, such as the Ladakhans, Kinnariis, Gaŕhwalis, Nepalese, Sikkimese, Bhutanese, Newaris, Mizos and Garos; the Mediterranean Aryans, such as the Kashmirii Brahmins and those with a reddish or fair complexion; and the Dravadians, such as the Andhra Pradeshiis, Kanatakas, Keralites and Tamil Nadus.

In the pre-historic past the entire North India – that is, the entire area north of the Vindhya Hills up to Tibet – was under the sea. The area south of the Vindhyas, the present Arabian Sea, South Africa, Australia and Southeast Asia formed the Gondwana archipelago. The Austrics inhabited the southern portion of Gondwanaland, the Negroes inhabited the southwestern portion and the Austrico-Negroids, the Dravidians of today, inhabited the central portion. The bio-racial structure of different ethnic groups indicates the race to which they belong.

As a rule, a strong culture exerts a great influence on a weaker culture. When people with different cultural backgrounds live side by side, the language spoken by the people of the stronger culture automatically influences other groups. For example, though there were marked differences between the Aryan and non-Aryan cultures, the Aryan language was so powerful that all the languages of eastern and northern India had to depend mainly on Saḿskrta. The influence of Saḿskrta was so widespread that even in southern India it exerted a tremendous influence on the Dravidian languages. The following statistics demonstrate the extent to which the eastern and northern Indian languages were influenced by Vedic Saḿskrta. In Bengali there are 92% Saḿskrta words, in Oriya 90%, Maethilii 85%, Tamil 3% and Malayalam 75%. Some people from North India travelled to the western part of Madras by sea and settled there, hence Malayalam is full of Saḿskrta words, although the verbs are from Tamil.

The influence of Aryan culture was prominent on the upper classes of the society, although it had a general influence on the other classes. There are some Austric communities such as the Saha, Dhangrsh, etc. who speak an Austric dialect at home but Bhojpurii outside their family circle. Similarly, the Singhmundas and Sarkars of Ranchi district and the Tinneras of Tripura speak their own dialect at home and Bengali outside. The people of Gaŕhwal and the Kumayun have started speaking Indo-Aryan languages instead of Tibetan and Chinese. The Dravidian languages include Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada and Tulu. The alphabets of the Tibetan, Chinese and Indo-Chinese languages are the same, although the Chinese and Japanese scripts are pictorial. The inhabitants of Ceylon speak Sinhalese (which contains 87% Saḿskrta words) and Tamil (13% Saḿskrta words). Members of the Gunatilak and Bandar Nayak communities of Bengal migrated to Ceylon and became the Sinhalese community. The people of Burma speak several languages – Burmese, Chin, Kachin, Shun and other important and unimportant languages. Like the Sinhalese, their alphabets are based on the Indo-Aryan alphabet.

The Indo-Aryan languages are Marathi, Rajasthani, Gujarati, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Khari, Bali, Vraja, Bundel Khandii, Avadhi, Chattishgarhi, Bhojpurii, Angika, Magahii, Maethilii, Bengali, Oriya, Assamese, Gaŕhwali, Kumaynani and Gorkhali. The Austric languages include all the Munda languages, Santal, Kerai and the Mankhamer group of dialects. The Tibeto-Burmese languages include all the languages and dialects of Assam except Assamese, and the Manipuri and Nagar dialects. The Tibeto-Chinese languages include Ladakhi, Bathii, Kinnari, Kirat, Lepcha, Tahru, Newari, Garo, Kashi and Mizo. The Sino-Japanese languages include Mandarin Sinalese, Cantonese, Japanese, Cambodian, Indonesian and the Malaysian languages and dialects.

Basically there are four types of script – Indo-Aryan, Roman, Semitic (alpha, beta, gamma, etc. in Greek correspond to aleph, beth, gimel, etc. in Hewbrew) and Chinese or pictorial script. The oldest script was invented 6,000 years ago and is called “Samalháptii” script. Kharosthi emerged after 1000 years. Brahmii is written from right to left and Kharosthi from left to right.

Kuthila was used in Allahabad and east Allahabad. In Rajasthan, Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bengal, Orissa and Assam Brahmi script was widely used. The old rock inscriptions of Emperor Ashok were written in Kuthfia. Ancient rock inscriptions found at Allahabad, Dacca, Calcutta, Patna, etc., are all written in Kuthila script. Later, the script came to be known as “Sri Harsa script” after King Harsabardhan who used Kuthila in his rock inscriptions or official seals. The present Bengali script is Sri Harsa script.

Sáradá is used in northwestern India while Naŕáda or Nagri script is used in southwestern India. The Nagri script does not use a mátrá or a line over the letters. When such a line is used, it is called “Devanagri script”. The Sárasvata Brahmins of Kashmir and the Punjab use Sáradá script, and the Nagar Brahmins of Gujarat used Nagri script. The present Sri Harsa script is about 1,300 years old and the Nagri script is about 300 years old.

In ancient India, Vedic Saḿskrta tried to suppress the Dravidian and Austric languages, just as in Europe Latin tried to destroy all the other European languages. In the Middle East, Arabic tried to destroy all the Persian languages, and in India Saḿskrta tried to suppress all the Prakrta languages. When Buddha began to propagate his philosophy in Pali, the Saḿskrta scholars advised him to use Saḿskrta, but Buddha refused. In Medieval India, Kabir revolted against the use of Saḿskrta as the medium of expression. He said,

Saḿskrta kúpodaka bhákhá bahatá niira.

“Saḿskrta is like the stagnant water in a well, whereas the people’s languages are like fresh, flowing water.”

In Bengal, Saḿskrta scholars tried to suppress the Bengali language, but Nawab Hussain Shah extended all kinds of help and encouragement to the development of the Bengali language. Till then, the Rámayańa, the Mahábhárata and the Bhágavat Giitá were written only in Saḿskrta. Later, the poets Krittivas, Kashiramdas and Malladhar Basu (Guna Raja Khan) translated the Rámáyańa, the Mahábhárata and the Bhágavat Giitá respectively into Bengali. The Saḿskrta scholars began to spread the false rumor that the Nawab Suhen Shah was conspiring to destroy Hinduism because the holy scriptures of the Hindus were being translated into Bengali. They imposed social restrictions on Krittivas Oja and excommunicated him from the Hindu religion. This took place about 450 years ago. Recently, some people in Canada and Wales revolted against the imposition of English because they wanted to use their own language as their medium of expression. Likewise, Bhojpurii, Maethilii Magahii, Chattishgarhi, Angika, Avadhi, Bundeli, Marawari, Konkoni and many other important Indian languages are being suppressed by different vested interests.

Religion

Not everyone follows the same religion, nor is religion a common factor in human society. Rather, the opposite is the case, and very often it divides human society. The Arabic word for religion is majhab whereas dharma in the etymological sense means “characteristic” or “property”. In fact, if dharma is understood in the true sense of the term, it is one and indivisible for the entire human race. Dharma is a psycho-spiritual faculty. It gradually brings out the latent divine qualities of the human heart, and helps human beings attain oneness with the Supreme Entity. It has nothing to do with material objects. On the other hand, religion is a psycho-sentimental factor. It is a collection of physical and ritualistic observances. There may be many religions, but dharma is one.

Religions always prescribe various ritualistic observances like lighting lamps in a particular way, holding candles in a specified manner, sitting one way or standing another way, counting beads a certain number of times, etc. Only approved people are supposed to worship particular deities, fixed sacerdotal fees are to be charged, prescribed animals are to be sacrificed to the deities, alters are to be built in a particular way, and so on. While following such rituals, the mind is engrossed in religious rites and material objects, so how can it move in an ideational flow to a devotional goal? Those who follow a particular religion are supposed to kneel down and stand up a specific number of times, so naturally they are always counting their movements, consequently their minds cannot be withdrawn from physical movements and external activities.

There are some people who vehemently believe that only temples are holy places, and that mosques, churches and synagogues are not. The followers of other religions look upon themselves as the chosen disciples of God, and regard others as heathens or infidels. But how can the bricks, stones, mortar, etc. be holy or unholy? They are only material objects. Most of the masons and carpenters who were employed to build temples belonged to other religions, yet once a temple was constructed, it was declared holy, regardless of who built it. Is this not ludicrous?

Religions are based on external ritualistic observances, so they are preoccupied with physical objects. In the course of time, these physical objects become the objects of ideation. Take the example of cows. Cows are considered sacred by Hindus because they provide milk. Now, if cows are considered sacred for this reason, then what about buffaloes which provide more milk? They should be considered more sacred than cows. The followers of religious dogma do not like to discuss such issues. As a result of ideating on religion, the human mind becomes inert. No amount of discussion or intellectual persuasion can shake that psychic inertia. From childhood, human beings are taught irrational ideas, so when they grow up it is extremely difficult to remove preconceived notions. For example, students conversant with science know that a solar or lunar eclipse is caused by scientific factors and has nothing to do with the mythological demons Ráhu and Ketu. But even then, due to their inherent reactive momenta, they go to the Ganges and take a holy bath. Is this not due to ingrained religious beliefs?

When people’s ideas are so fixed that they will not entertain any discussion or argument it is called “fanaticism”. It is said that religion is a question of faith, not logic. In India, there are many religious fanatics. Due to religious fanaticism and bigotry, there have been innumerable violent clashes in the past. How repugnant that thousands of people were killed on the pretext of a single strand of hair! These fanatics never bothered to listen to the beliefs of others, and moreover, for them it is a sin to listen to others. In one sense they are worse than animals, because animals do not harbour any communal feeling. Physical sentiments are predominant in such religious expressions. People should keep aloof from the bondages of religion. Behind all religious dogma, physical considerations are dominant. One community considers it a sin to eat beef but not goats or deer. The custom of wearing a vermilion mark on the head and forehead by Indian women is an expression of religious sentiment. The women of other countries do not follow this practice. It does not matter at all if Indian women stop using vermilion. All religions exploit people by appealing to religious sentiments.

There are many people who worship particular scriptures. These scriptures were most likely composed, printed and bound by the followers of other religions. As soon as a book of scripture has been published, Hindus regard it as the goddess Saraswati. There are many people who spend money extravagantly to build idols, then after a day or two, a long procession and a lot of fanfare, the idol is immersed in a river. If a member of another religion accidentally damages any part of the idol, an undesirable incident of unprecedented magnitude may occur.

Fanaticism occurs when physical considerations outweigh rationality. Religious fanaticism occurs when fanaticism centres on a particular religion. A powerful intellectual appeal rather than the application of force is required to bring religious fanatics onto the right path, because force will only create a reaction which will intensify religious fanaticism.

Certain practices were not originally religious rituals, but traditions or customs. Long ago the Jews started practising circumcision. When Moses converted some of his contemporaries to Judaism, and later when Mohammed converted some local people to Islam, neither prophet dared to instruct their new followers to discard the old customs they followed, consequently the old customs continued after their conversion. In ancient times, the Austrics used to worship the sun god because they believed that if it was propitiated it would send abundant rays and produce rich harvests; In Austric society, women have a very important role, consequently the role of the priests is not so important. The Austrics believed that the sun was a female god and that the moon was a male god, so they addressed the sun as mother. They introduced Chat Puja, the worship of the sun goddess. In olden times, people used to worship the sun goddess only once a year, but in Magadh it is worshipped twice, during the two major harvests. The tradition of Chat Puja became so strong among the inhabitants of Magadh that despite the enormous influence of the Aryans, Buddhists and Muslims, the custom of Chat Puja continued unchanged. Even today, the Muslims in some areas of Magadh worship the sun goddess. In some places they perform the worship themselves, and in other places they get it done with the Hindus. Similarly, in Bengal the Muslims worship the deities Satya Narayana and Olabibi. These are expressions of traditional beliefs which have been passed down from one generation to another.

The only way to combat religious fanaticism is to strengthen the logical wave. Through the study of science, we know that an eclipse is a physical phenomenon. The deities Ráhu and Ketu have nothing to do with it. Although this sort of superstitious belief is no doubt diminishing, there are some people who still worship mythological deities because they believe that the deities can be propitiated to release the sun and the moon from an eclipse. The reason is that the fear psychosis in human beings is stronger than logic. When human rationality is strengthened, irrational ideas will vanish from society.

Many people today advocate the formation of theocratic states (dharmarasta). But when they use the term theocratic states, they mean religious states, not states which uphold the cause of righteousness. We should strive to establish states which uphold righteousness (dharma), and for this the physical sentiments that are the basis of religion should be ignored. People must remain aloof from dogmatic religious ideas. Some people perform religious observances which relate to the moon – after sighting the moon, they start their religious penance. But what will happen to those who will live on the moon itself. Rational thinking will remove the fear psychosis from the human mind – rationality will defeat fanaticism.

In India, the Aryans tried to establish the Vedic religion by destroying the Austric religion. In the Buddhist period, particularly during the reign of King Binbisai of Magadh, Buddhism was imposed upon non-Buddhists. Later, the Hindus forcibly converted Buddhists and Jains to Hinduism. During the Muslim period, the Islamic rulers forcibly imposed Islam in India, Iran and Egypt. In false contemporary Egypt is a mixture of Arabian civilization and Islamic religion. Countless Jews were forcibly converted to Christianity. During the British rule of India, the Christians propagated Christianity in a very psychological way, consequently thousands of Hindus became Christians. Before the British came to India, there were hardly any Christians in the country. In the Muslim period, many Hindus were converted to Islam by both psychological pressure and physical force. Besides this, many Hindus embraced Islam because they were disgusted with the defects in Hinduism. At that time, along with severe religious upheaval, there was also extreme social disparity, and as a result many people turned to Islam. Even today, some missionaries are converting people into their respective religions by taking advantage of the peoples educational backwardness, superstition and poverty. The medieval crusades are also burning examples or the suppression of one religion by another.

Political Democracy can and will be fortuitous

when Economic Democracy is established.

Explore this and other articles covering alternative economics, ethical leadership, economic democracy, and a society without the weal and woe of social and economic vicissitudes HERE

How does PROUT compare or contrast with capitalism or communism? Explore the answers HERE

What are essential ingredients assuring progressive sustainability bereft of the vicissitudes of economic or political predation, privation or disparity? Learn more HERE

http://gplus.to/ProgressiveSustainability

Minimum Requirements and Maximum Amenities for Life

noreply@blogger.com (Progressive Development) — Tue, 05 Jul 2016 23:42:00 +0000

Human needs are ever constant, though indeed include necessarily basic needs germane to contemporaneous life. Through changes in time, place, and person, such basic necessities may fluctuate, while in a progressively evolving society, such amenities escalate, building upon prior amenities and often transcending them through subtler means. PROUT endeavors towards participation, as well as production and distribution to escalate in optimal capacities and processes, and rational distribution in a rational manner, not to compromise any realm of society by any means in the evolution of such progress.

Guaranteeing basic amenities of life are imperative for a society to prevail; prevention of such availability and growth of amenities are unconscionable, are crimes against humanity.

Progressive Utilization promotes assuring the purchasing capacity for acquiring the basic necessities for all, a broader concept, disposition, and principle than state capitalism, stipend socialism, chasing the crumbs of trickle-down economics, or stealing, or anarchy. At any moment, the correct approach within any country or community may not be exactly the same between one another, while exercising the principle will be the same.

Principles in PROUT are of such a core nature that they have lasting import throughout the continuation of life and society, while what forms of implementing such core principles vary from time, place and person(s). This also facilitates PROUT from accommodating dogma or superstition to become part of societal culture.

Today there may be a call for $15 or $20 an hour as a just and living wage, whereas such numbers may not be practical as time passes, thus, Progressive Utilization operates on the broader principle, to remain steady, that "everyone should be guaranteed the purchasing capacity for basic necessities of life", of which should always be in the increase for all, optimizing the felicities of life.

Building anything on humanistic lines requires a foundation of real love and affection for humanity. A truly benevolent society will never come into being under the leadership of those who are solely concerned with profit and loss. Where love is paramount, the question of personal loss or gain does not arise. The basic ingredient for building a healthy society is simply genuine love; how then is it possible to establish such a society through coercion or legal compulsion?
— P R Sarkar

by P R Sarkar Founder or PROUT

There are many attractions in society, and it is the nature of human beings to run after these attractions. Communism exploited this human tendency by promising to give equal wealth to all. But the mundane resources in the world are limited, so is it possible to provide equal wealth to all? No, and the attempt to do so is nothing but a dazzling ostentation. Now communism has met its end. Communism was nothing but a “bogusism” – a mere ostentation of verbose language and nothing else.

Rather than trying to give equal wealth to all, the proper approach is to ensure that everyone is guaranteed the minimum requirements of life. As the income of people increases, the radius of their minimum requirements should also increase. Just to bridge the gap between the more affluent people and the common people, we have to incease the minimum requirements of all. In addition, the maximum amenities should be provided to meritorious persons to enable them to render greater service to society. This should be done by setting aside some wealth for those with special qualities, but the provision of the maximum amenities should not go against the common interest.

