Our current age: a liminal age?

2024

This thesis explores the transformative potency of liminality and its imperative role in facilitating self-transcendence, the ultimate state of fulfillment. Liminality, the middle phase of a rite of passage, is a transition period characterized by ambiguity. This paper examines it through interdisciplinary lenses, including anthropology, history, psychology, spirituality, and ecology. I propose an integrative framework for consciousness designed to guide individuals step-by-step through this disorienting time. It consists of meaning, acceptance, detoxification, introspection, joy, and embodiment. By distinguishing between liminal and liminoid experiences, the research highlights differences between East and West mentalities and ancient and current cultural dynamics. The significant feature of this thesis is the importance of embracing liminality as a sacred process to be moved through rather than a challenge to be avoided or dwelled in. Findings suggest that intentional engagement with liminal experiences enhances resilience, self-awareness, and overall well-being, leading to deeper fulfillment and self-transcendence. This framework contributes to individual development and provides valuable insights for therapeutic practices and community support, which can be successfully implemented across considerable domains.

Philosophy Now , 2020

“Now dogma is fast being replaced by rationality and reason,” explains Dharma Guru Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar. “Human beings with their developed brains, developed nerve systems and developed nerve-cells started thinking that we are not to do something for a particular tribe or a particular clan or a particular nationality; we are to do whatever we are to do, whatever we must do, for the entire humanity of the Cosmos.” “So ours is the age of Neohumanism – humanism supplying elixir to all, one and all. We are for all, and with everything existent we are to build up a new society, a Neohumanistic society.”. Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar (1921-1990) was a spiritual teacher in the tradition of Shiva and Krishna. He founded the international social-spiritual movement Ananda Marga (“Path of Bliss”).

The coming deliverer: millennial themes in …, 1997

As human beings we live with paradox. We are conscious and self-reflective, aware of our existence, assured of our position as hunters rather than prey, without predators in the world in which we live, and yet we remain ignorant of the world - of our place in the delicate ecological balance which holds our existence in its thrall - and powerless before the reality of death, the great equalizer which puts paid to our specious notions of superiority. Human societies and individuals have historically come to two broadly contradictory conclusions concerning our predicament. These contrasting emphases may be present within each person, but the stress on each element varies from one culture to another, across time and within individuals. The first approach is to conceive of the world (the limits of which are culturally determined) as existing in a delicately balanced state of equilibrium, to which human beings, through their social and religious actions, contribute. The forces of nature and human misdemeanours threaten to upset this ideal harmony, as may the actions of destructive gods or spirits, who must be constantly opposed if chaos is to be averted. Such a view may be combined with a notion of endless cosmic cycles of growth and decay, mirroring the experience of life itself within a time-scale set between the life-span of creatures on earth and the stars on which they gaze. The main thrust of such a vision tends to be this-worldly and life-affirming. Through constant struggle and vigilance human beings can and must play their part in the great drama of life on whi'ch fhe continued existence of the world depends. By way of contrast we have the solution of those whose eyes are set on a future utopia, or perhaps on a golden past which they seek to recreate in a transformed world. The present constraints of existence are eschewed in favour of a new world in which suffering and chaos are finally overcome. This new world, whether for the few or the many, recreated on this earth or in some future existence, demands the destruction of the old order and is therefore life-denying and transcendental. The notion of a coming deliverer belongs to the latter scheme of things - a human or divine (or divine-human) saviour will come who is stong enough to take on the forces of chaos and evil and defeat them once and for all, leading the chosen few to the new world beyond the boundaries of the present age.

