CETR

Ela Bhatt
Questions mold our lives

25-03-2011

Kennedy School of Government Commencement Speech given by Ela Bhatt .

7 June 2006

Source: www.wiego.org.
More about Ela Bhatt: http://www.theelders.org/elders

Congratulations!  Thank you for inviting me today. Looking at this sea of bright, intelligent eyes is not only thrilling, it is inspiring, it is reassuring, it is humbling. I wish each and every one of you the very best in life.
Today, as you get ready to leave Harvard, and enter the world of work, you are well-prepared. You have read a lot, you have learnt a lot, and I am sure you are brimming with ideas and theories that you are impatient to put into practice.  If that is true, rest assured, your university has done its duty.

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3Teresa Guardans

24-02-2011

CETR: a centre of study devoted to human quality  

Societies marked by innovation and change face an urgent challenge: how to cultivate human quality within the new cultural dynamic. As it would be unwise to begin from scratch, we must attempt to draw on the heritage of wisdom amassed over the course of human history.

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3Jaume Agustí i Cullell From scientific experiment to whole experience through freedom

28-01-2009

Jaume Agustí Cullell [1], CSIC investigator. Paper presented in the University of Ca’ Foscari of Venezia in the "International symposium in honoring to Raimon Panikkar"

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

From T.S. Eliot’s Choruses from The Rock (1934)

1.The Freedom of Reality

A meditation on freedom

This paper is a meditation on the myth of freedom. It embraces freedom as a myth, i.e. as it is present in our consciousness before and beyond any notion or conceptualisation of it, and defying any attempt to its definition. Our meditation is on the creative power of this symbolic word, extending its scope beyond the confines of an exclusively human trait, to encompass all reality.

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3Marià Corbí With faith and no beliefs

16-12-2006

The proposal of the religious traditions, to a society articulated upon initiative, creativity, innovation, and continuous change in all levels of life, cannot account for “linking”. It will account for trust and acceptance of an offer supported by the acknowledgement of quality of the Masters and the great books; an offer that causes free adhesion, not to formulas, but to a quality and a spirit that generate certainty without subduing to fixed forms of thinking, feeling, acting, and living.

On a globalized society of innovation and continuous change – in science, technologies, ways of working, and organizations, in systems of collective cohesion, and purposes – the spiritual path, which has been called “religion”, can not pass for beliefs.

Under these cultural circumstances, what so far has been called “religion” - and which we will call “inner path” or “path of silence” due to the lack of a better term - cannot offer “beliefs” to new societies. Whatever it offers, if it is wrapped on beliefs, it will not be accepted.

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3Marià Corbí A revival of Religions?

27-09-2006

Published in La Vanguardia, April 20th, 2006
Intervention by Marià Corbí in the discussion: A revival of religions?
Translation by Susana Mate

It is being said that religions have regained their appeal. Is it true that they are again fascinating people? In our societies we find simultaneously a clear, global and explicit rejection of religion by a wide majority of the population, and a growing interest in it. If we reflect on this contradictory attitude, we can observe two very different social phenomena, both under the term “religion”. It doesn´t seem to be a genuine revival of old beliefs and religious structures, though. It is more a completely new phenomenon: spirituality is becoming autonomic within religion.

The so-called revival of religion is a very ambiguous phenomenon.
Islam is again appealing to the masses at the clamor of “Islam is the solution”. What are Arab countries, Afghans and Pakistanis looking for when they turn to Islam as the solution to their problems? It is not so much spirituality as it is a firm cornerstone for their identity as a culture and as people, against a North that is oppressive economically, military and culturally. It is not at all clear that the various Islamic phenomena are exclusively religious in nature.

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3Marià Corbí Secular mysticism

27-09-2006

Centre Unesco de Catalunya. On Mystics: A congress. Barcelona, June 2001
(Each participant was asked to introduce himself in connection to the subject, his personal stand point on spirituality)

My intellectual research and my inner path have blended and become one and the same.
I had a catholic education.
I studied music and piano with dedication at the Liceo School of Music. Perhaps this played a part in the education of my sensitivity.
I soon developed an interest in the spiritual path. However, and at the same time, I also began to feel uncomfortable about the way in which sacred stories, myths and rituals were experienced and also, in general, with the way that the spiritual life was approached. I suffered from this profound discomfort for years, but was incapable of theorising it or of facing up to those that knew more than I. Yet I was convinced that my experience was not a personal problem and that many others found themselves in the same position as I did.

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3Marià Corbí The Problem Of Human Quality In New Societies

27-09-2006

In new societies, where economic success is linked to scientific and technical innovation capacity, as much for goods as for services, and therefore to the ability to change organizing and axiological patterns, the fixed ways of thinking, judging, feeling, organizing or living, which are linked to either religious or secular (ideological) beliefs are no longer feasible.

The fact is that

• traditional religions find themselves in a serious cultural and social discredit;
• classical ideologies, those belonging to the first industrial revolution -socialism and liberalism-, are also coming to a deep crisis:

(1) socialist political parties, trade unions and social movements, are looking for new ideas to structure them
(2) what liberal parties and social organizations have saved from general fire are not theories or principles but some procedures that have proved their effectiveness in economic and social management : market, democracy and private enterprise.

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