Role of Spirituality in Sustainable Development

Abstract

Looking beyond the materialistic boundary of the conventional development paradigm, it is very important to keep a balance between the external changes and the changes which needs to be done within. Unfortunately Conventional development’s overemphasis on external changes, and it ignores inner changes, it may be because of the reflection of the prevailing general belief. Now a day the sense of ‘I’, self-centeredness and greed which is actually an inherent human characteristics common to all human beings is seen to be taking the charge of the personality and becoming dominant. As we all are talking about the Globalization, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics all this put together will definitely create a competition where the human beings will have to prove themselves better than the machines, this may lead to various problems such as stress, anxiety, depression, performance anxiety so forth and so on. The fundamental differences between the machines and human beings can be explained as; human beings are having (1) Empathy – the capacity to sense others’ feelings, (2) Loving kindness – the wish of others’ happiness, (3) Compassion – the wish to alleviate others’ suffering and (4) Generosity – the willingness to share one’s wealth with others in order to reduce their suffering. In other words we can say that the human beings are having thought ware. There is a need to understand that merely achieving money or position cannot be the sole measure to decide the success or failure of a person. Currently various initiatives are taken on design thinking, positive thinking and meditation. Even the school children are also having meditation as a part of their daily routine. It is seen that many of the youngsters are becoming victim of depression and fail to maintain their mental balance. The researcher strongly feels that for having a sustainable development people need to be spiritually ignited. In this paper the researcher has tried to relate the sustainable development with spirituality. For material development to be sustainable, spiritual advancement must be seen as an integral part of the human development algorithm.