What’s New in the New Europe? Redefining Culture, Politics, Identity, 2019

RETHINKING THE HUMAN CONDITION IN THE AGE OF MODERNITY rom where does the anxious suspicion arise that the biblical eschatology of last things and end times is rapidly approaching? Apocalypse originates in the ancient Greek word apocalypsis, which means to uncover what you could not see before-to reveal. The biblical use of the word "apocalypse" means that which is revealed by divine intervention. For purposes of this paper I will adhere to the ancient Greek meaning which can be stated as simply taking note of that which has been overlooked. One thing that has not been overlooked is how European history is riddled with violence over religious beliefs. The modern response has been to diminish religious relevance. But that was followed by unparalleled nationalistic violence in the 20 th century. Today, 21 st Century Europe remains embroiled in religious conflicts despite its best efforts to avoid them. In the hope of pursuing a more promising path to peaceful existence, I offer some overlooked biblical and secular observations about the human condition. Modernity originates with Western culture; and that culture is overwritten with Christendom. To rethink the human condition begins with rethinking the biblical. But to that there is resistance. Europe has turned Christendom into a relic. It has turned away from entanglement in conflicts over dogma and moral certainty by embracing the materiality of an endless progress regulated by the modern equivalent to spirituality found in an enforcing of liberal Democracy. The belief in the endless amelioration of human conditions that is imbedded in the word "progress" has no last things or end time. Instead, progress is about endless change. Its relationship to eschatology seems clear enough: the eschatological tribute to last things has given rise to the modern answer of endless offerings through progress. But progress presupposes knowledge of human

The history and politics of Western modernity is to a large extent clocked by formations and transformations of time. For centuries, dominant human/ist and technoscientific notions of teleology, progress and innovation have been used to structure developments and classify human and nonhuman life.

The ethical challenges posed by the advances in the understanding of ageing are the subject of very welcome controversy across political and social, economic and environmental dimensions. But the challenges are not just a matter of how our societies would manage the material consequences of such dramatic changes. They also challenge our conception of the shape of our lives and for what it means for our lives to flourish. How do we reconcile a radical conceptual change in our thinking about ageing-that many would have us enthusiastically embrace-with what may be a deeper truth: that it is not merely our bodies, but we who age? And that perhaps to be particular human beings whose lives have value-worth engaging in scientific research to cherish and preserve-we need to age? Moreover, like many ethical controversies produced by scientific and technological change, these issues are liable to produce a profoundly uncomfortable sense of moral vertigo. Most of our ordinary ethical decisions take place on relatively stable ground in which moral concepts have relatively firm connections with facts of nature and of the human condition. Profound scientific changes of the kind associated with aspects of anti-ageing research, precisely because it challenges our view of what the facts are, and promise or threaten to revise the human condition, shift the entire pattern of connections between moral and everyday concepts. This poses a problem not just for what we are to think but about the means by which we think about these matters. Default ethical thinking about anti-ageing is most often couched in Utilitarian terms. Utilitarian moral thinking-which requires us to try to figure out the likely net effect of our decisions on total human welfare-is an essential and useful ingredient in ordinary public policy making. It is a moral methodology perhaps especially appealing to scientists. Given an ethical problem, can't we weigh scenarios, probilify and calculate the optimal ethical result? I think we need to be reminded that here Utilitarian approaches are unlikely to help us face these challenges and not only or primarily because the calculations are hard. Why? First of all, the debates are subject to what we might call the problem of perspective instability. Rational but rival estimations of consequences about anti-ageing begin from different and incommensurable domains: there are the perspectives of the individual and their loved ones, that of society, the economy and culture, and, not uniquely-compare climate change-but still profoundly, that of the species as a whole, both now and into the far future. It is hopeless to pretend, in regard to such profound questions about the human condition, that we have any already available principled way of managing these perspectives which needs merely to be applied smartly and in the light of acquirable evidence. Our moral concepts simply do not form so well-ordered a system and were not built to handle questions which put the very notion of the human into contention. (A sad truth is that some highly developed societies cannot even manage these different perspectives to agree about the economics of health care under present conditions.) Thus, in the case of anti-ageing, the fact that, if asked, an individual may always want to live another day, does not trump the issues of any harm done to humanity as a species by enabling that preference of all current members of humanity to be indefinitely fulfilled. Equally, questions of justice-for example issues of equality of access to the technology or intergenerational equity-do not consistently override individual choice.

Are we living in the age of humans? This article will look at the facts behind the documentary film on humanity’s massive reengineering of the planet, "ANTHROPOCENE: The Human Epoch". We shall look at 11 aspects: reliance on fossil fuels, iron and other metals; poverty as a lack of global resources; poor people and large families; poor people have a major impact on their local environment; Global warming causes such as weather events, heatwaves, droughts and floods; Human activity is destroying the habitat of countless species; humankind’s consumption of resources such as timber, oil and minerals; the production of greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide and methane; People produce waste and pollution. Agriculture production takes up 50% of all habitable land on Earth; and, Human travel with a very large emissions footprint.