However, something more can be added. Besides increasing the maximum amenities of meritorious people, we also have to increase the maximum amenities available to common people. Meritorious people will earn more than common people, and this earning will include their maximum amenities. But the common people should not be deprived of maximum amenities, so there should be efforts to give them as much of the maximum amenities as possible. There will still be a gap between the maximum amenities of the common people and the maximum amenities of the meritorious, but there should be constant efforts to reduce this gap. Thus, the common people should also receive more and more amenities. If maximum amenities are not provided to common people, no doubt there will be progress in society, but there will always remain the scope for imperfection in future. What constitutes both the minimum requirements and the maximum amenities should be ever increasing. This idea is a new appendix to PROUT.

If the maximum amenities of meritorious people become excessively high, then the minimum requirements of common people should be immediately increased. For example, if a person with special qualities has a motor bike and an ordinary person has a bicycle, there is a balanced adjustment. But if the person with special qualities has a car, then we should immediately try to provide the common people with motor bikes.

There is a proverb which refers to plain living and high thinking, but what is plain living? Plain living eighty years ago was not the same as it is today, so plain living changes from age to age. The standard of value also varies from age to age. Thus, both the minimum requirements and the maximum amenities will vary from age to age, and both will be ever increasing. If this were not so, there would be no economic progress in society.

So, our approach should be to provide the minimum requirements of the age to all, the maximum amenities of the age to those with special qualities according to the degree of their merit, and the maximum amenities to the common people as well. The minimum requirements of the age as per their money value plus the maximum amenities of the age as per their money value are to be fixed and refixed, and fixed again and refixed again, and so on. In this way you must elevate the standard of the people – you must go on elevating their standard of living.

The Amenities of Life

The amenities of life are those things which make life easy. The word “amenity” comes from the Old Latin word amenus which means “to fulfill the desire” or “to make the position easy”. Amenities mean physical and psychic longings. Whatever will satisfy the physical and psychic longings of the people will be the amenities of the age. Common people should be favored with maximum amenities. For example, previously people used to dig a well to get drinking water, and then they carried the drinking water to their houses. Later water tanks were constructed, and now drinking water comes through pipes. In this way the amenities of life have increased and life has become easier. Though the aim is to get water, the system of getting it has become more effortless and more convenient.

Take another example. Suppose school children receive the minimum requirements of life. If they are provided with free snacks, this amenity will be over and above the minimum requirements. Again, in most trains there are first and second class compartments. First class passengers already get special facilities, but if free tea or coffee is given to the passengers in the second class compartments, it will be considered an amenity.

More and more amenities will have to be provided to the common people with the progress of society. This process will generate the impetus to collect and utilize more and more resources, and the proper utilization of the collective resources will elevate the standard of living of both the common mass and the meritorious people.

As the need for the minimum requirements is fulfilled and the supply of the maximum amenities increases, the struggle for daily subsistence will gradually decrease and people's lives will become increasingly easy and enjoyable. For this reason PROUT guarantees the minimum requirements and the maximum amenities to all.

The root vidh prefixed by su and suffixed by ac and t´a´ equals suvidha´ which means “the pabulum asked for”. Kuvidha´ means “the pabulum not asked for”. If you are travelling by train and you see someone take a snack of delicious food, you will have a natural urge or longing to enjoy the same delicacies. This is a natural longing for physical pabulum. Those things which your body wants are the natural amenities. Natural amenities include all the longings of nature. They include all natural physiological longings such as urination, defecation and eating when one is hungry. Common people should be provided with more and more natural amenities to make their lives easy.

They should also be provided with more and more super-natural amenities. Common people experience much stress and strain – they should be freed from this tension. For example, the rural people of India always worry about their crops. If the rains are late or if they fail, paddy production will suffer; if the climate is too cold or not cold enough, the winter crop will be adversely affected. The common people should be freed from all these stresses and strains. This can be achieved through the provision of super-natural amenities which can be developed artificially through science and technology. For example, better agricultural techniques and the construction of small-scale dams to conserve water and improve irrigation can help relieve poor rural people of their stresses and strains. Even simple techniques can increase crop yields. For instance, if the smoke from burning wood chips is made to pass through a field of mustards seed, the flowers of the mustard seeds will bloom immediately and increase the production of the crop.

We should provide common people with both natural and super-natural amenities according to the physical capacity, the psychic capacity and the technical capacity of the state. This approach will ensure that human beings get enough amenities so that their lives become satisfying and congenial.

The minimum requirements must be guaranteed to all human beings, and under the environmental conditions concerned – that is, the existing environmental conditions – there should be maximum amenities. You should satisfy the thirst for physical and psychic longings – for physical and psychic pabula – under the concerning conditions. So maximum amenities are to be guaranteed to all under the environmental conditions concerned, which means keeping in view such factors as the temporal, topographical, geographical, social and psychic conditions.

What is the difference among surroundings, atmosphere, and environment? “Surrounding” means “everything physical, either directly physical or psycho-physical, that surrounds.” “Atmosphere” means “the nature of different expressions in the surroundings, such as water, air, air pressure, temperature, etc.” “Environment” means “that which controls the characteristic of inanimate and animate beings.”

One age will go and another will come, and human longings will also change. In one age a particular type of breakfast is accepted as the standard, and in the next age it will be considered substandard. Today people eat bread and butter, but according to the standard of the next age people may eat fried rice or sweet rice. Thus, the maximum amenities of life should be guaranteed to each and every individual, and their standard should be continuously elevated.

The jurisdiction of maximum amenities will go on expanding with the progress of human beings. Human beings are marching ahead, and their longing for different psycho-physical pabula is also increasing. The minimum requirements of the age must be guaranteed, and the maximum amenities must also be guaranteed. Maximum amenities must be provided in the existing environment.

Can human thirst be fully quenched? Can human hunger be fully satisfied? Why is it that human thirst knows no limitations? From PROUT we are moving to psycho-philosophy. In the relative world human thirst cannot be satisfied. Human beings are the progeny of the Supreme Progenitor, therefore human thirst is unlimited. All the properties of the Supreme are ensconced in human existence, and not only in human existence, but in each and every entity of the expressed universe. Can physical thirst, psychic thirst and spiritual thirst be quenched? Only spiritual thirst can be quenched. Unification of the unit with the Cosmic can quench the spiritual thirst. The physical body has certain limitations. It functions within very strict limitations. The mind has a far bigger jurisdiction, but it is also limited.

Future Progress

Every system has its merits and demerits. The demerit of this system is that as life becomes easier and easier, the physical capacity of human beings will gradually decrease. In ancient times people used to walk great distances with bare feet, carrying only a single cloth, but today people rarely move without footwear or without taking proper provisions. It is a fact that human strength will decrease in the future, but with the progress of society we have no alternative but to accept this situation. A day will come when the eyes and the bones in the human body will become weak. Almost all people will wear glasses and have false teeth. In the future there will also be tremendous changes in the structure of human beings. Human intellect will become sharper, the cranium will become larger and the nerve fibres will become more complex. Not only will such changes occur in human beings, similar changes will occur in animals and plants too.

The African elephant has a large body and a small head and it cannot be easily domesticated. In comparison the Indian elephant has a small body and a large head. It is more intelligent and it can be easily domesticated.

As life becomes increasingly easy, there will be greater opportunities for intellectual pursuits. A day will come when there will be hardly any need for human beings to work. This may sound strange today and perhaps we might not like to hear such a thing, but that day will surely come. Physicality will be transformed into more and more intellectuality, and intellectuality will be transformed into the culminating point of spirituality. To move ahead from physicality to intellectuality is the Proutistic order. It is the surest movement of human life – it is the surest movement of human destiny.

This type of movement to intellectuality will also take place in certain kinds of animals, such as dogs, monkeys and cows. It may be that in 1,000 years monkeys will reach the stage of evolution that human beings have achieved at present. At that time human beings will be making tremendous progress in the realms of intellectuality and intuition. The human beings of that future age will be very sensitive. The efferent nerves will be more active than the afferent nerves, and subtle experiences will be more common than they are now. Today human beings seldom have subtle experiences, but in the future they will occur naturally and spontaneously. The functional jurisdiction of the brain will also increase. Similarly, many animals will become more sensitive and their vocabulary will increase. With intellectual development vocabulary increases, and the number of words in a language also increases. The functional jurisdiction of the brain of animals will increase too.

With the help of spiritual practices, the human beings of the future will increase the functional jurisdiction of their brains with accelerating speed. People may think that they cannot make rapid spiritual progress unless the size of the brain, and hence the size of the cranium, is increased. But this is not so because human beings can increase the jurisdiction of their thinking.

Today human beings are progressing in the realm of intellectuality. To attain the culminating point of spirituality the human beings of today have to face less obstacles than the people of the past such as Mahars´i Vishvamitra, Mahars´i Agastya, etc. The development of the glands and the amount of the hormone secretions is much greater than 100,000 years ago, and the glands will develop and increase their secretions by much more in the next 100,000 years. In 100,000 years, human beings will conceive of things which are beyond the conception of the human beings of today. These types of changes will occur within the social and economic jurisdiction of PROUT.

As human beings gradually move along the path of evolution, they will come to increasingly understand that humans are more psychic than physical. In fact human beings are machines, but they are physico-psychic machines. With psychic changes physical changes will also occur. The human beings of the future will feel strange when they see the structure of the human beings of today. Similarly, the humans of today would feel disturbed if they could see what the humans of the future will look like.

According to human psychology, people do not like to think much about the future. Rather they prefer to dwell on the past. The reason is that the future may or may not happen as human beings plan, so there is always a risk involved in speculating about the future.

One day the physical and psychic structure of human beings will become divine. It may happen that human beings will not like this mundane world anymore. They will then lose their fascination with the transitory world. They will think that it is better to merge into Supreme Consciousness and leave the world forever. This transformation in human psychology will come about through spiritual practices. So I advise each human being that as long as you are alive, you should try to build yourself in a nice way, in a complete way. But you should not only build yourselves, you should also build human society in the same way. To achieve this you will have to take the help of PROUT.

The progressive availability of the maximum amenities of life will be guaranteed in PROUT, satisfying physical needs. The satisfied physical needs will lessen the physical obstacles which inhibit human progress, and human beings will experience all-round development, especially in the intellectual stratum. Human beings will get the opportunity to develop in the intellectual stratum without any hindrances.

The truth of humanity, the veracity of humanity, will go on increasing in different areas of expression. That is why I say that there must be guaranteed minimum requirements and guaranteed maximum amenities for all human beings, and that these must go on increasing. These amenities must be good for the physical and psychic development of human beings, or at least for one of the two.

NeoHumanistic Approach to Economics

As you know, physical pabulum is limited, so the mind continually runs from one thing to another. This process goes on in a never ending order. But in the realm of intuition the goal is infinite. When aspirants come into this realm, their desires, their longings, are fully satisfied. Thus the controlling point is the spiritual order. Because the spiritual order is infinite, human beings have no control over it, but as the physical realm is finite, human beings can increase their sphere of activity in this realm. The attempt to do this is a never ending process, and there are infinite permutations and combinations in this endeavor, but the latent hunger in human beings will never be satisfied in this realm. The quest to satisfy this hunger can at best only lead to the threshold point of spirituality.

As human beings progress towards the realm of spirituality, they are helped on the one hand by PROUT, which guarantees minimum requirements and maximum amenities, and on the other hand by NeoHumanistic outlook, which removes disparities. These two approaches help human beings in their progress and elevation. Finally the existential faculty merges in the Supreme.

PROUT touches the threshold point of spirituality. It also helps to lessen the obstacles in daily life. For example, many daily commuters have to leave their homes at 6:00 a.m. and return at 10:00 p.m. to secure their minimum requirements. But PROUT will guarantee the minimum requirements to all, so their daily burden will be lessened.

NeoHumanism also touches the threshold point of spirituality. It helps the existential faculty reach the pinnacled state. NeoHumanism will bring equality in the social sphere and remove all sorts of disparities, therefore human progress will be greatly accelerated.

When PROUT and NeoHumanism are established, the whole existence of human beings will become effulgent in the attainment of the Supreme.

The world is moving ahead with its merits and demerits. The movement from imperfection to perfection is progress. In the physical and psychic realms progress is never ending, but because everything in these realms is limited, the hunger of human beings remains unsatisfied. In the spiritual realm, at the point of culmination, human hunger is fully satisfied. To satisfy human hunger in the physical and psychic realms there is PROUT and NeoHumanism. But how can human hunger be satisfied in the subtlest realm? For this [Tantra Sadhana] philosophy and practice is there. Movement beyond the threshold point of spirituality is beyond the scope of PROUT but within the realm of [Tantra Sadhana]. [Progressive Utilization] is a happy blending of rationality and spirituality.

The human requirements of every age must be guaranteed. The minimum requirements must go on increasing according to the physical and psychic standard of human beings and according to the changes in climatic conditions, environment, etc. Thus the range of minimum requirements will go on increasing according to the range of human social conditions.

At present human beings are thinking about their own minimum requirements more than about the minimum requirements of animals and plants. A day is coming when some of the animals, if not all, will come within the realm of our social membership. Today we say that each and every human being will get the minimum requirements. Tomorrow we will say that the minimum requirements will also include the needs of dogs, cows, monkeys, etc. To fulfill these requirements, there should be more and more production.

The earth is not only for human beings, it is for other living beings also. So we will have to do something for them. The minimum requirements and maximum amenities should also be given to animals. Today cows, dogs and monkeys are developing; tomorrow more and more animals will be in this category. Animals will also develop longings for different psycho-physical pabula, so they should be guaranteed minimum requirements and maximum amenities too. We will have to do something for them also. This is the demand of NeoHumanism, of NeoHumanistic ideas. This demand should be fulfilled by PROUT.

According to the enlargement of human existential value and jurisdiction, psychic pabula will also increase. There should be maximum amenities for one and all, with more longing for physico-psychic objects of enjoyment. These amenities should be increased for the entire social order. There cannot be any full stop, any comma or any semi-colon in this progress.

Progress is never ending. Pabulum is also never ending. We should understand this. There cannot be any stop in the march of human progress. And not only in human progress, but in the physical and psychic worlds also. Geo-sentiment will die out; socio-sentiment will disappear; socio-economic sentiment will be eradicated. Finally a day will come when sentient sentiment will dominate. A day will come when human beings will get the maximum amenities, then human beings will reach the zenith. But is the provision of maximum amenities the zenith of service? It may be looked upon as the zenith; but because circumstances change, maximum amenities change. The provision of maximum amenities should be treated as a relative zenith point and not the supreme zenith.

So maximum amenities of life under the conditions concerned should be guaranteed, and they should go on increasing. We should communicate this idea to the masses and encourage them to help us in our noble mission.

Whenever we are thinking of implementing a theory we should feel that we are living in the present, then we should implement the theory. The order of Shiva was to march ahead maintaining association with present reality. This was the order of Shiva. Marxism completely violated this fundamental principle, which is why Marxism has been broken into pieces under the impact of the present circumstances.

Bheunge geche mor svapner ghor,
Chinre geche mor viinar ta´r.
“The intoxicating effect of my dream has been lost,
The string of my lyre has been broken.”

Suppose there is a bright lamp. Hundreds and thousands of insects will rush towards it and get burnt. Similarly, communism was like a bright lamp. Marxists built castles in the air. They propagated many tall talks but they never thought about the practical application of their socio-economic approach. They killed many innocent people and sent countless others to concentration camps in the name of so-called ideology. Stalin killed hundreds of thousands of people instead of helping them by providing amenities for all. In the name of doing good for the masses he killed so many people. This is not humanism. Today people have kicked communism out. In China the people recently demanded “common human liberty”. That was considered an offence, so they were crushed. Do not people have every right to demand common human liberty?

Whatever is feasible and practical has been said in PROUT. Marxism built castles in the air and encouraged the people to dream a meaningless dream. PROUT has not done this nor will PROUT do it. PROUT will do that which is feasible and practical.

If the common people and the meritorious people are treated as the same, the capable people will not be encouraged to develop their higher potentiality. This is the reason why the brain drain is happening in India. When talented people leave India, they leave it for good. Providing special amenities for those with special capabilities will stop the brain drain.

PROUT’s approach is to guarantee the minimum requirements for all, guarantee maximum amenities for all and guarantee special amenities for people with special capabilities. This approach will ensure ever increasing acceleration in the socio-economic sphere. The question of retardation does not arise; even the question of maintaining speed does not arise. There must be acceleration. Acceleration is the spirit of life, the spirit of existence, the spirit of the existential faculty. One may not be a genius, one may simply be a member of the ordinary public, and not properly accepted or respected by all, but even then one will get the minimum requirements and maximum amenities in an ever increasing manner according to the environmental conditions concerned, according to the demands of the day.

So what is the significance of this new approach?

1) Minimum requirements are to be guaranteed to all.

2) Special amenities are to be guaranteed to capable people. Special amenities are for people of special calibre as per the environmental condition of the particular age.

3) Maximum amenities are to be guaranteed to all, even to those who have no special qualities – to the common people of common calibre. Maximum amenities are to be guaranteed to all as per environmental conditions. These amenities are for those of ordinary calibre – the common people, the so-called downtrodden humanity.

4) All three above are never ending processes, and they will go on increasing according to the collective potentialities.

This appendix to our philosophy may be small, but it is of a progressive nature and a progressive character. It has far-reaching implications for the future. I hope you will realize its impact and all its potentialities.

13 October 1989, Calcutta
Published in:
Prout in a Nutshell Volume 4 Part 17
Proutist Economics

Political Democracy can and will be fortuitous

when Economic Democracy is established.

