scholarly journals Ecological Consciousness and Self-Realization-- an Identification: A Step towards Spiritualistic World

Author(s):  
Dr. Mayuri Barman

The most dangerous tendency of the present human generation is to enjoy every aspect of life selfishly which leads to serious threat to an environment. From the very beginning man was never a solitary creature in the planet where the relationship between humans and nature is one of the most fundamental issues we face and must deal with today. A universal holistic approach is needed, which may develop ecological consciousness among us. Many religions, scriptures can help to build a model of ecological consciousness. The importance of ancient Indian religious practices shows that human beings are an integral part of nature, and should, therefore, naturally understand the framework of life. At present human society is misled by the false attraction of the materialistic life, so to realize his true ‘self ,‘ one has to get out of this false notion that human society is the only proprietor of the world. The ‘Bhagavad-Gita’ nicely describes detachment from materials activities to the transcendental activities with realizing our true ‘self.’ Warwick Fox and Arne Naess’s ‘Self Realization’ shows how a person who Is self-realized and well-identified with the non-human world, will behave in harmony with nature, acting from inclination rather than duty.

2012 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Hamoud Yahya Ahmed ◽  
◽  
Ruzy Suliza Hashim

Ecocriticism is concerned with the relationship between literature and environment or how the relationships between humans and their physical world are reflected in literature. In this paper, we attempt to analyse selected poems of Muhammad Haji Salleh using some concepts from ecocriticism as an analytical lens. The premise of this paper is based on the poet’s symbiotic relationship which has become a significant feature of his work. Using six of his nature poems to exhibit Muhammad’s idea of mutual relationship between the human world and the natural world of environment, we show the poet’s concern about the slightest interference of human beings into the world of nature which results in the disruption of human-nature relationship. Muhammad Haji Salleh does not limit himself to presenting the brighter and darker side of nature, rather he has gone a step further to reveal the very concept of ecosystem and reflect the blossoming of ecological consciousness in modern Malaysian society. This approach of reading Muhammad Haji Salleh exhibits the current interest in the environment and the ways in which it has to be treated with respect and love. By explicating the intrinsic features of nature in his selected poems, we can inculcate environmental awareness and inspire ecological consciousness among people in Malaysia and elsewhere in the world. Keywords: Ecocriticism, ecosystem, interrelationship, ecological consciousness, poetry and Muhammad Haji Salleh


Author(s):  
Madhuri M. Yadlapati

This chapter examines four particular ways in which faith has been expressed as a commitment to one's responsibilities vis-à-vis one's community and God. It discusses Hindu epic illustrations of dharma, or sacred duty; an allegorical extrapolation of Christian responsibility in C. S. Lewis's Narnia series as well as his discussion of the relationship between faith and works; Islamic understanding of human beings as God's caliphs (khalifa) and the responsibility for jihad; and Jewish articulations of human responsibility in a covenantal relationship with God. These examples concern a specific interface of religious ethics and the commitment to faith, by which one embraces a tremendous sense of responsibility for the very fate of the human world.


Author(s):  
María Dolores Cervera Montejano

A partir de la relación entre cosmovisión y etnoteorías parentales y su expresión en prácticas de crianza infantil me he aproximado a la construcción de la persona en los primeros años de vida entre los mayas de Yucatán. Centro este trabajo en la ceremonia de hetsmek’, ya que sugiero puede verse como expresión del papel que juegan las entidades anímicas y la agencia humana en las etnoteorías parentales, al tomar en cuenta la conformación de los niños. Los padres, apoyados en los padrinos, contribuyen simbólicamente a abrirle el camino al infante para que desarrolle las capacidades que definirán su entendimiento. En conjunto evocan las que caracterizan a los seres de maíz en el génesis maya. En particular, la responsabilidad y la adquisición de conciencia se relacionan con ik’, atributo que permite al individuo relacionarse con el mundo al igual que ool y cuyos significados múltiples y relaciones requieren mayor investigación para entender la construcción de la persona entre los mayas de Yucatán.     ABSTRACT I approach the cultural construction of the idea of person in the first years of life among the Yucatec Maya through the relationship between parental ethnotheories and worldview. I focus in the hetsmek’ ceremony and suggest that it may be seen as the expression in parental ethnotheories of the role played by souls and human society in the formation of children. Parents and godparents symbolically contribute to open the infant’s road in order to develop the abilities that will define the concept of understanding. These evoke the characteristics of human beings modeled from corn as described in the Maya genesis. Among them, responsibility and awareness relate toik’. Together with ool, they refer to the attributes that allow the individual to engage in the world and which require further investigation into their multiple meanings and relations if we are to better understand the construction of the person among the Maya of Yucatan.  


