Communion for Sustainable Futures
  • Home
    • SENSE
  • Global Centre
    • Focus
    • Vision, Mission and Values
    • Orientation
    • Knowledge Base >
      • Special Collections >
        • Indigenous Knowledge Collection
        • Agroecology
        • Specific Sources
      • Beyond Sustainable Development >
        • Commodification
        • "No-Growth" Philosophy
      • Focus Areas >
        • Sustainability and Spirituality >
          • Ecology and Religion
        • Planetary Consciousness
        • Eco-Psychology
        • Futures Studies/Futurology
        • Sustainable Design
        • Authentic Communication
        • Sustainable Leadership
      • Books
      • Reports
      • Videos on Contemporary Issues
      • Technologies: Sharing, Dialogue, Action
      • Visuals: Data On Sustainability
    • Disciplinary Focus Areas >
      • The SES Narratives >
        • Climate Change
        • Urbanisation
        • HRD/M (Human Resources Development/Management)
    • People & Structure >
      • Advisors >
        • Ben Bernstein
        • Chainarong Monthienvichienchai
        • Sashi Kumar
        • Yves Berthelot
      • Associates >
        • Barnabas Tiburtius
        • David Haley
        • Dicky Sofjan
        • Indu Prakash Singh
        • Khoo Salma
        • Manish Jain
        • Somboon Chungprampree
      • Research Consultant & Mentor
  • Our Books
  • 7 Screens
  • Conver-[Dialogue]-sations
    • Roundtable 2017 >
      • Participants
      • 1-Profiles
      • 2-Profiles
      • 3-Profile
      • Background (XHS)
      • VC's Message
      • Contributions/Comments >
        • Comments Compilation
      • Resources (XHS)
    • The Water Dialogue (2016) >
      • Water Bodies
    • Orientational Session 2016
    • Orientational Sessions 2015
    • Diversions and U-turns (Unconference, 2015) >
      • Unconference Resources >
        • Aims and Objectives
        • 5 Planetary Concerns
        • Notes for Participation
        • Messages for Reflection
        • Videos
      • Co-Creator Community >
        • Co-Creators >
          • Web Presence of Co-Creators
          • Activities of Co-creators
        • Unconferencing
        • Photo-Collection 1
        • Photo-Collection 2
        • Comments from Co-Creators
        • Reflective Notes
    • Shared Concerns (2013)
    • tth2017
  • Contact Us
    • 'Talk' to Us
Section Homepage

Focus

Picture
Searching for Futures (Nat/PMA/2012/Trichy-India)

Spiritually-Engaged Sustainability: 
The Way Forward


People understand and engage with spirituality in many different ways. Spirituality is the basis of religion (not the other way round), religiosity and religious institutions. It animates religious life. It offers us an understanding of our place in the 'larger picture', our intimate dependent connectedness to the larger cosmos, to each other and to the 'transcendental'. It offers us a cosmological point of  view. It gives us a sense of wonder and awe at Creation and its creative processes, and evokes humility in our Being. It encourages love and compassion as a sustainable state for all to live together in dialogue, peace and harmony...now and for the future. It is rooted in permanence, where we engage with the world by Being, not by 'Possessing'  or ‘Having’.  It is essentially a totalising experience.

Spirituality encourages a way with non-materialism and ‘non-materialistic development’, offering a different understanding and experience of engagement, achievements, accomplishments, ownership, involvement and adventure. The inner core of spirituality radiates an awareness of all-round sustainability -- our engagement with all living and non-living things, our personhood, our choices, our social and technology design drives, and our place in the universe (or an universe of multi-verses). To have a spiritual experience is to mindfully see ourselves in deep interconnectedness/ interdependence, to engage with the universe (or an universe of multi-verses)
 from that totalising perspective and to act from that self-consciousness.

This focus is beginning to dawn on many and is shaping the discourse around the world in various fields. It is a sure pathway to wean us from the “business-as-usual” approach to sustainable development, to re-cast the imperialistic profit-motive to one that grows a humane economy, to move away from monologues to dialogues to 'multi-logues',  and to free us from structures of educational/learning short-sightedness that produce 'products' for the exploitation-based economic system to forming people who authentically care. 


But in order to take this difficult path, we need to break away from our usual modes of thinking and feeling and being driven by crude materialistic worldviews and lifestyles of the Good Life in a Consumerist Utopia. For this pathway to shape our everyday life, the future generations and human civilization, we need not only to expand its presence as a culture of thinking-feeling-emoting, or Being, but also as a culture of creative, self-conscious institution-building, promoting sustainability-spirituality realities (or multi-verses) at the local and global levels.

The “business-as-usual” approach to sustainable development offers the world more discussions, debates, reports, technologies … and more disasters. Sadly, it offers a mindset to transform our disasters into commodities, camouflaging and consolidating the profit-motive, yet again. We talk about change because it is convenient. What we need to do is to trans-form, to change rules, to productively upset status quo and set ourselves a new direction. We need an approach to sustainability that is influenced by spirituality, i.e., a spiritually-engaged sustainability, which gives us a chance to offer future generations a life of creativity, growth, dialogue, harmony and authentic adventure with the universe and its fellow beings.


The Global Centre

Picture
  • Focus
  • Vision, Mission and Values
  • Orientation
  • Disciplinary Focus Areas
  • SES Narratives (Spiritually-engaged Sustainability Narratives)
  • Climate Change
  • Urbanisation
  • HRD/HRM
  • People and Structure
  • Promoting SENSE

Knowledge Base

  • Main Catalogue
  • General Links
  • Indigenous Knowledge Collection
  • Agroecology
  • Beyond Sustainable Development
  • Commodification
  • No-Growth Philosophy
  • Focus Areas Sub-Catalogue
  • Sustainability and Spirituality

  • Ecology and Religion
  • Planetary Consciousness
  • Eco-Psychology
  • Future Studies
  • Sustainable Design
  • Authentic Communication
  • Sustainable Leadership
  • Books 
  • Reports
  • Videos on Contemporary Issues
  • Technologies for Sharing, Dialogue and Action
  • Info-graphics on Sustainability
Our Book
  • Living Pathways
Managed by:
Picture
www.publicmediaagency.org

Booklet Series (Reprints)
Critical Orientations 
to Sustainability and Spirituality 


  • 7 Screens
  • Dialogue

This site promotes the orientation, activities, resources and projects of the Centre for the Study of Sustainable Futures and Spirituality (GCSSFS). The Centre is supported in the area of content generation, project execution, design and general administration by Public Media Agency (PMA),  Petaling Jaya, Malaysia under the direct care of one of their creative consultants, Dr. M. Nadarajah (Nat). Nat works as consultant on different projects.  He supports PMA on its various projects supporting social causes. Nat is presently engaged with Xavier University@Bhubaneshwar, India, with it School of Sustainability. He works with Loyola College@Chennai, India on issues related sustainability and spirituality. He is associated with the Centre for Diaspora Studies@MSU, Tirunelveli, India. He continues to support Pesticide Action Network Asia and the Pacific (PAN AP), which is based in Penang, Malaysia, as consultant on a project to set up a 'blended' institution, International People's Agroecology Multiversity (IPAM), to promote agroecology across Asia and the Pacific. He is also a member of the Asian Public Intellectual (API)  community.

GCSSFS, 2016