Explore this and other articles covering alternative economics, ethical leadership, economic democracy, and a society without the weal and woe of social and economic vicissitudes HERE

How does PROUT compare or contrast with capitalism or communism? Explore the answers HERE

What are essential ingredients assuring progressive sustainability bereft of the vicissitudes of economic or political predation, privation or disparity? Learn more HERE

http://gplus.to/ProgressiveSustainability

Essential Factors for Existence of Society

noreply@blogger.com (Progressive Development) — Fri, 15 Apr 2016 22:14:00 +0000

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The Existence Of Human Society

Human society provides the framework for the collective movement and growth of all individuals -- for the expansion and development of the individual and collective potentialities. As such, society does not indicate merely an aggregate of individuals; rather it implies a degree of collective consciousness and social cohesion. The factors necessary for the existence of human society, asti in Sanskrit, are based upon the strengths of social unity, security and peace.

Social Unity

The degree of social unity in a system is created by, and depends upon, the existence and strength of certain key factors: common ideals, an absence of social stratification (a classless society), collective social functions, and an absence of capital punishment.

Common Ideals: Inspired by common ideals, people move together overcoming all hardships and obstacles. Without the inspiration of a common ideal, their movement becomes thwarted and haphazard. Historical groupings -- whether ancient clans, medieval empires or modern nation-states –- have all been based upon common ideals and sentiments to achieve social unity. While common ideals are positive, the various ”isms” based on these ideals have often divided humanity into mutually belligerent groups. In modern days, for example, the patriotism of nation states have often given rise to national chauvinism, racism and imperialism. Such value systems are fast becoming outdated. Two World Wars, the excesses of imperialism, and the exploitation of global capitalism, demonstrate the need to develop global common ideals and realize that this mother Earth is populated by a single human society. The narrow groupist sentiments of the past, including racism, nationalism, and class elitism must to be overcome to realize greater social unity.

Philosophically, the only ideal which is all-inclusive and synthetic, is to merge one's identity with all of life. Only by offering each of our actions to the Divine Entity are we able to developing feelings of true universalism beyond narrow self interest. This is the required sentiment to inspire people to move toward greater unity.

Classless Society: Human beings have a natural bond of love and affection towards each other and this tender thread should be strengthened. The idea of the basic equality of all human beings is known in Sanskrit as sama samaja tattva: the principle of social equality. This principle of social equality should be the basis for human society. It is essential for the promotion of unity.

Even in an ideal social structure there would be infinite differences of outlook, occupation and opinion insofar as diversity is the law of nature. But this apparent diversity, which accounts for the beauty and strength of human culture, should not be used as a pretext for the creation of a social structure undermining the basic rights, unity, and oneness of human beings. Stressing the apparent differences and dividing people by injecting or promoting irrational divisive sentiments is detrimental to the growth of society, weakening its unity and strength. Ideas of division based on gender, race, class, religion, etc., are the products of self-serving leaders who want to inculcate them into the social psychology in order to divide and conquer. People have to be educated and mentally strengthened to overcome such sentiments.

Social Functions: It is in our common social functions, festivals, gatherings, etc., that the social fabric is woven and where people learn to appreciate each other. Social functions inspire the sense of community that is necessary to collectively face our everyday difficulties. They also give us a chance to express our higher forms of art and culture.

Absence of Capital Punishment: It is morally wrong for society to sanction murder by law as a punishment. It legitimizes killing and creates a psychic imbalance in people. From the social point of view, every executed member of the society will leave behind a husband or wife, sons and daughters, parents, friends, etc., who become alienated and disgruntled by this measurement. Their resentment and pain (with or without any wrongdoing on their part) undermines the unity of society. The situation worsens when racism or class dominance come into play. Similarly, social ostracism (the creation of ”outcasts” or permanently rejected individuals) is a sort of capital punishment on the psychological rather than physical level, and also causes negative effects. As such PROUT advocates that education and rehabilitation, rather than punishment, should provide the basis of a criminal justice system.

Security

For the existence of human beings and for the development of their full physical, psychic, and spiritual potential, economic and social security is required. This security primarily depends upon two factors: social justice and discipline.

Social Justice

Many of the insecurities of life can be removed by recognizing the need for social unity despite the world's apparent diversity. When this recognition is linked to a greater effort to ensure everyone the opportunity to meet their basic necessities, according to rational and human considerations, we have the basis for PROUT’s system of social justice. Proutists will make a strong effort to remove all exploitative and unjust practices from the social fabric. This will greatly strengthen the well being, creativity and productivity of the individual, making society much stronger as a whole. The economic system of PROUT is based on this idea of social justice.

Discipline

A well balanced and agreeable code of conduct is highly necessary in both individual and collective life because it lessens conflicts due to self interest. All societies have social codes, such as standards for courteous behavior as well as regulations and laws. These help create an environment and attitude conducive to mutual respect and interaction. They give scope for freedom of expression up to the point at which one's behavior creates interference with the basic rights of others. Lack of discipline in individual and social life bring about social deterioration, as unrestrained self-interest, greed, and immorality erode unity. The rich and powerful puff up their own lifestyles by preying on the weak. Poverty spreads in similar proportion to the concentration of wealth into the hands of a few. The Earth's resources are limited, but selfish desires and greed are unlimited. Without a strong common code of discipline, based upon universal values, society degenerates into a pack of wolves. Social Darwinism legitimizes the exploitation of the weak and the poor by the rich and the powerful.

An overly repressive or permissive code of conduct that does not take into account human psychology inevitably has disastrous results. Discipline must be in tune with the nature and subtle aspirations of human beings. The mechanical discipline of the military or discipline based on the repression of human nature will never serve the whole. The repressive manners and beliefs of the Victorian age resulted in modern days' hedonism. In the former Soviet Union, only the omnipresence of the secret police assured socially acceptable behavior -- making individual life a repressive nightmare and ultimately leading to the destruction of that social system from within. Discipline in social life must develop from a code of conduct which is in tune with the physico-psycho-spiritual nature of human beings, and be adjusted to the needs of different age-groups and cultures. Children will have to be educated with a love for self discipline. Only by such means can freedom in the social and individual sphere be realized. For the utilization of the higher faculties of the mind, self discipline is especially of great importance.

Peace

War is a great blight on human history. Human society thrives in peace and is destroyed by war. War throws human beings back into the animalistic fight for survival and brings out all base instincts, creating untold sufferings.

Peace is of two kinds. Sentient peace indicates the predominance of the forces of unity, justice, and the light of rationality. Static peace, on the other hand, indicates that oppression, suppression and the forces of ignorance and exploitation are dominant. To establish sentient peace in human society, the well-wishers of humanity can not shy away from struggle. Only by struggling against the forces of ignorance and exploitation can lasting sentient peace be established.

For establishing lasting sentient peace, two factors are important: scientific spiritual practices and the fight for the removal of all dogmas. Through spiritual practices (proper diet, asanas, morality, selfless service, meditation and devotion), selfishness and physical longings are converted into higher mental and spiritual propensities, and the clash on the material level for limited goods can be minimized. Sentiments are broadened as people accelerate the unfolding of their innate potential. By fighting against irrational superstitions and dogmas, human beings establish themselves in rationality. Various dogmas have been the root cause in the past for much bloodshed. Take for example the clash between two different schools of Christianity that plunged most of central Europe into thirty years of utter destruction; or the dogma of racial superiority which gave the European settlers in America the scope to enslave Africans and eradicate Native Americans. And all this took place under a Constitution professing the liberty and equality of all men. Rationality encourages ideological discussion and conflict, but abhors the cruelties of war and destruction. To establish sentient peace, broad-mindedness must be encouraged and universalism must inspire the hearts of all. To do this, the following factors are necessary.

We must strive to develop and adopt a common philosophy of life. This does not mean the adoption of a set of dogmas or limiting of ideological differences. Rather it means the acceptance of universal values built upon a strong foundation of rationality.

We must develop a common constitution for all people and nations, especially a bill of human rights. This constitution should take the best of all experiences from different constitutions and blend them into one, to be ratified by all national governments. This will help protect the rights of minorities, and will be the first step toward establishing a world governing body with legislative powers.

We must create a common penal code for all nations, to be based primarily upon accepted human rights rather than local notions of vice and virtue.

There must be a guarantee of the production, supply and necessary purchasing capacity for the minimum requirements of life. This will assure everyone’s security on the existential level and free up the tremendous psychic energy presently bound up in fear, insecurity, and the struggle for the basic necessities. This mental energy can be harnessed for the welfare and development of individuals in all spheres of life, and a quantum leap in the quality of social life can be achieved.

A Comprehensive Guide to the Study of PROUT
By The Proutist Writers Group, New York Sector
© Proutist Universal, Inc. 1998
This edition published by Proutist Universal Global Office, March 2010
P.U. Global Office
Platanvej 30
DK 1810 Frederiksberg C

Denmark

Political Democracy can and will be fortuitous

when Economic Democracy is established.

Explore this and other articles covering alternative economics, ethical leadership, economic democracy, and a society without the weal and woe of social and economic vicissitudes HERE

How does PROUT compare or contrast with capitalism or communism? Explore the answers HERE

What are essential ingredients assuring progressive sustainability bereft of the vicissitudes of economic or political predation, privation or disparity? Learn more HERE

http://gplus.to/ProgressiveSustainability

PROUT Study Guide - 01 Introduction

noreply@blogger.com (Progressive Development) — Tue, 12 Apr 2016 01:29:00 +0000

Find more about PROUT Study Guide Here

Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar propounded the Progressive Utilization Theory (PROUT) in 1959 as an alternative to capitalism and communism. His ideas on this subject are enunciated in Proutist Economics, Prout in a Nutshell, Neo-Humanism in a Nutshell, Human Society, Part One, Human Society, Part Two, and A Few Problems Solved.

The experience of contemporary history has exposed the fallacies of cherished social, political and economic ideas, classical as well as revolutionary. The world is full of opportunities – material, mental and spiritual – and so to build a better and freer society is a practical possibility. Yet we are observing a process of social decadence, moral degeneration and the collapse of values which is corroding the springs of human action and corrupting the ideals of a civilized life. Failure and disappointment are bound to follow from attempts to solve the problems of our time with the ideas of previous centuries. These ideas emphasized material progress and scientific development. However, the mental makeup and moral standard of the civilized community have not matched the level of material progress. In other words, the development of civilization – refined cultural progress – has proven far slower than material scientific development.

Communism, which promised material well-being and security in an atheistic and socially regimented life has collapsed, creating disillusionment about revolutionary ideals. The great promise of the industrial nations has also remained unfulfilled despite enormous accumulation of wealth, because of the underlying psychology of individualistic hedonism. This radical hedonism postulates that happiness can be achieved by the fulfilment of any material or sensual desire whatsoever, and that in order to fulfil these desires, egotism, greed and selfishness have to be encouraged. The achievement of sensory pleasure has been sold as the achievement of harmony and peace. Radical hedonism, it should be known, is the philosophy of rich people.

The ideals of intellectual liberalism and intellectual refinement have also failed us. The cherished belief that the spread of reason would abolish our irrational outbursts toward each other has all but disappeared. Antagonism between ethnic, racial, and religious groups has become the fundamental reality of the nation-state. When human security becomes threatened, social, ethical and religious energies get expressed through unprecedented oppression, violence and enmity. The disconcerting experiences of the contemporary world compel thoughtful people to reconsider the fundamental philosophical principles from which different political theories – of the Right and the Left, conservative and liberal, reactionary and revolutionary – are alike deduced.

The capture of power, irrespective of the diversity of the means that are advocated, is the common postulate of all political theories. Today, the so-called free world heralds the victory of liberal democracy and its corollary the capitalist economic system. Through modern liberalism the individual has become 'economic man', lured by the glittering projections of a consumer psychology. In the context of capitalist society, people exist mainly as units in the work force, with our thoughts, feelings and tastes manipulated by the government and industry and the mass communications they control.

Simultaneously, gaining momentum among the poor and disenfranchised is a tendency to relapse into medieval obscurantism in search of an illusory safety in the backwaters of dogmatic faith. With the collapse of the Soviet Empire, movements for self-reliance are being sentimentalized with slogans from religious fundamentalism, slogans presented to the innocent person as an antithesis to pseudo-culture, economic domination and Western values.

This represents a new flare-up in the age-old struggle between religion and science – between faith and reason, and between mystic agnosticism and empirical knowledge. Probably the last gasp of a life and death struggle, it has lasted long, and has always placed civilized humanity in the breach. The material scientific mode of thought, having driven religion from pillar to post over a period of several centuries, is meeting the final assault of a hitherto vanquished adversary. Denying humans the possibility of ever knowing reality through experience, religions preach a neo-mysticism and a teleological view of life, which is the expression of humanity's loss of faith in itself. This is in contradiction to spiritual enlightenment, which leads the human mind to experience the real essence of freedom and the organic wholeness of the Universe.

Science, attempting to free the mind from the shackles of dogma, emphasized that truth is contained only in that which can be recognized clearly and distinctively through physics and physical laws. Knowledge is defined as the result of the intellectual analysis of our sense experience. In this way, however, science created a new barrier beyond which the mind could not elevate itself to greater thresholds of consciousness. Hence, science could not prevent the emergence of a materialistic dogma that devalues human potential, encourages the mechanization of life, and curtails freedom of thought.

The quest for freedom is much more ancient than either religion or physical science and can be referred back to our earliest struggle for existence. This quest accounts for the human triumph over nature in the course of efforts to satisfy biological needs. It provides the basis for the constant search for knowledge, and it enables us to progressively free ourselves from the tyranny of natural phenomena and social environments. If we are to be guided by this deep human longing, the philosophy of the future should judge the merit of any social organization or political institution by the actual measure of freedom it affords the individual in the physical, mental and spiritual spheres.

A Comprehensive Guide to the Study of PROUT
By The Proutist Writers Group, New York Sector
© Proutist Universal, Inc. 1998
This edition published by Proutist Universal Global Office, March 2010
P.U. Global Office
Platanvej 30
DK 1810 Frederiksberg C

Denmark

Political Democracy can and will be fortuitous

when Economic Democracy is established.

Explore this and other articles covering alternative economics, ethical leadership, economic democracy, and a society without the weal and woe of social and economic vicissitudes HERE

How does PROUT compare or contrast with capitalism or communism? Explore the answers HERE

What are essential ingredients assuring progressive sustainability bereft of the vicissitudes of economic or political predation, privation or disparity? Learn more HERE

http://gplus.to/ProgressiveSustainability

PROUT Study Guide Introduction - 02 Spiritual Humanism

noreply@blogger.com (Progressive Development) — Tue, 12 Apr 2016 01:27:00 +0000

Find more about PROUT Study Guide Here

Sarkar's philosophy is founded on the assumption that matter is not separate from consciousness but is rather a metamorphosed form of it. Similarly, consciousness is not the result of mental activity but rather thought is also a form of consciousness. It is Consciousness that underlies psychophysical reality and provides the inspiration for a rational view of life, moral integrity, and spiritual wisdom.

Spirituality and morality should not be equated with religious dogma and faith in God. All religions are frankly dualist systems that separate humans from their progenitor and the manifest universe. The rationalist rebels against theology – Descartes, Leibnitz, and Kant – also failed to escape the vicious circle of dualism. To offer security, religion impressed upon people the need to submit before the imaginary will of God or a theological ethical code, sanctioned by the scriptures and defined by religious institutions. Morality in this sense, however, is the absence of freedom.

A philosophy based on spiritual and moral values, on the other hand, is able to explain human existence – including desire, emotion, instincts, intuition, will and reason – as an integrated framework and do so in a way that is accessible to human comprehension. Such a philosophy is required to build the new social organism and political institutions that can foster not only the harmonious relations of all races and cultural groups, but also the harmonious relation of human beings with all animate and inanimate objects.

For Sarkar, human existence is physical, mental and spiritual. He defined progress as evolution to higher consciousness and ultimately to the state of absolute freedom. Simultaneously, he explained that ”spiritual progress can only be attained on a firm physical and mental base. … This physical and intellectual base has to be progressively adjusted to changing conditions of time and space.” The natural human aspiration is to achieve freedom in all three spheres.

In our march towards freedom we cannot neglect other living beings. We have to develop a social system where all living beings can live securely, and where people can move towards emancipation by freeing their minds from superstition and dogma. This universalistic spirit is Neo-Humanism or Spiritual Humanism. Human history thus far is a story of ruling classes trying to enhance their own social and material wealth at the cost of human values. This is why temples, churches, scriptures, laws, constitutions, corporations and international trade agreements have become more important than human beings. To confront this, Sarkar maintains that a fundamental human philosophy is required to cement a new social system and not the changing social values based on self-interest that are embodied in ruling institutions.

Human values find their root in spirituality. Spirituality is not mystic speculation of life after death, but is realized in relation to the manifest universe. The philosophy of monism, which postulates the self to be in union with the rest of the universe and responsible for its well-being, is the essence of spiritual humanism. Sarkar wrote in his book Neo-Humanism in a Nutshell: Part 1: “What does the state stand for, what is the use of these regulations, and what is the march of civilization for, if human beings don't get a chance to build a good physical well-being, to invigorate their intelligence with knowledge, and to broaden their hearts with love and compassion? Instead of leading humanity to the goal of life, if the State stands in the way, then it cannot command loyalty, because humanity is superior to the State.”

