The Peoples' Institute for Re-thinking Education and Development
An Invitation into Liminality
This inquiry into Sacredversities comes from a belief that modern systems (economic, political and educational) have been designed to bring out the lowest frequencies of humanity. Our modern consciousness is being continually colonized and down-graded by a mindset of scarcity, competition, separation, monoculture and fear. Gandhi warned of the dangers of a decapitated education system that focused only on the head rather than the hands, heart and home. As a result, across the planet, we are witness to rising levels of greed, war, genocide, inequality, depression, drug abuse, ecological breakdown, etc. This is not due to a few individual ‘bad Hitlers’ as we have been taught to believe but rather due to the techno-industrial-military design of the system (its organizing structures, tools and technologies, data indicators, incentives, knowledge categories, speed and scale, etc).
One can use the metaphor of musical chairs to understand this more closely. If we recall one of the biggest rituals from our modernized childhoods, we can hear the music that used to blare at every birthday party and see the kids being forced to move around in a circle over and over again. We were taught that there is only one chair and we must fight against our friends for the chair. We should bite, cheat, kick and do whatever it takes to grab that chair from our friends. This is what winning is ultimately all about – as a child and for the rest of our lives. And, as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan infamously stated, There is No Alternative (TINA) to this. The musical chairs operating system tells us who is a “winner” and who is a “loser” with its survival of the fittest orientation. It educates and conditions us into an extremely anemic, isolated and anti-nature notion of “self” which often get internalized and reproduced by even the “good-guys” and “change-makers”.
This design both gives shape to and perpetuates itself through a cancerous, fragmented and anthropocentric logic (what Ivan Illich referred to as homo economicus) that is being spread through modern education. Just calling it “madness” misses the point. It is a cold-blooded logic which morally justifies and creates the conditions for profiting from war, profiting from the pollution of rivers and cutting of forests, profiting from poisoning food and soil, and profiting from loneliness. It trains us to think that we can see and understand Life and our purpose as human beings through flat Microsoft products (excel spreadsheets and ppt decks), textbooks and standardized exam scores, White Papers, policy briefs, and stock market graphs, oil prices and GDP. At the same time, it trains us to ignore, deny and lie about the harmful consequences of our actions through mythologies such as technological utopianism, unlimited growth-energy and human exceptionalism. We are all implicated in this logic in some way or the other. How we transcend this base logic and access another imagination is one of the most important questions of our times.
The urgent need to explore Sacredversities also comes from a sense that our institutionalized notions of spirituality and the sacred have become fractured and disconnected from the rest of nature and everyday Life. Due to which, our collective immune system and capacities to meaningfully respond to the absurdity of the musical chairs paradigm has been greatly compromised. The West taught us that they are “materialists” and we in the East are “spiritualists”. But this is a fragmented lie. We are spiritual-materialists. This is perhaps the most important aspect to understand for any socio-cultural-ecological regeneration efforts. The original sin is the separation of spirit and matter or, in other words, the severing and absence-ing of the sacred from everyday life. It comes from being taught over and over that the sacred is somewhere ‘out there’ or something you do only in specific buildings or specific institutions or at specific times. For our ancestors, making a clay pot (and being made by it) was a spiritual act, growing food (and being grown by it) was spiritual act, healing (and being healed by) medicinal plants, soil, mountains and rivers was a spiritual act, gifting (and being gifted by) drinking water in the desert was a spiritual act, etc. My friend and mentor, Waterman Rajendra Singh, once told me that the meaning of Bhagvan (god in Hindi) is derived from the letters: bh- for bhoomi (earth), ag- for agni (fire), wa- for vahu (air) and n- for neer (water). The divine is intertwined with and emerges from the elements of Life.
Fractured spirituality allows modern civilization to continue to create businesses without spiritual purpose, compassion and well-being; science and technology without wisdom and a sense of humility and limits; and governance and politics without deep service, belonging and oneness. It makes us forget the real value of things. There is a saying that if you beat them at their own game, you will lose everything. Humanity is slowly waking up to the harsh costs of “winning” the game of modernity’s musical chairs and its escalation trap.
There is a need for a different game that moves beyond the traumas, tools and triggers of the “god of money”, the enslaving and commodification of the commons, the cult of hyper-individualism, the violence of measurement and the continuous technological-energy colonization necessary to sustain this system. I call it the Ancestral game. This was a game that was uploaded millenia ago by our ancestors to remind us that, when confronted with debilitating collective amnesia, we are capable of operating at a higher frequency and level of consciousness. Our ancestors left us many gifts for opening up new channels within ourselves; for re-accessing a deeper wisdom, imagination and courage; for re-partnering with the more-than-human world; for remembering who we really are and why we are on this planet. This is an intelligence for opening up other possible games for humanity.