1994 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard W. Fulweiler

Our Mutual Friend, published just six years after Darwin's The Origin of Species, is structured on a Darwinian pattern. As its title hints, the novel is an account of the mutual-though hidden-relations of its characters, a fictional world of individuals seeking their own advantage, a "dismal swamp" of "crawling, creeping, fluttering, and buzzing creatures." The relationship between the two works is quite direct in light of the large number of reviews on science, evolution, and The Origin from 1859 through the early 1860s in Dicken's magazine, All the Year Round. Given the laissez-faire origin of the Origin, Dicken's use of it in a book directed against laissez-faire economics is ironic. Important Darwinian themes in the novel are predation, mutual relationships, chance, and, especially, inheritance, a central issue in both Victorian fiction and in The Origin of Species. The novel asks whether predatory self-seeking or generosity should be the desired inheritance for human beings. The victory of generosity is symbolized by a dying child's "willing" his inheritance of a toy Noah's Ark, "all the Creation," to another child. Our Mutual Friend is saturated with the motifs of Darwinian biology, therefore, to display their inadequacy. Although Dickens made use of the explanatory powers of natural selection and remained sympathetic to science, the novel transcends and opposes its Darwinian structure in order to project a teleological and designed evolution in the human world toward a moral community of responsible men and women.


Author(s):  
Abbas Mohammadi

Cinema consists of two different dimensions of art and instrument. A tool that mixes with art and represents society in which anything can be depicted for others. But art has always sought to portray the beauties of this universe. The beauty that lies within philosophy. Since the advent of human beings, men have always sought to dominate and abuse women for their own benefit. In the 19th century, cinema entered the realm of existence and found its place in the human world. With the empowerment of cinema in the world, filmmakers tried to achieve their goals by using this tool.Many filmmakers use women as a propaganda tool to attract a male audience. In many films, when the hero of a movie succeeds in reaching a woman, or in doing so, she is succeeded by a woman. In this way, of course, women themselves are not faultless and have helped men abuse women. Afghanistan, a traditional and male-dominated country, has not been the exception, and in many Afghan films women have been instrumental zed and used in various ways to benefit men, and we have seen fewer films in which women be a movie hero or a woman in a movie like a man. This kind of treatment of women in Afghan films has caused other young Afghan girls to not have a positive view of Afghan cinema.


2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-131
Author(s):  
Jarosław Horowski

One of the most difficult problems, which is to be solved by contemporary culture, is the ecological problem. It concerns the culture because the hedonistic and consumerist mentality of man plays an important part in it. Biocentrism states that the ecological problem results from traditional Western attitudes to the non-human world based on the belief that humans are the central and most significant entities in the universe. Biocentrism puts forward a teleological argument for the protection of the environment. It indicates that non-human species have inherent value as well and each organism has a purpose and a reason for being, which should be respected. Biocentrism states that the anthropocentric attitude to the non-human world results from the Christian worldview based on the Bible where it is written that God gives man dominion over all creatures. The author analyses the main issues of the Catholic concept of the relationship between human beings and other creatures. He indicates that ecotheology respects the inherent value of non-human creatures because, as the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the modern world Gaudium et spes says: “all things are endowed with their own stability, truth, goodness, proper laws and order”, but maintains that the purpose of the world is connected with its relationship to God. The author considers also what is the human subjectivity in behaving towards the environment and what is the dependence between the autonomy of the world and the subjectivity of man in ecotheology. In the end, the author comes to the conclusion that according to ecotheology the ecological problem results from the broken relationship between the human and God and in consequence it the broken relationship between the world and God.