A Comprehensive Guide to the Study of PROUT
By The Proutist Writers Group, New York Sector
© Proutist Universal, Inc. 1998
This edition published by Proutist Universal Global Office, March 2010
P.U. Global Office
Platanvej 30
DK 1810 Frederiksberg C

Denmark

Political Democracy can and will be fortuitous

when Economic Democracy is established.

Explore this and other articles covering alternative economics, ethical leadership, economic democracy, and a society without the weal and woe of social and economic vicissitudes HERE

How does PROUT compare or contrast with capitalism or communism? Explore the answers HERE

What are essential ingredients assuring progressive sustainability bereft of the vicissitudes of economic or political predation, privation or disparity? Learn more HERE

http://gplus.to/ProgressiveSustainability

PROUT Study Guide Introduction - 03 Society and State

noreply@blogger.com (Progressive Development) — Tue, 12 Apr 2016 01:26:00 +0000

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In Human Society: Part 2, Sarkar described the inner spirit of 'society' as to ”move together.” Society originated as a family in the early phase, and was strengthened subsequently under the guidance of group mothers and group fathers. Later, with growing social complexity, group leaders emerged as queens and kings during the age of empires. The emergence of classical religion strengthened political power and under the dominance of the priest class the Church State arose. In modern times, under the rise of the capitalist class, the Nation State has become the norm. In this proces, Society itself has lost its identity and importance, and social laws, norms and values possess little meaning. All social structures have been politicized both in democratic countries and totalitarian countries. Nevertheless, realistic relations between society and State could be formulated to create a congenial atmosphere for security and freedom.

Sarkar's main goal was to revitalize society, and through his writings and action he clearly demonstrated that he wanted to establish a 'moral society' which he termed 'Sadvipra Samaj'. He was not so concerned with the political structure because he concluded that it will continue to evolve and change its character in different phases of history. On the other hand, he felt that in the absence of a strong society, neither moral standards nor strong social relations could be realized or maintained. He also believed that a strong society would balance the power of the political structure. He considered human society to be one and indivisible; hence, he emphasized the formation of a social structure from the village to the global level.

When he laid the foundation of his own organisation, for example, he set up a structure that consists of 35 branches, each extending from the village to the global level. This means that each locality should have at least 35 persons to take decisions on multifarious activities without being dependent on the dictates of the political structure.

Considering the above, the relation between Society and State can be defined as follows:

• Society has a wider scope than the State. As an assemblage of human beings, society should be considered one and indivisible without any boundaries of race, religion or nation. The State is a political machinery within society to maintain law and order and other co-related functions delegated by society.

• The State refers only to the politically organized portion of society. Society takes priority over the State. A sense of collective living creates society, and society in turn creates the State.

• The State needs an organized government to enforce its will. Society also needs a structure to regenerate moral and social values and maintain social cohesiveness free from the influence of the State machinery.

• Society is universal and without any boundaries. But the State may have specific boundaries flexible enough to be changed when there is need.

It is necessary to define the relation between the two structures in the clearest language to be able to set goals and coordinate between the two. Ultimately, however, the success of socially benevolent institutions will depend on the evolution of a proper social culture based on the values of spiritual humanism. The materialistic orientation of life and the marketing character of modern industrial religion has created extreme forms of alienation, isolation and identity crisis in the affluent Western world. Third World countries, besides suffering economic crisis, carry the psychological burdens of passive psychology, inferiority complex, religious dogma and other group sentiments. These narrow and stagnant ideas damage social integration.

The creation of social institutions on the world level with organs on the lower levels can eliminate threats from political and economic oligarchies and religious fanatics. Members of the social institutions should be established in the spirit of universalism. Sarkar explained that to be established in cardinal moral principles is essential for the qualitative transformation of the personality as well as society. He frequently used the term 'sadvipra' in this regard. Value-oriented intellectuals and spiritually free persons, who have moral integrity and are not motivated by selfinterest, are the best persons to organize themselves to form the new social structure. Their leadership is vital in creating social unity.

A Comprehensive Guide to the Study of PROUT
By The Proutist Writers Group, New York Sector
© Proutist Universal, Inc. 1998
This edition published by Proutist Universal Global Office, March 2010
P.U. Global Office
Platanvej 30
DK 1810 Frederiksberg C
Denmark

Political Democracy can and will be fortuitous

when Economic Democracy is established.

Explore this and other articles covering alternative economics, ethical leadership, economic democracy, and a society without the weal and woe of social and economic vicissitudes HERE

How does PROUT compare or contrast with capitalism or communism? Explore the answers HERE

What are essential ingredients assuring progressive sustainability bereft of the vicissitudes of economic or political predation, privation or disparity? Learn more HERE

http://gplus.to/ProgressiveSustainability

PROUT Study Guide Introduction - 04 PROUT's Political Objectives

noreply@blogger.com (Progressive Development) — Tue, 12 Apr 2016 01:24:00 +0000

Find more about PROUT Study Guide Here

Security for all members of society must be ensured, without depending on the bureaucratic structure. Security includes not only a guarantee of food, clothes, housing, health care, education and other minimum requirements of life, but also security in the psychological sense. In Third World countries, the cause of insecurity is the economy. Western countries face a sense of psychic insecurity due to the influence of a quantitative, materialistic monoculture. Overemphasis on materialistic values has created an identity crisis. Extremely alienated, an individual standing before the high wall of organized power structures feels helpless. To eradicate this sense of insecurity and alienation, spiritual awakening of the self is essential. Human beings must restore the sense of unity with their fellow beings, other living beings, nature, society etc. Secondly, the bureaucratic power structure should be replaced by humanistic management.

The basic human urge for freedom is the motivating force behind social evolution and progress. Freedom should be considered in the physico-psycho-spiritual sense. Physical freedom means the guarantee of the minimum requirements of life, and it cannot be unlimited. Intellectual freedom implies an arrangement for the development of intellect that can overcome environmental and pseudo-cultural influences. Freedom of thought is more important than freedom of expression. In every society, education, culture, religious institutions and the mass media manipulate the collective mind. Human values are distorted and pseudo-values are imposed. To ensure real freedom in the intellectual realm, the education system should be reoriented to develop intuitional and creative consciousness. 'Freedom from' hunger, poverty, exploitation, oppression, superstition, dogma, etc. is not enough to guarantee freedom. There must be an idea of 'freedom to'.

Spiritual liberation is a state where the individual mind realizes the sense of unity and harmony with the entire universe. The awakening of this consciousness is the goal of freedom, not the expression of unbridled passion and any demand whatsoever of the limited ego. It is the responsibility of society to create opportunities for every member to pursue their spiritual goal without hindrance. In this regard Sarkar wrote, “I want that every person should be guaranteed the minimum physical requirements of life, every person should get scope for full exploitation of psychic potentiality, every person should get equal opportunity to attain absolute truth, and endowed with all the glories and achievements of the world, every person should march towards the Absolute.” The 'Absolute', in a spiritual sense, is the state of total liberation.

Political Democracy can and will be fortuitous

when Economic Democracy is established.

Explore this and other articles covering alternative economics, ethical leadership, economic democracy, and a society without the weal and woe of social and economic vicissitudes HERE

How does PROUT compare or contrast with capitalism or communism? Explore the answers HERE

What are essential ingredients assuring progressive sustainability bereft of the vicissitudes of economic or political predation, privation or disparity? Learn more HERE

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PROUT Study Guide Introduction - 05 PROUT's Economic Development

noreply@blogger.com (Progressive Development) — Tue, 12 Apr 2016 00:22:00 +0000

Find more about PROUT Study Guide Here

Ideas Worth Living

The idea that maximum consumption will create happiness has been challenged before. Economist E. F. Schumacher states in his book Small is Beautiful:

“Economy as the content of life is a deadly illness, because infinite growth does not fit into a finite world. That economy should not be the content of life, has been told to mankind by all its great teachers; that it cannot be, is evident today. If one wants to describe the deadly illness in more detail, one can say that it is similar to addiction, like alcoholism or drug addiction. It does not matter too much whether this addiction appears in more egotistical, or more altruistic form, whether it seeks its satisfaction only in a crude materialistic way or also in an artistically, culturally or scientifically refined way. Poison is poison, even if wrapped in a silver paper. ... If the spiritual value of inner man is neglected, then selfishness, like capitalism, fits the orientation better than a system of love for one's fellow beings.”

Sarkar asserted that economic development is only a means for survival and the fulfilment of physical needs. The economy must maintain balance with Nature and other aspects of social and cultural development. The spirit of all-round collective welfare, not limitless profit, should guide future economic development.

Considering the above, Sarkar's guidelines and goals for economic development are as follows:

• The minimum requirements of all should be guaranteed.

• Economic power should be decentralized and economic democracy should be introduced.

• Production should be designed for meaningful consumption, not profit.

• The gap between rich and poor nations should be narrowed.

• Production should serve the real needs of people and not the demands of the economic system.

• Harmonious relations of cooperation with Nature should be established.

• The psychology of competition must be replaced by a psychology of cooperation.

• It should be accepted that economic fulfilment cannot satisfy the infinite desire for happiness.

• Supramundane and spiritual potentialities should be explored and utilized to balance the mundane, finite character of the economy.

• Psycho-economy, which aims at neutralizing dehumanization by the economic system and effecting the progressive expansion of the individual and collective minds, should develop as a branch of the economy.

This Study Guide is intended to provide an introduction to Sarkar’s philosophy of spiritual humanism, which he called NeoHumanism, and the political-economic theory of PROUT which addresses the practical application of this value system. This introductory material has been presented in the form of a Study Guide because our objective is to do more than share ideas. We want to create organizational cadre who will work to lay the groundwork for a new era in human society.

We encourage the formation of Study Circles to “study” the requirements of a benevolent society. It cannot be created by merely mouthing philosophy. It requires that we first transform ourselves. This is accomplished through spiritual practices and by studying and working together for the greater good we put meaning into our lives.

Sincerely,

The Proutist Writers Group of New York Sector

A Comprehensive Guide to the Study of PROUT
By The Proutist Writers Group, New York Sector
© Proutist Universal, Inc. 1998
This edition published by Proutist Universal Global Office, March 2010
P.U. Global Office
Platanvej 30
DK 1810 Frederiksberg C
Denmark

Political Democracy can and will be fortuitous

when Economic Democracy is established.

Explore this and other articles covering alternative economics, ethical leadership, economic democracy, and a society without the weal and woe of social and economic vicissitudes HERE

How does PROUT compare or contrast with capitalism or communism? Explore the answers HERE

What are essential ingredients assuring progressive sustainability bereft of the vicissitudes of economic or political predation, privation or disparity? Learn more HERE

http://gplus.to/ProgressiveSustainability

Dynamics of the Social Cycle

noreply@blogger.com (Progressive Development) — Sun, 06 Mar 2016 00:12:00 +0000

Based upon the relationship formed by the human mind with the natural and social environment, four different social groupings or behaviors may be identified. Each group has a different relationship with its environment and therefore develops different mental tendencies. The first group (the masses) are overwhelmed by the psycho-physical waves of the mundane world. Unable to contend with it, this group spends its energy simply trying to exist. The second group (the warriors) commands the psycho-physical reality by physical force. The third (the intellectuals) commands by psychic (mental) force and the fourth (merchants) commands by controlling the manufacture and exchange of psycho-physical objects. PROUT's concept of Social Cycle identifies the characteristics and circumstances of and their transformation from one to the other and how such eras and transitions may operate smoothly, minimizing or eliminating characteristic exploitation.

by Prabhat Sarkar, Founder of PROUT

Primitive human beings had no society and the whole set-up was individualistic. Even the concept of family was absent. Life was brute and non-intellectual. Nature was the direct abode and physical strength ruled the day. The strong enjoyed at the cost of the weak, who had to surrender before the voracity of the physical giants. However, the sense of acquisition had not developed in them, and they worked manually, and there was no intellectual exploitation in that age. Though life was brute, it was not brutal.

From bottom, clockwise, the natural flow
of the social cycle, which repeats.

Blue arrows represents natural flow

of Social Cycle.

If laborers (shúdras in Sanskrit) be defined as those who live by manual work or service, this primary stage of nature’s brute laws could be named the Laborer Age, because all were manual workers. The reliance on physical power gradually led a chosen few to lead the rest by the strength of their muscles. They were the leaders of the laborers.

Simultaneously, the family developed. And the above-mentioned leadership, once based upon the superiority of muscles, passed on from the father to the son or from the mother to the daughter, partly due to the momentum of fear and power commanded, and partly because of superiority of animalic breed.

Superior strength requires the assistance of other superior strengths in the neighborhood for all to maintain their status. Generally such superior neighbors belonged to the same parenthood or were related through matrimonial ties. Gradually the leaders by physical might started a well-knit group, and ultimately formed a class known as the warriors (kśatriyas). The age when the power to rule, or supremacy in arms, was the only material factor that mattered, was the Warrior Age. The leaders of the Warrior Age were Herculean, huge giants who depended on the supremacy of personal valor and might, making little or no use of intellect.

With the development of intellect and skill as a result of physical and psychic clash, physical strength had to lose its dignified position according to the growing intensity of intellectual demand in the warrior-dominated society. One had also to develop skill in the use of arms, and even for this the physical giant had to sit at the feet of some physically-common men to learn the use of arms and strategy. A reference to the mythology of any ancient culture reveals numberless instances where the hero of the day had to acquire specific knowledge from teachers. Subsequently this learning was not confined to the use of arms only but extended to other spheres, such as battle-craft, medicine and forms of organization and administration, so essential for ruling any society. Thus the dependence on superior intellect increased day by day, and in the course of time real power passed into the hands of such intellectuals. These intellectuals, as the word implies, justified their existence on intellect only, performed no labour themselves, and were parasites in the sense that they exploited the energy put in by others in society. This age of domination by intellectual parasites can be called the Intellectual (Vipra) Age.

Progressive Cyclical Spiral of Social Change through the classes,
repeating on, usually, grander scales each time.

Even though the intellectuals came into the forefront by the use of their marked intellect, it is more difficult than in the case of the warriors to maintain a hereditary superiority of intellect. In an effort to maintain power among the limited few, they actively tried and prevented others from acquiring the use of the intellect by imposing superstitions and rituals, faiths and beliefs, and even introducing irrational ideas (the caste system of Hindu society is an example) through an appeal to the sentiments of the mass (who collectively cannot be called intellectual). This was the phase of human society in the Middle Ages in the greater part of the world.

The continued exploitation by one section of society resulted in the necessity for the collection and transfer of consumable goods. Even otherwise, need was felt very badly for the transport of food and other necessities of life from surplus parts to deficit parts. Also, in the case of clan conflicts, the result of the resources of one community or class versus another gained importance. This aspect was confined not only to the producers but also to those handling the goods at various stages up to the point of consumption. These people became known as capitalists (vaeshyas), and ingenuity and summed-up production began to enjoy supremacy and importance, till an age was reached when this aspect of life became the most important factor. These capitalists, therefore, began to enjoy a position of supremacy, and the age dominated by this class is said to be the Age of Capitalists.

Post-Digestive Hierarchy
of Trickle-down Economics

Individualistic or laissez-faire sense develops capitalism when the means of production pass into the hands of a few who are more interested in personal exploitation. At this stage it can be said that the instinct of acquisition has developed tremendously. The thirst for acquisition instigated them to develop the psychology of complete exploitation of the human race also, and this resulted in a class by itself. In the race for greed and acquisition not all could survive, and only a few remained to dominate the society in general and the economic set-up in particular by their capital. The great majority were either duped into believing that they would be allowed to share such resources, or were neglected and left uncared-for for want of strength and did not survive the race. Such people in society ultimately occupy the place of exploited slaves of the capitalists. They are slaves because they have no option other than to serve the capitalists as laborers to earn the means of subsistence.

We may recall the definition of laborers as persons who live by manual work or labor hard for their livelihood. This age of capitalism is the age when the large majority of society turn into such laborers. This develops into dejection and dissatisfaction on a large scale because of an internal clash in the mind, because the psychology of society is essentially dynamic in nature and the mind itself exists as a result of constant clash. These conditions are necessary and sufficient for laborers, whether manual or mental, to organize and stand up against the unnatural impositions in life. This may be termed “laborer revolution”. The leaders of this revolution, also, are people physically and mentally better-equipped and more capable essentially of overthrowing the capitalistic structure by force. In other words, they are also warriors. So, after a period of chaos and catastrophe, once more the same cycle – Laborer Age to Warrior to Intellectual, and so on – recommences.

In this cycle of civilization one age changes into another. This gradual change should be called “evolution” or kránti. The period of transition from one age to another can be said to be yuga saḿkránti – “transitional age”. One complete cycle from the Laboer Age evolving through the other three ages is called parikránti.

Social Cycle, and Reversal, as played out
through Egypt's recent history.

Sometimes the social cycle (samája cakra) is reversed by the application of physical or psychic force by a group of people inspired by a negative theory. Such a change is, therefore, counter-evolution – that is, against the cycle of civilization. This may be termed vikránti. But if this reversal of the social cycle takes place, due to political pressure or any other brute force, within a short span of time, the change thus brought about is prativiplava, or “counter-revolution”. It is just like the devolution of the Cycle of Creation (Brahmacakra). Thus the progress and march of civilization can be represented as points of position and as the speed of approaching the Supreme, respectively, by a collective body in the Cycle of Creation.