Sacredversities are practice spaces and processes: for being initiated and deepening commitment; for cleansing and healing; for accessing and interpreting dream-worlds; for grieving; for composting and dissolving; for honoring transitions and shapeshifting; for listening to other beings and across dimensions; for more playfulness and mischief; for forgiving conflict; for breaking the spell of voracious capital, debt and greed and shifting our collective frequencies. They remind us how to integrate. They seek to re-weave the spiritual-material world into our cognitive and epistemological moorings. They seek to re-weave our everyday notions of business, work, healing, education, entertainment with holistic spirituality. They seek to re-weave “arrogant modern individuals” back into the relational, interdependent web of life.
They are also wisdom spaces for questioning the dominant definitions of progress, success and happiness as well as our institutionalized tools, educational degrees and ideological frameworks. In India, for example, reconnecting with the goddesses Lakshmi, Saraswati and Durga reminds us to ask ourselves fundamental systemic questions of decolonization: what is real wealth?; what is real knowledge?; and what is real power? Sacredversities help us to reclaim the deeper wisdom of these goddesses in our collective learning, valuation and decision-making frameworks, organizational structures and processes as part of a larger cosmological reset for modernity.
This collection of essays is a humble exploration of how Sacredversities have shaped different peoples’ lives. As a survivor of American suburbia and its hyper-sterility, my own encounters with the “sacred” have happened through many important Sacredversities: unlearning with my illiterate Grandmother’s University in her village and, through her, listening to my Ancestors-versity; serving food to people in the Sikh Langar community kitchen in the Seva-versity; connecting to goodness and beauty in the midst of pain and violence with inmate-learners through the Swaraj Jail University; surrendering and bowing to the mighty Amazon Forest-versity; forgiving others and myself in the Jain-versity; opening myself to Dream-versity where I have received uploads about masti yoga and the trickster’s journey; exploring how to host ritual pedagogies of sacred-versities in Swaraj University. These encounters have given me the courage not only to walk on a different path but also to surrender to where those paths want to take me. All along the way, I have had to engage with my educated inner skeptic and the critical and hyper-rational mind which keeps questioning whether the “sacred” even exists and who is quick to label and judge everything that does not fit neatly in the monoculture norm as ‘superstitious’. Editing this book has been another initiation of sorts for me.
Just today, I was thinking about what it means to practically reconnect to the sense of the sacred. The following mantra popped up in my heart - "Remember to take care of those who take care of you." This simple idea seems so revolutionary if we stop to remember it: take care of our bodies, take care of our parents and relatives, take care of our friends, take care of our employees, take care of our employers, take care of our mentees, take care of our mentors, take care of our local rivers and water bodies, take care of our forests, take care of our soils, take care of the animals, take care of the refugees and the migrants, take care of the farmers and the earthworms, bees and butterflies, take care of all the invisible beings and spirits who sustain our lives, take care of our ancestors. We don’t need to do this with the burden of paying things back in some linear tit-for-tat accounting system. Rather, it is with the spirit of joy, gratitude, playfulness, love, belonging and seva that we pay things forward. This is what our indigenous wisdom teaches us about how life flourishes. It is also the ethos of indigenous creativity and innovation.
We welcome seekers of all backgrounds and traditions to contribute to this exploration of Sacredversities. One word of caution: please don’t treat these Sacredversities as commercial gimmicks, tricks or quick-fixes as “modern alternatives” tend to do. They are not about convenient weekend workshops, heady academic courses or new revenue streams. They invite deep apprenticeship with significant self-study, devotion, introspection, humility, unlearning, care and practice. They are not to be commodified - they fuel and are fueled by the gift culture. Sacredversities are also not about more reactionary “solutionism” or “activism”. Nor are they about escapism. We are being invited to enter into the space of not knowing what to really do in these times; very vulnerable and scary spaces that can make us feel very uncomfortable and even unhinged. It is only by journeying through this portal can we open up ancient-new ways forward.
This book is an invitation to slow down, scale down and remember. It is an invitation into sensing and imagining a new education, a new politics and a new economics. It is an invitation to loosen the firm grip of fixed categories, soul-numbing identity politics and black and white answers and flow into the temporary confusion that comes with re-entanglement. It is an invitation to let go of our rationalist demands for “inner alignment” and quest for logical consistency as a “human” and lean into the mystical paradoxes of Life. It is an invitation to sit with the messy conflicts, cracks and chaos as potential forces of liberation. It is an invitation to unlearn polarizing narratives of “good vs. evil”, “survival of the fittest”, and “the enemy is out there” and re-infuse ourselves with radical trust, open-heartedness and abundance. It is an invitation to renew our sacred covenant with the spirit worlds and the rest of nature and to re-prioritize what really matters. Most importantly, it is an invitation to awaken our senses and sensibilities to the miracle of this wild and precious Life again and to notice that we are in the midst of a profound planetary initiation as a species.