Glimpse ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-38
Author(s):  
Junichiro Inutsuka ◽  

Keeping aside discussions about theories of depiction of photography and the epistemic value of photography from the viewer’s perspective, I reconsider this techne from the photographers’ entire act of photographing. It presents the quest of the possibility to regain the world by the art of photography, especially in a situation where human consciousness of the living environment is overwhelmed by the photographic effects. The nature of the current technological environment—while disguising the manifestation of pure humanity, in the sense that it is the externalization of technology due to human nature—is completely destructive. Today, trying to save or regenerate philosophy should be nothing more than seeking a way for human beings to refuse being incorporated as an automaton in an endless track of automated reproduction processes. As one of those who wish to find a way to reconstruct the relationship between humans and nature or to reveal that human existence can only be established in such correlation, I seek a way of breathing human freedom, momentarily disputing this automated living and social environment. In other words, to regain or to play the art of photography, to unsettle what usually works as concrete support for the cognitive transformation making us unconsciously think of the technological environment as something inevitable and natural. It would be presenting a temporary retreat and a more positive way forward.


Author(s):  
D. Yu. Fedotov

The article examines the origin of corruption as a social and economic phenomenon that is persistent in society. The purpose of the study is to identify the causes of corruption and the economic factors that influence it. It is revealed that corruption existed in all epochs of human society and in all countries of the world, regardless of their level of economic development and political structure. It is concluded that corruption, as a common phenomenon, comes from the usual human desire to obtain privileges in society, but with the use of illegal methods. It is revealed that in addition to cases of corruption, the desire to obtain a privileged position is also observed in cases where economic entities use an anti-competitive model of conduct in relations with other market participants. This led to a conclusion about the mutually overwhelming influence of competition and corruption on each other — the more competition is developed in a country, the lower the level of corruption in it. In this paper, using econometric methods, a correlation analysis of the relationship between competition and corruption in 140 countries of the world is carried out. The results obtained suggest that increasing the level of competition in the economy will reduce the scale of corruption in the country.


2019 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gert Biesta ◽  
Patricia Hannam

AbstractIn this paper we explore the relationship between religious education and the public sphere, suggesting that religious education, if it takes its educational remit seriously, has to be orientated towards the public sphere where human beings exist together in and with the world. Rather than seeing religion as propositional belief, we argue for an existential approach that focuses on the question as to what it means to exist religiously. We offer educational and theological arguments for our position and, along both lines, seek to (re)connect religion and religious education to the idea of democracy.


2008 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Harvey

AbstractThe practices, habits and convictions that once allowed the inhabitants of Christendom to determine what they could reasonably do and say together to foster a just and equitable common life have slowly been displaced over the past few centuries by new configurations which have sought to maintain an inherited faith in an underlying purpose to human life while disassociating themselves from the God who had been the beginning and end of that faith. In the end, however, these new configurations are incapable of sustained deliberations about the basic conditions of our humanity. Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theology provides important clues into what it takes to make and keep human life human in such a world. The first part of this essay examines Bonhoeffer's conception of the last things, the things before the last, and what binds them together. He argues that the things before the last do not possess a separate, autonomous existence, and that the positing of such a breach has had disastrous effects on human beings and the world they inhabit. The second part looks at Bonhoeffer's account of the divine mandates as the conceptual basis for coping with a world that has taken leave of God. Though this account of the mandates has much to commend it, it is hindered by problematic habits of interpretation that leave it vacillating between incommensurable positions. Bonhoeffer's incomplete insights are thus subsumed within Augustine's understanding of the two orders of human society set forth in City of God.


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