The world is a transitory phase or changing phenomenon within the scope of the Cosmic Mind. It is going in eternal motion, and such a motion is the law of nature and the law of life. Stagnancy means death. Hence no power can check the social cycle of evolution. Any force, external or internal, can only retard or accelerate the speed of transition, but cannot prevent it from moving. Therefore progressive humanity should cast off all skeletons of the past. Human beings should go on accelerating the speed of progress for the good of humanity in general.

Political Democracy can and will be fortuitous

when Economic Democracy is established.

Explore this and other articles covering alternative economics, ethical leadership, economic democracy, and a society without the weal and woe of social and economic vicissitudes HERE

How does PROUT compare or contrast with capitalism or communism? Explore the answers HERE

What are essential ingredients assuring progressive sustainability bereft of the vicissitudes of economic or political predation, privation or disparity? Learn more HERE

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Evolution of World Government - Bicameral Congress

noreply@blogger.com (Progressive Development) — Sun, 28 Feb 2016 22:32:00 +0000

As nations reach toward each other to exercise their responsibilities in unity, inevitably the capacities of arriving at such unity and universal standards will result in world governance. Arriving at such stasis is necessarily a slow process for such a grand scale, while doing so in an ethical and progressive manner is essential and necessary.

by Prabhat Sarkar, Founder of PROUT

Two houses

Universalism does not depend upon any relative factor, hence it is free from the vices of ism. Ism thrives on the angle of group interest. Among many other factors, ism is a major factor in war. War is not an ideological clash. Those who are eager to establish peace should shake off nationalism and other allied isms.

If we are to shake off these isms, we have to organize a universal body and go on strengthening its power. This will be the first phase in establishing a world government. In the initial stage it will be a law-framing body. The first beneficial effect of such a body will be that no country will be allowed to frame laws detrimental to the interests of its minorities. The right to execute those laws will be vested with the local government and not with the world government. The world government will decide the principles on the basis of which a particular law will be enforced in a particular country.

There will be two houses: a lower house and an upper house. In the lower house, representatives will be established according to the population of the country. In the upper house, representatives will be country-wise. First bills will be placed before the lower house, and before their final acceptance they will be duly discussed in the upper house. Small countries which cannot send a single representative to the lower house will have the opportunity to discuss the merits and demerits of proposed acts with other countries in the upper house.

From Discourses on PROUT – 2

The Evolution of World Government

To run the world government, two houses may be maintained for an indefinite period. The lower house will be composed of representatives from various parts [countries] of the world, elected on the basis of population. The members of the upper house will be elected country-wise. This will provide opportunities to those countries which cannot send even a single representative to the lower house due to their small population, because they will be able to express their opinions before the people of the world by sending their representatives to the upper house. The upper house will not adopt any bill unless it has been passed by the lower house, but the upper house will reserve the right to reject the decisions of the lower house.

Initially the world government should go on working merely as a law-framing body. The world government should also have the right to make decisions regarding the application or non-application of any law, for a limited period, in any particular region.

In the first phase of the establishment of the world government, the governments of different countries will have only administrative power. As they will not have the authority to frame laws, it will be somewhat difficult for them to arbitrarily inflict atrocities on their linguistic, religious or political minorities.

From Problems of the Day

Political Democracy can and will be fortuitous

when Economic Democracy is established.

Explore this and other articles covering alternative economics, ethical leadership, economic democracy, and a society without the weal and woe of social and economic vicissitudes HERE

How does PROUT compare or contrast with capitalism or communism? Explore the answers HERE

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Benefits of Global Government

noreply@blogger.com (Progressive Development) — Sun, 28 Feb 2016 22:02:00 +0000

Humanity's productivity and ability to reach far and wide to embrace people from other cultures and distant places demonstrates an escalating inclusiveness of humanity as one family, and with all its diversity establishing universal norms and practices accommodating such diversity while augmenting assurances of just and fair intercourse around the world. Such efforts, at best, are what have unified geographic tribes into nations, nations into federations, and federations into a unified planet. We are at the threshold of unifying the planet, as the vicious parasitics of one nation over another are addressed with more ethical more's and practices.

by Prabhat Sarkar, Founder of PROUT

Many people say that different national interests are the only hurdle in the formation of a world government. In my opinion this is not the only obstruction; rather, this is just a minor difficulty. The real cause lies in the fear of local leaders losing their leadership. With the establishment of a world government the powerful influence, which they enjoy today in different countries, societies and in national life, will no longer exist.

Different national interests and popular skepticism may hinder the formation of a world government. The progress of this work must be carried on step by step to remove the baseless fears in people's minds. Besides, due consideration will have to be given to removing any possible obstacles to the formation of a world government. The world government has to be strengthened step by step and not suddenly.

For example, two houses may be formed for an unspecified period for administration. The lower house will comprise representatives from parts of the world elected on the basis of population, while members of the upper house will be elected country wise. By this arrangement those countries which cannot send a single representative to the lower house due to their small population, will benefit by expressing their opinions before the people of the world by sending their representatives to the upper house. The upper house cannot adopt any resolution unless the lower house has ratified it, but it will enjoy the privilege of disallowing the decisions of the lower house.

In the first stage this world government may act only as a law framing body. The world government will be vested with framing the rights of implementation or non-implementation of any particular law in any particular region. In the beginning when the world government is being established, the government of different countries will have only administrative power. As they will not have any power to enact any laws arbitrarily; it will not be easy for any government to inflict atrocities on its linguistic, religious, or political minorities according to the whims of the governing majority.

Political Democracy can and will be fortuitous

when Economic Democracy is established.

Explore this and other articles covering alternative economics, ethical leadership, economic democracy, and a society without the weal and woe of social and economic vicissitudes HERE

How does PROUT compare or contrast with capitalism or communism? Explore the answers HERE

What are essential ingredients assuring progressive sustainability bereft of the vicissitudes of economic or political predation, privation or disparity? Learn more HERE

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Requirements of an Ideal Constitution

noreply@blogger.com (Progressive Development) — Sat, 27 Feb 2016 22:07:00 +0000

Constitutions are the intersection of conjugating noble ideals with pragmatic adjustments in societal intercourse providing steadily purpose, continuity, and actional propriety for executing such principles and designs, and remediating conceptual and practical conflicts in a progressive manner, made better with amendability to accommodate for changes over time. The need for a Constitution at the helm of governments is substantial and quite obviously so.

New thresholds of excellence in constitutional development include the well thought out and articulated United States Constitution, albeit with retention of absurd and unconscionable concepts as slavery, which, by compromise, were put off to later for remediation over time to arrive at an otherwise viable constitution more immediately. The Preamble and other elements of the U S Constitution are reflected clearly in the United Nations' Constitution and other Constitutions around the world.

As time, place, and persons progress over time, so should Constitutional elements come forth as inalienable true and essentially included within Constitutions. Prabhat Sarkar, founder of PROUT, covers some of such factors that for modern society to progress in an escalatingly more ethical manner must include within governmental Constitutions.

by Prabhat Sarkar, Founder of PROUT

With the changes of the social cycle, the human society has developed several social institutions to carry out its duties and responsibilities. The state is one such vital institution which organizes a group of people in a certain area of land, rules them, promotes their welfare and oversees their good. This institution is powerful because it also enjoys sovereign power.

Accumulation of power is dangerous if it is not guided by some rules and basic principles. The guide book in which all such rules, regulations and principles for the proper conduct of a state are codified is called a constitution. A constitution guides a state with policies and principles to render all-round services to the people for their rapid progress.

The first written constitution was framed by the Licchavi Dynasty of Vaeshali (in northern Bihar) in ancient India over 2500 years ago. Prior to that, the words of the king were law and kings ruled according to the advice of their ministers. The first republican democracy was established by the Licchaviis. The Licchavi Republic comprised some portion of Muzzaffarpur, portions of Begusharai, Samastipur and Hajipur between the Gandaka and Kamala rivers, all in the present state of Bihar. It was the first democratic state and they had their own written constitution.

Differences Among Some Constitutions

There is no British constitution – it is only a collection of traditions and conventions and not a written document. The theoretical head is the crown queen or king. All power is vested with the crown but practically it is exercised by the prime minister in a parliamentary form of government. The French system is a presidential form of government where the president appoints the prime minister and all other ministers. The USA also has a presidential form of government. In France and the US there is a written constitution. In the US the president exercises power or rules the country through secretaries appointed by the president who is directly elected by the electorate. There are no ministers, only secretaries in the US system whereas there are ministers in the French system. When there is no ministry in Britain a lame-duck ministry is formed by the crown and the crown can head that ministry until a new parliament is elected. In India the president has no power and is only a signatory authority or rubber stamp. The Indian president cannot even head a caretaker government. The Indian prime minister can remove the president but the president cannot remove the prime minister. Although the prime minister is powerful according to the constitution, he or she is not directly elected by the electorate, that is, by the people. The prime minister is elected only as a member of parliament and then is made prime minister by the party.

The US presidential form of government is a better form of government, but there is a shortcoming in the US constitution and that is that individual rights are given maximum scope: this leads to an unrestrained capitalist order. Now India is also going to suffer the same disease and this is leading to regionalism. Too much individual freedom should be curtailed in an ideal form of government. PROUT will introduce social controls so that collective interests will be supreme. In the US constitution purchasing power is not guaranteed to the people. The best form of government is the presidential form where the president is elected directly by the electorate and there is less individual liberty.

Common Constitutional Defects

Everyone has the right to physical, mental and spiritual development. But all constitutions have been written in such a way that they do not ensure the all-round welfare of all citizens. A constitution should be fair and just. The least bias on the part of the framers towards any particular ethnic, linguistic or religious group may undermine the unity and solidarity of the concerning country and thus disturb the peace and prosperity of the society as a whole.

Judged from this perspective some of the defects of the Indian constitution are easily discernible. India should have a new constitution to establish unity in diversity in a multilingual, multi-social and multi-national country.

While drafting the constitution of a country the framers should keep in mind the population structure of the concerning country. The population of India is a blended population of the Austric, Mongolian, Negroid and Aryan races. But the Indian constitution, due to inherent defects, has not helped establish social amity, cultural legacy, equality and unity among these races. As a result fissiparous tendencies have developed in the country.

There are several fiscal and psychological loopholes in the Indian constitution. The fiscal loopholes include the following. First, there is no check on unbarred capitalist exploitation. This is because the leaders of the independence struggle did not give any economic sentiment to the people. The only sentiment was an anti-British sentiment. Thus the independence struggle was only a political movement and not an economic movement. After 1947 instead of white exploitation, brown exploitation emerged. 1947 brought only capitalist political liberty but not economic freedom. As a result, unbarred economic exploitation continues today.

Secondly, the constitution gives no guarantee for increasing the purchasing capacity of every individual. Thirdly, the president has no constitutional power to check financial or fiscal matters. The Indian economy is controlled by a few business houses through some chambers of commerce. The president has no constitutional power to check either the price level or the degree of exploitation. Neither the president nor the prime minister can check these. Fourthly, there is no provision for inter-block planning for socio-economic development. Fifthly, there is no clear concept of balanced economy.

The psychological loopholes in the Indian constitution include the following. The first is the imposition of a regional language as the national language. English imperialism has been followed by Hindi imperialism. Hindi is only one of many regional languages. The selection of one such regional language as the official language adversely affects the psychology of people who speak other languages. As the consequence of such a defective language policy in the constitution, the non-Hindi-speaking people face unequal competition at the national level and they are forced to use a language, either Hindi or English, which is not their natural language. Hence they are relegated to “B class” citizens. No regional languages should be selected as an official language in a multi-national, multi-lingual and multi-cultural country like India. Such a selection would affect the minds of other non-Hindi-speaking people. Hindi is just a regional language like Tamil, Telegu and Tulu. It is a good language but it should not be forcibly imposed on others.

India is a secular country but Pakistan is a Muslim state and Nepal is a Hindu state. They may or may not impose a language on their people, but in India this imposition should not take place. The spirit of secularism provides equal scope and equal avenues for all for the maximum psycho-social-economical development of every individual.

When the Indian parliament debated the issue of official languages, the constituent assembly was equally divided into two. The then chairman of the Constituent Assembly at that controversial stage cast his all-important vote in favour of Hindi. Thus Hindi becomes the official language of India by a single vote.

Sanskrit may be the national language of India. It is the grandmother of almost all the modern languages of India and has a great influence on the languages of India. It may take five, ten, fifty or hundred years to spread this language to all people. Roman script should be used since Sanskrit has no script of its own. All groups of people including linguists of India should join together and decide this controversial matter.

The second psychological loophole is that there are several disparities in the law. The constitution of India proclaims that all are equal in the eye of the law. But in practice, this principle is not followed, and as a result disparity is growing in the arena of law and justice. Such disparity is adversely affecting the different groups of people in the country. For example, there are disparities between the Hindu Code and the Muslim Code. Hindu women and Muslim women, although they are all Indian citizens, do not get equal advantages of law. For instance, according to Hindu law, a man cannot have more than one wife, but a Muslim man is entitle to have more than one wife. A Hindu husband or a Hindu wife is required to approach the court to secure a divorce, while a Muslim man is entitled to divorce his wife without the permission or approval of the court. Moreover, a Muslim husband can divorce his wife but a Muslim wife cannot divorce her husband. Besides, a Muslim husband is not required to show any reason for the divorce.

Disparity in the eye of the law is creating all these problems. The root of all these evils lies in the psychological loopholes of the Indian constitution. Why is the constitution allowing the Hindu Code and Muslim Code to stand side by side? Let there be only one code – the Indian Code. This Indian Code should be based on cardinal human values, with a universal approach and [neoumanistic] spirit. Then only equality before the law can be established in practice, and equal protection of the law for all can be guaranteed. So the constitution should remove the psychological loopholes by eradicating existing disparities in the eye of the law.

The third psychological loophole is that there is no law against the indiscriminate destruction of flora and fauna due to the absence of neohumanistic sentiment. In the [Cosmic Family of the Supreme Consciousness], humans, animals, plants, and inanimate objects exist together and maintain a harmonious balance. However, human beings, because of their superior intellect, are indiscriminately destroying plants and animals for their own narrow, selfish ends. In the constitution, there is no provision for the safeguard of the plants and animals. In a constitution, there should be safeguards for the lives of plants and animals. The absence of such provisions in the constitution creates psychological loopholes which should be corrected without delay.

Fourthly, the relation between the centre and the states in a confederation should be clearly defined in the constitution. Otherwise, there will be centre-state conflict and the whole country will be psychologically affected. Among all other aspects of this relation two important aspects should be clearly defined; the right of self-determination, and the right of secession of a particular component of the confederation. In the constitution of India these are not clearly stated. As a result, the relation between the centre and the states is always strained and pressured.

Fifthly, in the constitution of India, no clear definitions of scheduled tribes and scheduled castes are given. Rather, these lists have been wrongly prepared on the basis of racial considerations. Instead of this unscientific approach, Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Caste lists should be based on economic backwardness and educational backwardness.

Constitutional Reforms

To overcome these fiscal and psychological loopholes, all constitutions in the world today need to be reformed. The following reforms should be implemented.

(1) Dissolution of the ministry or parliament. The president may discharge the ministry or dissolve the parliament under certain circumstances: in case of inimical action within the country; in case of disorder or the breakdown of law and order; in case of external inimical activity; and when a democratic ministry is rendered a minority in the parliament. When a democratic ministry is discharged because it is a minority in the house, the president has to explain the reasons for his or her actions before the parliament within one month from the day of taking such action against the ministry. If the parliament is already dissolved then the president will have to arrange a general election within six months and explain the position before the newly elected parliament within one month of the election.

(2) Period of emergency. The president may continue the period of emergency with the approval of parliament for a period of six months, and with such a parliament the president may continue a period of emergency for not more that two years.

(3) Advice of a lame duck ministry. The president may or may not act on the advice of a lame duck ministry. If the advice of a lame duck ministry is not honoured by the president then the parliament will be dissolved. A new parliament will have to be formed through a general election, and the president will have to explain his or her position before the new parliament within one month of its formation.

(4) The moral standard and character of the president and prime minister. The president or prime minister must be of high moral character. The president or prime minister must not divorce his or her spouse, marry a divorcee or have more than one spouse.

(5) The power of the president to issue any statement. The president must not issue any statement under normal conditions without consulting the parliament or the prime minister. In normal conditions when there is a ministry, the president will have to act according to the advice of the ministry. In case the ministry is dissolved the president will have to act according to the advice of parliament.

(6) Parliament in the role of constituent assembly. The parliament will play the role of constituent assembly only with a majority of 7/8 of the members, because changing the constitution at regular intervals reduces the status of the constitution.

(7) Language. All living languages of a country must have equal status before the state or the government.

(8) Equal rights. All citizens must have equal rights before the law. Physical requirements are to be equally considered for all citizens so that all citizens will have equilibrium and equipoise in collective life.

(9) Review board. To review economic progress and development of different parts of the country, a high-level review board should be constituted by the president. If there is any difference between the ministry and the board, the president must act according to the advice of parliament. And if there is any difference between the parliament and the board, the president should seek advice from the supreme court of the country and act according to their official advice, according to the provisions of the constitution.

(10) A case against the prime minister or president. A case may be filed in the supreme court against any person in the country including the prime minister and president, because every citizen in the country is equal before the constitution.

(11) The right of self-determination and plebiscite. The right of self-determination for a part of the country may be recognized only on the basis of a plebiscite held in that area with the permission of the parliament functioning as a constituent assembly. If the plebiscite is to be held, it should be held under the strict control and supervision of the central government by the chief election commissioner of the country.

(12) Education. Primary education for all must be guaranteed and education should be free from all political interference.

(13) The law and the constitution should be the same. The law and the constitution should be the same for the entire country, as each and every individual is equal before the law and before the constitution. According to the constitution, each and every part of the country will enjoy the same power. For example, special rights or facilities for Kashmir should not be allowed. Today a Kashmiri can go to Bengal and purchase land, a house, etc. but a Bengali in Kashmir cannot enjoy that facility. This kind of discrimination must end.

Charter of Rights

The formation of a World Government will require a world constitution. A charter of principles or bill of rights should be included in such a constitution and encompass at least the following four areas. First, complete security should be guaranteed to all the plants and animals on the planet. Secondly, each country must guarantee purchasing power to all its citizens. Thirdly, the constitution should guarantee four fundamental rights – spiritual practice or dharma; cultural legacy; education; and indigenous linguistic expression. Fourthly, if the practice of any of these rights conflicts with [cardinal human values] then that practice should be immediately curtailed. That is, cardinal human values must take precedence over all other rights. All the constitutions of the world suffer from numerous defects. The above points may be adopted by the framers of different constitutions to overcome these defects.

Political Democracy can and will be fortuitous

when Economic Democracy is established.

Explore this and other articles covering alternative economics, ethical leadership, economic democracy, and a society without the weal and woe of social and economic vicissitudes HERE

How does PROUT compare or contrast with capitalism or communism? Explore the answers HERE

What are essential ingredients assuring progressive sustainability bereft of the vicissitudes of economic or political predation, privation or disparity? Learn more HERE

http://gplus.to/ProgressiveSustainability

An Epidemic of Disinformation: Monsanto-Linked Larvicide True Cause of Microcephaly, Not Zika Virus

noreply@blogger.com (Progressive Development) — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 20:50:00 +0000

World health authorities are using Zika virus mosquitoes as a cover story to conceal the damage caused by toxic chemicals manufactured by powerful multinational corporations. Zika virus has never been known to cause brain deformations in children:

Malformations detected in thousands of children from pregnant women living in areas where the Brazilian state added pyriproxyfen to drinking water is not a coincidence, even though the Ministry of Health places a direct blame on Zika virus for this damage, while trying to ignore its responsibility and ruling out the hypothesis of direct and cumulative chemical damage caused by years of endocrine and immunological disruption of the affected population.

February 3, 2016, Production Team REDUAS, Coordinator Dr. Medardo Avila Vazquez.

Guest article

Latin American Doctors Suggest Monsanto-Linked Larvicide Cause of Microcephaly, Not Zika Virus

Lorraine Chow, February 2016

As the Zika epidemic “spreads explosively” around the world, pregnant travelers have been put on pause due to the virus’s suspected association with microcephaly, the congenital condition in which a baby’s head is abnormally small.

While the link between the mosquito-borne virus and microcephaly has yet to be scientifically proven, Argentinian and Brazilian doctors have suggested an alternate culprit: pesticides.

The report, written by the Argentine group Physicians in the Crop-Sprayed Towns (PCST), suspects that pyriproxyfen—a larvicide added to drinking water to stop the development of mosquito larvae in drinking water tanks—has caused the birth defects.

The authors said that the pesticide, known by its commercial name SumiLarv, is manufactured by Sumitomo Chemical, a Japanese subsidiary of Monsanto.

According to PCST, in 2014, the Brazilian Ministry of Health introduced pyriproxyfen to drinking-water reservoirs in the state of Pernambuco, where the proliferation of the Zika-carrying Aedes aegypti mosquito is very high.

“Malformations detected in thousands of children from pregnant women living in areas where the Brazilian state added pyriproxyfen to drinking water is not a coincidence, even though the Ministry of Health places a direct blame on Zika virus for this damage, while trying to ignore its responsibility and ruling out the hypothesis of direct and cumulative chemical damage caused by years of endocrine and immunological disruption of the a acted population,” PCST said.

As it happens, the northeast state has registered the largest number of cases of microcephaly. Pernambuco, the first state to detect the problem, has roughly 35 percent of the total microcephaly cases across Brazil.

“Previous Zika epidemics did not cause birth defects in newborns, despite infecting 75 percent of the population in those countries,” the paper said. “Also, in other countries such as Colombia there are no records of microcephaly; however, there are plenty of Zika cases.”

Indeed, as The Ecologist observed from PCST’s report, Colombia has so far diagnosed 3,177 pregnant women with the Zika virus, but these women gave birth to healthy babies or are carrying healthy fetuses.

Sumitomo Chemical says on the Sumilarv website that the product “not only poses minimal risk to mammals, birds and fish; it also allows it to be applied to drinking water. Application to the aquatic breeding sites of mosquitoes ensures a rapid decline of the adult mosquito population significantly reducing bite rates.”

However, GM Watch has cited a report from Abrasco, an organization of Brazilian doctors and public health researchers, that links the pesticide to the abnormality. GM Watch wrote:

Abrasco also names Pyriproxyfen as a likely cause of the microcephaly. It condemns the strategy of chemical control of Zika-carrying mosquitoes, which it says is contaminating the environment as well as people and is not decreasing the numbers of mosquitoes. Abrasco suggests that this strategy is in fact driven by the commercial interests of the chemical industry, which it says is deeply integrated into the Latin American ministries of health, as well as the World Health Organization and the Pan American Health Organization.

PCST also observed that the highest concentration of microcephaly cases are found in the poorest areas of northeastern Brazil. These areas, “with intermittent water supply, led these communities to store water at home in an unsafe manner, due to the inadequate protection of tanks intended for human consumption” leading to very favorable conditions for the Aedes mosquito.

While the Internet is abound with a number of possible theories on the origin of the virus—genetically modified mosquitoes, for one—the World Health Organization (WHO) has been careful to not explicitly link Zika to microcephaly.

“Although a causal link between Zika infection in pregnancy and microcephaly has not, and I must emphasize, has not been established, the circumstantial evidence is suggestive and extremely worrisome,” WHO General Director Margaret Chan announced last month.

Zika-related microcephaly can be difficult to confirm. The Washington Post reported last month that after experts scrutinized 732 of the cases out 4,180 cases of Zika-related microcephaly, they found more than half either weren’t microcephaly or weren’t even related to Zika at all. In fact, according to the ministry bulletin, just 270 were confirmed as microcephaly that appears to be linked to Zika or other infectious diseases.

However, as PBS’s Frontline reported last week, Pernambuco researchers have identified clear evidence of the microcephaly-Zika link. According to the report, “researchers here tested the spinal fluid of 12 babies with microcephaly, all of whom were born to mothers who reported having symptoms of Zika early in their pregnancies. In all 12 cases, the researchers found evidence of Zika.”

Secretary of Vigilance and Health Luciana Albuquerque said in a press conference at the Pernambuco Health Department that “this is not a scientific study,” noting that the results do not indicate a definitive causal link but added, “it’s a very important suggestion of the link.”

The WHO officially declared Zika a global health emergency and officials are carefully monitoring the spread. Researchers are also currently racing to develop a vaccine.

This article originally appeared here

Political Democracy can and will be fortuitous

when Economic Democracy is established.

Explore this and other articles covering alternative economics, ethical leadership, economic democracy, and a society without the weal and woe of social and economic vicissitudes HERE

How does PROUT compare or contrast with capitalism or communism? Explore the answers HERE

What are essential ingredients assuring progressive sustainability bereft of the vicissitudes of economic or political predation, privation or disparity? Learn more HERE

http://gplus.to/ProgressiveSustainability

New Mobile App Intends Helping Citizens Record Truth of Police Brutality and Protect It on ACLU Servers

noreply@blogger.com (Progressive Development) — Sat, 09 May 2015 00:31:00 +0000

Guest article

New app aims to help citizens record police brutality using cellphones

The Mobile Justice app allows users to send video directly to the local ACLU chapter where it can be reviewed by lawyers and not confiscated by authorities

A major push is on to equip police officers with body cameras but it is citizens’ cellphone footage that has helped bring cases of police killings of citizens to light. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

Rose Hackman in New York

In an America engulfed in #BlackLivesMatter protests following the highly publicized deaths of black men and women at the hands of police officers throughout the last year, the battle for recording cameras is on.

But the question of who should carry them – whether police officers or civilians – and why remains unresolved. A government rush to arm law enforcement officers with body cameras is being matched by citizens’ routine use of cellphone video cameras during both protests and police interactions.

To help give ordinary citizens institutional and legal backing , the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has slowly been rolling out a Mobile Justice App for Android and iPhones over the last few months, specifically designed for citizens to film interactions between themselves and police.

For Justin Hansford, a 33-year-old law professor at the St Louis University School of Law, growing up black in America meant regular harassment, humiliation and being stopped for little to no reason while driving by police, he said.

It’s a set of negative experiences that were the norm for him and his fellow African Americans, he said, but the extremity of the interactions were such that they were sometimes difficult to convey to a broader public, that was either inclined to believe, or hopeful the claims were false.

Cellphone video footage is changing this.

“We’re accused of making things up. But we don’t have to make up stories. Now we just have to get the video. That’s enough,” Hansford says.

Last month, a cellphone video shot by a passerby recorded the fatal shooting of unarmed black man Walter Scott at the hands of South Carolina police officer Michael Slager. The video contradicted the incident’s police report and helped charge Slager on a first-degree murder count.

The ACLU Mobile Justice App hopes to take citizen video one step further. The app connects mobile phones directly to citizens’ local ACLU chapter, and to their team of lawyers.

Users can immediately send footage to the ACLU with a single shake of their phones. Received videos are systematically reviewed and screened for potential legal action by ACLU staff. This means users don’t risk losing footage if their phones are confiscated or destroyed by police, Jennifer Carnig with the ACLU’s New York chapter, the NYCLU, said.
The Mobile Justice App, which launched last November and has so far been adopted by ACLU chapters in Missouri, Mississippi, California, Nebraska and Oregon, was based on the success of a Stop and Frisk App, launched by the NYCLU in 2012 to tackle stop-and-frisk interactions.

Despite the fall in logged stop-and-frisk incidents in the city, the New York app has been downloaded 35,000 times and 40,000 videos have been submitted – all of which were reviewed by ACLU staff, Carnig said.

The newer ACLU app also enables users to see if they are close to another user either experiencing or witnessing a police-citizen interaction.

The app has not yet led to any need for specific legal action by the ACLU.
“We haven’t had a Rodney King incident,” Carnig says referring to the capturing on video of taxi driver Rodney King being beaten by Los Angeles police officers, whose acquittals are credited with causing the 1992 LA riots.

“But we have seen many videos that served to confirm anecdotal evidence of intimidation, disrespectful words, people being roughed up. All of those types of police interactions are violent interactions.”

So far, the app has been downloaded just under 9,000 times on Android, and 1,250 times on iPhone since it became available less than a two weeks ago. In Missouri, the state that has been the stage of many protests following the August shooting death of unarmed teenager Michael Brown, the ACLU chapter says it has so far received and reviewed 600 video submissions.

Justin Hansford, a young law professor who has been active during the protests against police brutality and is part of the Ferguson legal defense committee, says the need for such an app was there.

“It’s very important that we put videos somewhere they can’t be damaged, destroyed or manipulated by government,” Hansford says.

The fatal arrest of Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York, is captured on cellphone video.

Also vital is to have citizen-shot videos reviewed before they are uploaded to social media, says Hansford who has recently downloaded the app, as they can sometimes be used to incriminate those citizens who he says are the victims.

Sarah Rossi who is the director of policy and advocacy at ACLU’s Missouri chapter, says that the app is also an educational tool that seeks to empower citizens.

“I think that it is important for our citizens to feel comfortable filming the police and exercise their first amendment right to do so,” Rossi said. “And it is important for them to then have an organization that they can send it [the video] to whose objective it is to defend those constitutional rights.”

Last December, Obama announced intentions to finance 50,000 body cameras to adorn police officer shirts across the country as they go about their jobs. The move was made to increase transparency and accountability of law enforcement and help restore public trust.

In Ferguson, by the time a new wave of protests started in October 2014, following the initial wave in August, police officers had already been geared up with body cameras.
But more cameras in the hands of police may not necessarily mean more transparency.
In Missouri, two bills have since been introduced in the senate and the house to stop the state from forcing police to have dashboard cameras and body cameras, and greatly – or even completely – limit access of footage from these cameras to the general public.
Hansford sees police treatment of black and brown individuals as a form of bullying, and video use by citizens as a way of beating back the bullies.

“We try and have dignity. This is about human rights and human dignity,” he says. “The videos are now showing the truth.”

Get App HERE

Political Democracy can and will be fortuitous

when Economic Democracy is established.

Explore this and other articles covering alternative economics, ethical leadership, economic democracy, and a society without the weal and woe of social and economic vicissitudes HERE

How does PROUT compare or contrast with capitalism or communism? Explore the answers HERE

What are essential ingredients assuring progressive sustainability bereft of the vicissitudes of economic or political predation, privation or disparity? Learn more HERE

http://gplus.to/ProgressiveSustainability

The Myth of Maximizing Shareholder Value

noreply@blogger.com (Progressive Development) — Fri, 16 May 2014 23:02:00 +0000

Guest article

In 2010, the 500 largest companies in the United States, otherwise known as The Fortune 500, generated $10.7 trillion in sales, reaped a whopping $702 billion in profits, and employed 24.9 million people around the world.

Historically this has been good news. After all, when these corporations have invested in the productive capabilities of their U.S. employees, Americans have typically enjoyed plentiful well paying and stable jobs. That was the case a half century ago.

Unfortunately, as Bill Lazonick points out in the interview below, it’s not the case today.

For the past three decades, top executives have been rewarding themselves with mega-million dollar compensation packages while American workers have suffered an unrelenting disappearance of middle-class jobs. Since the 1990s, this hollowing out of the middle-class has even affected people with lots of education and work experience.

As the Occupy Wall Street movement correctly recognized, the concentration of income and wealth of the economic top “one percent” of society has left the rest of us largely high and dry. Corporate profits are increasingly going to share buybacks or dividend distribution, but very little is going back into research and development efforts, capital reinvestment, and employment.

Corporations, in other words, are devoting increasing amounts of their considerable and growing financial resources to redistribution rather than innovation. And they are doing so based on the justification of  “increasing shareholder value.”

However, as Lazonick points out, when the shareholder-value mantra becomes the main focus for companies executives usually concentrate on avoiding taxes for the sake of higher profits and don’t think twice about permanently axing workers. They also increase distributions of corporate cash to shareholders in the form of dividends and, even more prominently, stock buybacks.

When a corporation becomes financialized in this way, the top executives no longer concern themselves with investing in the productive capabilities of employees, the foundation for rising living standards. Instead they become focused on generating financial profits that can justify ever higher stock prices – in large part because, through their stock-based compensation, high stock prices translate into megabucks for these corporate executives themselves.

It’s not a pretty state of affairs. Lazonick discusses how we evolved from a society in which corporate interests were largely aligned with those of broader public purpose into a state where crony capitalism, accounting fraud, and corporate predation are predominant characteristics.

Lazonick makes a very powerful case that the ideology of “maximizing shareholder value” primarily works to the benefit of the very corporate executives who make corporate resource allocation decisions, and who derive high levels of remuneration from munificent stock option awards. As for the rest of us, we’re left to fight over the crumbs.

This article first appeared here

Sarah van Gelder wrote this article for How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Sarah is executive editor of YES!

Political Democracy can and will be fortuitous

when Economic Democracy is established.

Explore this and other articles covering alternative economics, ethical leadership, economic democracy, and a society without the weal and woe of social and economic vicissitudes HERE

How does PROUT compare or contrast with capitalism or communism? Explore the answers HERE

What are essential ingredients assuring progressive sustainability bereft of the vicissitudes of economic or political predation, privation or disparity? Learn more HERE

http://gplus.to/ProgressiveSustainability

Setting Science Free From Materialism

noreply@blogger.com (Progressive Development) — Sun, 10 Nov 2013 00:44:00 +0000

After centuries of psychic, social, and intellectual entrapment by religious predators constipating human evolution in favor of raucous parasitism of religious imperialism, liberation through factuality, material science, and democratic expression and disposition gained prominence around the planet. Many of today's prevailing bigotries, however, much like those of previous centuries, are now in the hands of pompous skeptics -- vicious deniers of mind and its subtleties -- determined to erase any practice, science, tradition demonstrating mind trumps matter in subtleties and influence upon life.

Such is reminiscent of Old Major Chairman Mao who all but obliterated Chinese history and the evolutionary excellence Chinese ancestors have contributed to humanity, resulting in today's Chinese youth not having a clue as to who native Chinese such as Lao tze, Chuang tze are, of the influence of Buddha's teachings affecting Chinese life for millennia, or of the substantial contributions they've made through Taoism and Buddhism and their extraordinarily positive influences around the world.

Rupert Sheldrake clearly articulates properly disposed breadth of mind germane to scientific dispositions, while contrasting such healthy-mindedness with the current state of affairs by most of whom define what science is today, a nefarious dementia of intellectual and moral perversity that is the very antithesis of what science actually is.

See Video Below

Guest article

by Rupert Sheldrake

**Editor’s Note: Reprinted with permission from Rupert Sheldrake, the ideas in this article are further explored in Rupert Sheldrake’s book, Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery. Please also visit his website, Sheldrake.org, for more of his fascinating articles and insight into nature and human consciousness. **

The “scientific worldview” is immensely influential because the sciences have been so successful. No one can fail to be awed by their achievements, which touch all our lives through technologies and through modern medicine. Our intellectual world has been transformed through an immense expansion of our knowledge, down into the most microscopic particles of matter and out into the vastness of space, with hundreds of billions of galaxies in an ever-expanding universe.

Yet in the second decade of the 21st century, when science and technology seem to be at the peak of the power, when their influence has spread all over the world, and when their triumph seems indisputable, unexpected problems are disrupting the sciences from within. Most scientists take it for granted that these problems will eventually be solved by more research along established lines, but some, including myself, think that they are symptoms of a deeper malaise. Science is being held back by centuries-old assumptions that have hardened into dogmas. The sciences would be better off with-out them: freer, more interesting, and more fun.

The biggest scientific delusion of all is that science already knows the answers. The details still need working out, but the fundamental questions are settled, in principle.

Contemporary science is based on the claim that all reality is material or physical. There is no reality but material reality. Consciousness is a by-product of the physical activity of the brain. Matter is unconscious. Evolution is purposeless. God exists only as an idea in human minds, and hence in human heads.

These beliefs are powerful not because most scientists think about them critically, but because they do not. The facts of science are real enough, and so are the techniques that scientists use, and so are the technologies based on them. But the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith, grounded in a 19th-century ideology.

The Scientific Creed

Here are the 10 core beliefs that most scientists take for granted.

1. Everything is essentially mechanical. Dogs, for example, are complex mechanisms, rather than living organisms with goals of their own. Even people are machines, “lumbering robots,” in Richard Dawkins’ vivid phrase, with brains that are like genetically programmed computers.

2. All matter is unconscious. It has no inner life or subjectivity or point of view. Even human consciousness is an illusion produced by the material activities of brains.

3. The total amount of matter and energy is always the same (with the exception of the Big Bang, when all the matter and energy of the universe suddenly appeared).

4. The laws of nature are fixed. They are the same today as they were at the beginning, and they will stay the same forever.

5. Nature is purposeless, and evolution has no goal or direction.

6. All biological inheritance is material, carried in the genetic material, DNA, and in other material structures.

7. Minds are inside heads and are nothing but the activities of brains. When you look at a tree, the image of the tree you are seeing is not “out there,” where it seems to be, but inside your brain.

8. Memories are stored as material traces in brains and are wiped out at death.

9. Unexplained phenomena like telepathy are illusory.

10. Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works.

Together, these beliefs make up the philosophy or ideology of materialism, whose central assumption is that everything is essentially material or physical, even minds. This belief system became dominant within science in the late 19th century, and is now taken for granted. Many scientists are unaware that materialism is an assumption; they simply think of it as science, or the scientific view of reality, or the scientific worldview. They are not actually taught about it, or given a chance to discuss it. They absorb it by a kind of intellectual osmosis.

In everyday usage, materialism refers to a way of life devoted entirely to material interests, a preoccupation with wealth, possessions, and luxury. These attitudes are no doubt encouraged by the materialist philosophy, which denies the existence of any spiritual realities or non-material goals, but in this article I am concerned with materialism’s scientific claims, rather than its effects on lifestyles.

In the spirit of radical skepticism, each of these 10 doctrines can be turned into a question, as I show in my book Science Set Free1 (called The Science Delusion in the UK). Entirely new vistas open up when a widely accepted assumption is taken as the beginning of an inquiry, rather than as an unquestionable truth. For example, the assumption that nature is machine-like or mechanical becomes a question: “Is nature mechanical?” The assumption that matter is unconscious becomes “Is matter unconscious?” and so on.

Rupert Sheldrake at TEDx

The Credibility Crunch For The “Scientific Worldview”

For more than 200 years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Science will prove that living organisms are complex machines, minds are nothing but brain activity, and nature is purposeless. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs. The philosopher of science Karl Popper called this stance “promissory materialism” because it depends on issuing promissory notes for discoveries not yet made. 2 Despite all the achievements of science and technology, materialism is now facing a credibility crunch that was unimaginable in the 20th century.

In 1963, when I was studying biochemistry at Cambridge University, I was invited to a series of private meetings with Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner in Brenner’s rooms in King’s College, along with a few of my classmates. Crick and Brenner had recently helped to “crack” the genetic code. Both were ardent materialists and Crick was also a militant atheist. They explained there were two major unsolved problems in biology: development and consciousness. They had not been solved because the people who worked on them were not molecular biologists—nor very bright. Crick and Brenner were going to find the answers within 10 years, or maybe 20. Brenner would take developmental biology, and Crick consciousness. They invited us to join them.

Both tried their best. Brenner was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002 for his work on the development of a tiny worm, Caenorhabdytis elegans. Crick corrected the manuscript of his final paper on the brain the day before he died in 2004. At his funeral, his son Michael said that what made him tick was not the desire to be famous, wealthy, or popular, but “to knock the final nail into the coffin of vitalism.” (Vitalism is the theory that living organisms are truly alive, and not explicable in terms of physics and chemistry alone.)

Crick and Brenner failed. The problems of development and consciousness remain unsolved. Many details have been discovered, dozens of genomes have been sequenced, and brain scans are ever more precise. But there is still no proof that life and minds can be explained by physics and chemistry alone.

The fundamental proposition of materialism is that matter is the only reality. Therefore consciousness is nothing but brain activity. It is either like a shadow, an “epiphenomenon,” that does nothing, or it is just another way of talking about brain activity. However, among contemporary researchers in neuroscience and consciousness studies there is no consensus about the nature of minds. Leading journals such as Behavioural and Brain Sciences and the Journal of Consciousness Studies publish many articles that reveal deep problems with the materialist doctrine. The philosopher David Chalmers has called the very existence of subjective experience the “hard problem.” It is hard because it defies explanation in terms of mechanisms. Even if we understand how eyes and brains respond to red light, the experience of redness is not accounted for.

In biology and psychology the credibility rating of materialism is falling. Can physics ride to the rescue? Some materialists prefer to call themselves physicalists, to emphasize that their hopes depend on modern physics, not 19th-century theories of matter. But physicalism’s own credibility rating has been reduced by physics itself, for four reasons:

First, some physicists insist that quantum mechanics cannot be formulated without taking into account the minds of observers. They argue that minds cannot be reduced to physics because physics presupposes the minds of physicists.3

Second, the most ambitious unified theories of physical reality, string and M-theories, with 10 and 11 dimensions, respectively, take science into completely new territory. Strangely, as Stephen Hawking tells us in his book The Grand Design (2010), “No one seems to know what the ‘M’ stands for, but it may be ‘master’, ‘miracle’ or ‘mystery’.” According to what Hawking calls “model-dependent realism,” different theories may have to be applied in different situations. “Each theory may have its own version of reality, but according to model-dependent realism, that is acceptable so long as the theories agree in their predictions whenever they overlap, that is, whenever they can both be applied.”4

String theories and M-theories are currently untestable, so “model-dependent realism” can only be judged by reference to other models, rather than by experiment. It also applies to countless other universes, none of which has ever been observed.5

Some physicists are deeply skeptical about this entire approach, as the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin shows in his book The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science and What Comes Next (2008).6 String theories, M-theories, and “model-dependent realism” are a shaky foundation for materialism or physicalism or any other belief system.

Third, since the beginning of the 21st century, it has become apparent that the known kinds of matter and energy make up only about 4% of the universe. The rest consists of “dark matter” and “dark energy.” The nature of 96% of physical reality is literally obscure.

Fourth, the Cosmological Anthropic Principle asserts that if the laws and constants of nature had been slightly different at the moment of the Big Bang, biological life could never have emerged, and hence we would not be here to think about it. So did a divine mind fine-tune the laws and constants in the beginning? To avoid a creator God emerging in a new guise, most leading cosmologists prefer to believe that our universe is one of a vast, and perhaps infinite, number of parallel universes, all with different laws and constants, as M-theory also suggests. We just happen to exist in the one that has the right conditions for us.7

This multiverse theory is the ultimate violation of Ockham’s Razor, the philosophical principle that “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity,” or in other words that we should make as few assumptions as possible. It also has the major disadvantage of being untestable.8 And it does not even succeed in getting rid of God. An infinite God could be the God of an infinite number of universes.9

Materialism provided a seemingly simple, straightforward worldview in the late 19th century, but 21st century science has left it far behind. Its promises have not been fulfilled, and its promissory notes have been devalued by hyperinflation.

I am convinced that the sciences are being held back by assumptions that have hardened into dogmas, maintained by powerful taboos. These beliefs protect the citadel of established science, but act as barriers against open-minded thinking. Here, for example, I explore Dogma 2, the assumption that matter is unconscious becomes “Is matter unconscious?” and so on.

Is Matter Unconscious?

The central doctrine of materialism is that matter is the only reality. Therefore, consciousness ought not to exist. Materialism’s biggest problem is that consciousness does exist. You are conscious now. The main opposing theory, dualism, accepts the reality of consciousness, but has no convincing explanation for its interaction with the body and the brain. Dualist–materialist arguments have gone on for centuries. But if we question the dogma that matter is unconscious, we can move forward from this sterile opposition.

Scientific materialism arose historically as a rejection of mechanistic dualism, which defined matter as unconscious and souls as immaterial, as I discuss below. One important motive for this rejection was the elimination of souls and God, leaving unconscious matter as the only reality. In short, materialists treated subjective experience as irrelevant; dualists accepted the reality of experience but were unable to explain how minds affect brains.

The materialist philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote a book called Consciousness Explained (1991), in which he tried to explain away consciousness by arguing that subjective experience is illusory. He was forced to this conclusion because he rejected dualism as a matter of principle:

I adopt the apparently dogmatic rule that dualism is to be avoided at all costs. It is not that I think I can give a knock-down proof that dualism, in all its forms, is false or incoherent, but that, given the way that dualism wallows in mystery, accepting dualism is giving up [his italics].10

This dogmatism of Dennett’s rule is not merely apparent: the rule is dogmatic. By “giving up” and “wallowing in mystery,” I suppose he means giving up science and reason and relapsing into religion and superstition. Materialism “at all costs” demands the denial of the reality of our own minds and personal experiences—including those of Daniel Dennett himself, although by putting forward arguments he hopes will be persuasive, he seems to make an exception for himself and for those who read his book.

Francis Crick devoted decades of his life to trying to explain consciousness mechanistically. He frankly admitted that the materialist theory was an “astonishing hypothesis” that flew in the face of common sense: “‘You’, your joys, and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, and your sense of personal identity and free will are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”11 Presumably Crick included himself in this description, although he must have felt that here was more to his argument than the automatic activity of nerve cells.

One of the motives of materialists is to support an anti-religious worldview. Francis Crick was a militant atheist, as is Daniel Dennett. On the other hand, one of the traditional motives of dualists is to support the possibility of the soul’s survival. If the human soul is immaterial, it may exist after bodily death.

Scientific orthodoxy has not always been materialist. The founders of mechanistic science in the 17th century were dualistic Christians. They downgraded matter, making it totally inanimate and mechanical, and at the same time upgraded human minds making them completely different from unconscious matter. By creating an unbridgeable gulf between the two, they thought they were strengthening the argument for the human soul and its immortality, as well as increasing the separation between humans and other animals.

This mechanistic dualism is often called Cartesian dualism after Descartes (Des Cartes). It saw the human mind as essentially immaterial and disembodied, and bodies as machines made of unconscious matter.12 In practice, most people take a dualist view for granted, as long as they are not called upon to defend it. Almost everyone assumes that we have some degree of free will, and are responsible for our actions. Our educational and legal systems are based on this belief. And we experience ourselves as conscious beings, with some degree of free choice. Even to discuss consciousness presupposes that we are conscious ourselves. Nevertheless, since the 1920s, most leading scientists and philosophers in the English-speaking world have been materialists, in spite of all the problems this doctrine creates.

The strongest argument in favor of materialism is the failure of dualism to explain how immaterial minds work and how they interact with brains. The strongest argument in favor of dualism is the implausibility and self-contradictory nature of materialism.

The dualist–materialist dialectic has lasted for centuries. The soul–body or mind–brain problem has refused to go away. But before we can move forward, first we need to understand in more detail what materialists claim, since their belief system dominates institutional science and medicine, and everyone is influenced by it.

Minds That Deny Their Own Reality

Most neuroscientists do not spend much time thinking about the logical problems that materialist beliefs entail. They just get on with the job of trying to understand how brains work, in the faith that more hard facts will eventually provide answers. They leave professional philosophers to defend the materialist or physicalist faith.

Physicalism means much the same as materialism, but rather than asserting that all reality is material, it asserts that it is physical, explicable in terms of physics, and hence including energy and fields as well as matter. In practice, this is what materialists believe too. In the following discussion I use the more familiar word materialism to mean “materialism or physicalism.”

Among materialist philosophers there are several schools of thought. The most extreme position is called “eliminative materialism.” Consciousness is just an “aspect” of the activity of the brain. Thoughts or sensations are just another way of talking about activity in particular regions of the cerebral cortex; they are the same things talked about in different ways.

Other materialists are “epiphenomenalists”: they accept rather than deny the existence of consciousness, but see it as a functionless by-product of the activity of the brain, an “epiphenomenon,” like a shadow. People might just as well be zombies, with no subjective experience, because all their behavior is a result of brain activity alone. Conscious experience does nothing, and makes no difference to the physical world.

A recent form of materialism is “cognitive psychology,” which dominated academic psychology in the English-speaking world in the late twentieth century. It treats the brain as a computer and mental activity as information processing. Subjective experiences, like seeing green, or feeling pain, or enjoying music, are computational processes inside the brain, which are themselves unconscious.

Some philosophers, like John Searle, think that minds can emerge from matter by analogy with the way that physical properties can emerge at different levels of complexity, like the wetness of water emerging from the interactions of large numbers of water molecules. Many non-materialists would agree with Searle that consciousness is in some sense “emergent” but would argue that while mind and conscious agency originate in physical nature, they are qualitatively different from purely material or physical being.

Finally, some materialists hope that evolution can provide an answer. They propose that consciousness emerged as a result of natural selection through mindless processes from unconscious matter. Because minds evolved, they must have been favored by natural selection, and hence they must actually do something; they must make a difference. Many non-materialists would agree. But materialists want to have it both ways: emergent consciousness must do something if it has evolved as an evolutionary adaptation favored by natural selection; but it cannot do anything if is just an epiphenomenon of the brain activity, or another way of talking about brain mechanisms. In 2011, the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey tried to overcome this problem by suggesting that consciousness evolved because it helps humans survive and reproduce by making us feel “special and transcendent.” But as a materialist, Humphrey does not agree that our minds have any agency, that is to say, they cannot affect our actions. Instead our consciousness is illusory: he describes it as “a magical mystery show that we stage for ourselves inside our own heads.”13 But to say that consciousness is an illusion does not explain consciousness—it presupposes it. Illusion is a mode of consciousness.

If all these theories sound unconvincing, that is because they are. They do not even convince other materialists, which is why there are so many rival theories. Searle has described the debate over the last 50 years as follows:

A philosopher advances a materialist theory of the mind… He then encounters difficulties… Criticisms of the materialist theory usually take a more or less technical form, but, in fact, underlying the technical objections is a much deeper objection: the theory in question has left out some essential feature of the mind… And this leads to ever more frenzied attempts to stick with the materialist thesis.14

The philosopher Galen Strawson, himself a materialist, is amazed by the willingness of so many of his fellow philosophers to deny the reality of their own experience:

I think we should feel very sober, and a little afraid, at the power of human credulity, the capacity of human minds to be gripped by theory, by faith. For this particular denial is the strangest thing that has ever happened in the whole history of human thought, not just the whole history of philosophy.15

Francis Crick admitted that the “astonishing hypothesis” was not proved. He conceded that a dualist view might become more plausible. But, he added, “There is always a third possibility: that the facts support a new, alternative way of looking at the mind–brain problem that is significantly different from the rather crude materialistic view that many neuroscientists hold today and also from the religious point of view. Only time, and much further scientific work, will enable us to decide.”16

There is indeed a third way.

Panpsychist Alternatives

Galen Strawson shares the frustration of many contemporary philosophers with the seemingly intractable problems of materialism and of dualism. He has come to the conclusion that there is only one way out. He argues that a consistent materialism must imply panpsychism, namely the idea that even atoms and molecules have a primitive kind of mentality or experience. (The Greek word pan means everywhere, and psyche means soul or mind.) Panpsychism does not mean that atoms are conscious in the sense that we are, but only that some aspects of mentality or experience are present in the simplest physical systems. More complex forms of mind or experience emerge in more complex systems.15

In 2006, the Journal of Consciousness Studies published a special issue entitled “Does materialism entail panpsychism?” with a target article by Strawson, and responses by 17 other philosophers and scientists. Some of them rejected his suggestion in favor of more conventional kinds of materialism, but all admitted that their favored kind of materialism was problematic.

Strawson made only a generalized, abstract case for pan-psychism, with disappointingly few details as to how an electron or an atom could be said to have experiences. But like many other panpsychists, he made an important distinction between aggregates of matter, like tables and rocks, and self-organizing systems like atoms, cells, and animals. He did not suggest that tables and rocks have any unified experience, though the atoms within them may have.15 The reason for this distinction is that man-made objects like chairs or cars do not organize themselves, and do not have their own goals or purposes. They are designed by people and put together in factories. Likewise rocks are made up of atoms and crystals that are self-organizing, but external forces shape the rock as a whole: for example it may have been split from a larger rock as a boulder rolled down a mountain.

By contrast, in self-organizing systems, complex forms of experience emerge spontaneously. These systems are at the same time physical (non-experiential) and experiential, in other words they have experiences. As Strawson put it, “Once upon a time there was relatively unorganized matter with both experiential and non-experiential fundamental features. It organized into increasingly complex forms, both experiential and non-experiential, by many processes including evolution by natural selection.”15 Unlike Searle’s attempt to explain consciousness by saying that it emerges from totally unconscious, insentient matter, Strawson’s proposal is that more complex form of experience emerge from less complex ones. There is a difference of degree, but not of kind.

The eminent American philosopher Thomas Nagel has put forward a powerful argument for panpsychism in his recent book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (2012).17 He too frames it in an evolutionary context: “Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.”18

Panpsychism is not a new idea. Most people used to believe in it, and many still do. All over the world, traditional people saw the world around them as alive and in some sense conscious or aware: the planets, the stars, the earth, the plants, and the animals all had spirits or souls. Ancient Greek philosophy grew up in this context, although some of the earliest philosophers were hylozoists and rather than panpsychists, that is, they saw all things as in some degree alive, without necessarily supposing that they had sensations or experiences. In medieval Europe, philosophers and theologians took for granted that the world was full of animate beings. The plants and animals had souls, and the stars and planets were governed by intelligences. Today this attitude is usually rejected as “naive,” or “primitive,” or “superstitious.” Searle described it as “absurd.”19

In the United States, the pioneering psychologist William James (1842–1910) advocated a form of panpsychism in which individual minds and a hierarchy of lowerand higher-order minds constituted the reality of the cosmos.20 The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) saw the physical and mental as different aspects of underlying reality: “All mind more or less partakes of the nature of matter… Viewing a thing from the outside… it appears as matter. Viewing it from the inside… it appears as consciousness.”21

In France, the philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) took this tradition of thought to a new level by emphasizing the importance of memory. All physical events contain a memory of the past, which is what enables them to endure. The unconscious matter of mechanistic physics was assumed by Bergson’s contemporaries to persist unchanged until acted on by external forces; matter lived in an eternal instant, and had no time within it. Bergson argued that mechanistic physics treated changes cinematographically, as if there were a series of static, frozen moments. But for Bergson, this kind of physics was an abstraction that left out the essential feature of living nature. “Duration is essentially a continuation of what no longer exists into what does exist. This is real time, perceived and lived… Duration therefore implies consciousness; and we place consciousness at the heart of things for the very reason that we credit them with a time that endures.”22

The leading panpsychist philosopher in the English-speaking world was Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), who started his career as a mathematician at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he taught Bertrand Russell. Together they co-authored Principia Mathematica (1910–1913), one of the most important works in twentieth-century mathematical philosophy. Whitehead then developed a theory of relativity that made almost identical predictions to Einstein’s, and both theories were confirmed by the same experiments.

Whitehead was probably the first philosopher to recognize the radical implications of quantum physics. He realized that the wave theory of matter destroyed the old idea of material bodies as essentially spatial, existing at points in time, but without any time within them. According to quantum physics, every primordial element of matter is “an organized system of vibratory streaming of energy.”23 A wave does not exist in an instant, it takes time; its waves connect the past and the future. He thought of the physical world as made up not of material objects but actual entities or events. An event is a happening or a becoming. It has time within it. It is a process, not a thing. As Whitehead put it, “An event in realizing itself displays a pattern.” The pattern “requires a duration involving a definite lapse of time, and not merely an instantaneous moment.”23

As Whitehead made clear, physics itself was pointing to the conclusion that Bergson had already reached. There is no such thing as timeless matter. All physical objects are processes that have time within them, an inner duration. Quantum physics shows that there is a minimum time period for events, because everything is vibratory, and no vibration can be instantaneous. The fundamental units of nature, including photons and electrons, are temporal as well as spatial. There is no “nature at an instant.”24

Perhaps the most astonishing and original feature of Whitehead’s theory was his new perspective on the relationship between mind and body as a relationship in time. The usual way of conceiving this relationship is spatial: your mind is inside your body, while the physical world is outside. Your mind sees things from within; it has an inner life. Even from the materialist point of view, the mind is literally “inside”— inside the brain, insulated within the darkness of the skull. The rest of the body and the entire external world are “outside.”

By contrast, for Whitehead mind and matter are related as phases in a process. Time, not space, is the key to their relationship. Reality consists of moments in process, and one moment informs the next. The distinction between moments requires the experiencer to feel the difference between the moment of now and past or future moments. Every actuality is a moment of experience. As it expires and becomes a past moment, it is succeeded by a new moment of “now,” a new subject of experience. Meanwhile the moment that has just expired becomes a past object for the new subject—and an object for other subjects too. Whitehead summed this up in the phrase, “Now subject, then object.”25 Experience is always “now,” and matter is always “ago.” The link from the past to the present is physical causality, as in ordinary physics, and from the present to the past is feeling, or, to use Whitehead’s technical term, “prehension,” meaning, literally, seizing, or grasping.

According to Whitehead, every actual occasion is, therefore, both determined by physical causes from the past, and by the self-creative, self-renewing subject that both chooses its own past and chooses among its potential futures. Through its prehensions it selects what aspects of the past it brings into its own physical being in the present, and also chooses among the possibilities that determine its future. It is connected to its past by selective memories, and connected to its potential future through its choices. Even the smallest possible processes, like quantum events, are both physical and mental; they are oriented in time. The direction of physical causation is from the past to the present, but the direction of mental activity runs the other way, from the present into the past through prehensions, and from potential and futures into to the present. There is thus a time-polarity between the mental and physical poles of an event: physical causation from past to present, and mental causation from present to past.

Whitehead was not proposing that atoms are conscious in the same way that we are, but that they have experiences and feelings. Feelings, emotions, and experiences are more fundamental than human consciousness, and every mental event is informed and causally conditioned by material events, which are themselves composed of expired experiences. Knowing can happen only because the past streams into the present, forming it and shaping it, and at the same time the subject chooses among the possibilities that help determine its future.25

Whitehead’s philosophy is notoriously difficult to follow, especially in his key book Process and Reality (1929), but his insights about the temporal relationship of mind and matter point to a way forward, and are well worth trying to understand, even if they are very abstract. One of his modern exponents, Christian de Quincey, has described his idea as follows:

Think of reality as made up of countless gazillions of ‘bubble moments’, where each bubble is both physical and mental—a bubble or quantum of sentient energy…. Each bubble exists for a moment and then pops! and the resulting ‘spray’ is the objective ‘stuff’ that composes the physical pole of the next momentary bubble… Time is our experience of the ongoing succession of these momentary bubbles of being (or bubbles of becoming) popping in and out of the present moment of now. We feel this succession of moments as the flow of the present slipping into the past, always replenished by new moments of ‘now’ from an apparently inexhaustible source we objectify as the future… The future does not exist except as potentials or possibilities in the present moment—in experience—which is always conditioned by the objective pressure of the past (the physical world). Subjectivity (consciousness, awareness) is what-it-feels-like to experience these possibilities, and choosing from them to create the next new moment of experience.26

Conscious And Unconscious Minds

There are at least two senses of the word unconscious. One means totally devoid of mind, experience, and feeling, and this is what materialists mean when they say matter is unconscious. Physicists and chemists treat the systems they study as unconscious in this absolute sense. But a very different meaning of “unconscious” is implied by the phrase “unconscious mind.” Most of our own mental processes are unconscious, including most of our habits. When driving a car we can carry on a conversation while our perceptions of the road and other vehicles affect our responses, without our being consciously aware of all our movements and choices. When I come to a familiar road junction, I may turn right automatically, because this is my habitual route. I am choosing among possibilities, but choosing on the basis of habit. By contrast, if I am driving in an unfamiliar town and trying to find my way with the help of a map, my choice when I come to a junction depends on conscious deliberation. But only a small minority of our choices are conscious. Most of our behavior is habitual, and habits by their very nature work unconsciously.

Like humans, animals are largely creatures of habit. Yet the fact that they are not conscious of most of their actions—as we are not conscious of most of our own—does not mean they are mindless machines. They have a mental aspect as well as a physical aspect, and their mental aspect is shaped by their habits, feelings, and potentialities, among which they choose, unconsciously or consciously.

It may not make much sense to suggest that electrons, atoms, and molecules make conscious choices, but they may make unconscious choices on the basis of habits, just as we do and animals do. According to quantum theory, even elementary particles like electrons have many alternative future possibilities. The calculation of their behavior by physicists involves taking all their possible futures into account.27 Electrons are physical in that they re-enact elements of their past; but they also have a mental pole in that they relate this re-enactment of the past to their future potentialities, which in some sense work backwards in time.

But can we meaningfully say that electrons have experiences, feelings and motivations? Can they be attracted towards one possible future, or repelled by another? The answer is “yes.” For a start, they are electrically charged; they “feel” the electric field around them; they are attracted towards positively charged bodies, and repelled by those with negative charges. Physicists model their behavior mathematically without supposing that that their feelings, attractions, and repulsions are anything other than physical forces, or that their individually unpredictable behavior is governed by anything other than chance and probability. Materialists would say that only by fanciful metaphors can they be seen to have feelings or experience. But some physicists think differently, like David Bohm and Freeman Dyson. Bohm observed, “The question is whether matter is rather crude and mechanical or whether it gets more and more subtle and becomes indistinguishable from what people have called mind.”28 Freeman Dyson wrote,

I think our consciousness is not just a passive epiphenomenon carried along by the chemical events in our brains, but is an active agent forcing the molecular complexes to make choices between one quantum state and another. In other words, mind is already inherent in every electron, and the processes of human consciousness differ only in degree but not in kind from the processes of choice between quantum states which we call ‘chance’ when they are made by an electron.29

These are difficult questions, and raise all sorts of questions about the meaning of words like “feeling,” “experience,” and “attraction.” Are they metaphorical when applied to quantum systems? Perhaps. But we do not have a choice between metaphorical and non-metaphorical thinking. There are no metaphor-free zones in science. The whole of science is suffused with legal metaphors, as in “laws of nature,” materialist theories of mind in computer metaphors, and so on. But the issues are not merely literary or rhetorical, but scientific. As Bergson and Whitehead made clear, the mental and physical aspects of material bodies have different relationships to time and to causation.

Minds Beyond Brains

If our minds are not just the activity of our brains, there is no need for them to be confined to the insides of our heads. As I argue in my book Science Set Free, our minds are extended in every act of perception, reaching even as far as the stars. Vision involves a two-way process: the inward movement of light into the eyes and the outward projection of images. What we see around us is in our minds but not in our brains. When we look at something, in a sense, our mind touches it. This may help to explain the sense of being stared at. Most people say they have felt when someone was looking at them from behind, and most people also claim to have made people turn round by looking at them. This ability to detect stares seems to be real, as shown in many scientific tests, and even seems to work through closed circuit television.

Minds are extended beyond brains not only in space but also in time, and connect us to our own pasts through memory and to virtual futures, among which we choose. As discussed in Science Set Free, repeated failures to find memory traces fit well with the idea of memory as a resonant phenomenon, where similar past patterns of activity in the past affect present activities in minds and brains. Individual and collective memory both depend on resonance, but self-resonance from an individual’s own past is more specific and hence more effective. Animal and human learning may be transmitted by morphic resonance across space and time. The resonance theory helps account for the ability of memories to survive serious damage to brains, and is consistent with all-known kinds of remembering. This theory predicts that if animals, say rats, learn a new trick in one place, say Harvard, rats all over the world should be able to learn it faster thereafter. There is already evidence that this actually happens. Similar principles apply to human learning. For example, if millions of people do standard tests, like IQ tests, they should become progressively easier, on average, for other people to do. Again, this seems to be what happens. Individual memory and collective memory are different aspects of the same phenomenon and differ in degree, not in kind.

And if minds are not confined to brains in space or in time, it becomes much easier to understand how psychic phenomena like telepathy might fit into an expanded, post-materialist science. Here I have space only to summarize my conclusions from an extended discussion in Science Set Free.

Most people claim to have had telepathic experiences. Numerous statistical experiments have shown that information can be transmitted from person to person in a way that cannot be explained in terms of the normal senses. Telepathy typically happens between people who are closely bonded, like mothers and children, spouses and close friends. Many nursing mothers seem to be able to detect when their babies are in distress when they are miles away. The commonest kind of telepathy in the modern world occurs in connection with telephone calls when people think of someone who then rings, or who just know who is calling. Numerous experimental tests have shown that this is a real phenomenon. It does not fall off with distance. Social animals seem to be able to keep in touch with members of their group at a distance telepathically, and domesticated animals like dogs, cats, horses, and parrots often pick up their owners’ emotions and intentions at a distance as shown in experiments with dogs and parrots.

Other psychic abilities include premonitions and precognitions, as shown by their anticipation of earthquakes, tsunamis, and other disasters by many species of animals. Human premonitions usually occur in dreams or through intuitions. In experimental research on human presentiments, future emotional events seem able to work “backwards” in time to produce detectable physiological effects.

Scientific Futures

The sciences are entering a new phase. The materialist ideology that has ruled them since the 19th century is out of date. All 10 of its essential doctrines have been superseded.

The sciences will have to change for another reason too: they are now global. Mechanistic science and the materialist ideology grew up in Europe, and were strongly influenced by the religious disputes that obsessed Europeans from the 17th century onwards. But these preoccupations are alien to cultures and traditions in many other parts of the world.

In 2011, the worldwide expenditure on scientific and technological research and development was more than $1000 billion, of which China spent $100 billion.30 Asian countries, especially China and India, now produce enormous numbers of science and engineering graduates. In 2007, at the B.Sc. level there were 2,500,000 science and engineering graduates in India and 1,500,000 in China31 compared with 515,000 in the US.32 In addition, many of those studying in the US and Europe are from other countries: in 2007, nearly a third of the graduate students in science and engineering in the US were foreign, with the majority from India, China, and Korea.33

Yet the sciences as taught in Asia, Africa, the Islamic countries, and elsewhere are still packaged in an ideology shaped by their European past. Materialism gains its persuasive power from the technological applications of science. But the successes of these applications do not prove that this ideology is true. Penicillin will go on killing bacteria, jet planes will keep on flying, and mobile telephones will still work if scientists move on to wider views of nature.

No one can foresee how the sciences will evolve, but I believe recognizing that “science” is not one thing will facilitate their development. “Science” has given way to the sciences. By moving beyond physicalism, the status of physics has changed. By freeing the sciences from the ideology of materialism, new opportunities for debate and dialog open up, and so do new possibilities for research.

REFERENCES:

1. Sheldrake R. Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery. New York: Random House; 2012.

2. Popper KR, Eccles JC. The Self and its Brain. Berlin: Springer International; 1977.

3. D’Espagnat B. Conceptual Foundations of Quantum Mechanics. Reading, MA: Benjamin; 1976.

4. Hawking S, Mlodinow L. The Grand Design: New Answers to the Ultimate Questions of Life. London: Bantam Press; 117.

5. Hawking S, Mlodinow L. The Grand Design: New Answers to the Ultimate Questions of Life. London: Bantam Press; 118–119.

6. Smolin L. The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next. London: Allen Lane; 2006.

7. Carr B, editor. Universe or Multiverse? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2007; Greene B. The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos. London: Allen Lane; 2011.

8. Ellis G. The untestable multiverse. Nature. 2011;469:295.

9. Collins. In: Carr B. ed. Universe or Multiverse? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2007:459–480.

10. Dennett D. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown and Co; 37.

11. Crick F. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. London: Simon and Schuster; 3.

12. Griffin DR. Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom and the Mind–Body Problem. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock; 1998.

13. Humphrey N. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. London: Quercus; 2011.

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17. Nagel T. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2012.

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25. De Quincey C. Reality bubbles. J Conscious Stud. 2008;15: 94–101.

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27. Feynman R. Quantum Electrodynamics. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley; 1962.

28. Quoted by Dossey L. Meaning and Medicine. New York: Bantam Books; 12.

29. Dyson F. Disturbing the Universe. New York:Harper and Row; 249.

30. Royal Society (2011). 31. Royal Society. Knowledge, Networks and Nations: Global Scientific Collaboration in the 21st Century. London: Royal Society; 2011 [Policy Document 03/11].

32. US Census Data. /http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2011/tables/11s0807.pdf S; Accessed June 2011.

33. National Science Foundation. /http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf09314/ S; Accessed June 2011.

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