How can humanity reach the goal together?

The first four questions can be read as one person’s journey: a purpose, whether it is real, what stands in the way, and the practices that clear it. But the third question found half the obstacles outside any single mind: dogma, narrow sentiments and exploitation. No amount of private meditation feeds a hungry neighbor or repeals a law that keeps a whole group poor. A person can work loose their own fetters and still live in a society that ties new ones on every child born into it.

So Ananda Marga’s answer has two halves, joined in the line already met in the first question: Átmamokśárthaḿ jagaddhitáya ca, “for one’s own liberation, and for the welfare of the world.” Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti puts the point bluntly: someone who works only for their own liberation and does nothing for others is selfish, however spiritual the work looks. The reasoning also runs the other way. Ánanda Sútram says that collective welfare lies in individuals and individual welfare lies in the collectivity. A society cannot be healthy while its members are starved in body, mind or spirit, and a person cannot grow freely in a society that starves them.

What, then, is a society? The Sanskrit word is samája, and Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti reads it from its root: samánam ejati iti samájah, a group of people who have decided to move together toward a common goal. On that definition, a crowd that lets its weakest fall behind is not yet a society at all. The rest of this page is about what it takes to build one: a wider love, a fairer economy, honest leadership, and service that starts now.

Start with the mind, because every social order is an idea in people’s minds before it becomes a law. Most people’s love already widens in steps: from oneself to a family, to a town or a country, to a people or a faith, sometimes to all humanity. Each step is real, and each one, if it stops there, becomes a wall. The third question named two of those walls, geo-sentiment and socio-sentiment. Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti adds that humanism can be a wall as well: people weep for suffering humanity and then sit down to a dinner of fish, as if the fish felt nothing.

Neohumanism is Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti’s name for humanism newly explained: the same care, carried past every line, to animals and plants and even to what we call inanimate matter. Why should love go that far? Because of what the second question found. If everything is an expression of one Consciousness, then a line of care drawn at the edge of a nation, a species or a skin is arbitrary. It follows habit, not reality. Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti quotes a verse from the Viśńupuráńa that draws the conclusion: since this universe is the expression of the All-Pervading, a wise person looks on everything as his or her own.

Two forces do the widening. One is reason. Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti’s remedy for narrow sentiment is study and a rationalistic mentality: judging every claim about race, nation or scripture in the light of the facts, so that nobody can be herded by slogans. The other is devotion: a love for the Supreme that, once it is real, cannot stop short of what the Supreme has become. Reason alone can explain why the walls are false; love is what makes anyone want to walk through them.

Neohumanism is a way of seeing, and Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti insisted that it become a way of living: “The translation of Neo-humanist ideas into practical life is the duty of PROUT.” PROUT, the Progressive Utilization Theory, was set out by Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti in 1959. Its name gives its method: use every resource of the world, physical, mental and spiritual, as fully as possible, distribute it rationally, and keep changing the method as times change.

Its first demand is simple. The minimum requirements of life, which are food, clothing, housing, education and medical care, must be guaranteed to everyone. The reason goes beyond kindness. A person who spends all their strength on survival has nothing left for anything subtler; once survival is secure, that energy is free for the mind and the spirit. The guarantee is not a handout, though. Ánanda Sútram warns that if society simply feeds and houses people, initiative withers. So the guarantee comes as work and purchasing capacity: the means to buy what one needs, earned by labor according to one’s capacity. And the minimum rises with the age. A bicycle may be the minimum in one age and an aeroplane in another, and Ánanda Sútram treats a rising minimum as the sign that a society is alive.

This is not a flat equality. People differ, and Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti holds that diversity, not identity, is the law of nature. After the minimum is met, the surplus goes to those whose skills serve society more: a doctor may need a car while others still ride bicycles. But the gap between those special amenities and the common minimum has to be narrowed again and again, so that privilege does not quietly turn back into exploitation.

Then the limit. The first of PROUT’s five fundamental principles reads: “No individual should be allowed to accumulate any physical wealth without the clear permission or approval of the collective body.” The reason is arithmetic. Mental and spiritual wealth has no limit, and my understanding takes nothing from yours. Physical wealth is limited, so unrestricted acquisition by a few produces a majority of have-nots. Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti is just as clear that individual liberty must not be cut so far that people cannot grow. So the ceiling is not fixed by a party or a dogma. Society itself sets it, and moves it as conditions change.

Who decides? Political democracy gave people the vote, Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti observed, but left economic power with a few: with capitalists in liberal democracies and with party officials in socialist ones. A vote every few years does not feed a family whose livelihood is decided far away. PROUT’s answer is economic democracy. Political power stays centralized and in the hands of people of proven morality, while economic power is decentralized and placed with local people.

Economic democracy, as Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti sets it out, has four requirements: the minimum requirements guaranteed to all; increasing purchasing capacity for everyone; economic decisions made by the local people; and no outsiders draining the local economy. “Local” here has nothing to do with race, caste, language or birthplace. Local people, in Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti’s definition, are those who have merged their own economic interest with that of the region they live in. The point is not to keep anyone out but to stop a region’s wealth flowing away to absentee owners.

Planning starts at the lowest level that can carry it, because those who live in a place know its needs: “Successful planning can never be done by sitting in an air conditioned office thousands of miles away from the place where planning is to be undertaken.” Production is for consumption, not for profit. And the economy has three tiers, with cooperatives as the main one. Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti notes that cooperatives have often failed, under centralized economies and in the hands of dishonest managers. That is why the next question is who will keep the whole system honest.

A system is only as good as the people who run it, and Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti’s reading of history shows why. In every age one kind of mentality dominates society, and the ages turn in a fixed order. Ánanda Sútram calls this turning the samája cakra, the social cycle. Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti uses four old Indian class names for it, but as names for kinds of mind, not for castes. Caste by birth Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti calls an irrational idea, brought in by intellectuals to keep power for themselves.

Each dominant class first governs well and then, secure in power, begins to exploit. When the capitalists have reduced nearly everyone to wage earners, revolution follows, and leaders of the warrior type start the cycle again. The wheel cannot be stopped, since a society that stops moving dies. What can be changed is whether each age has to end in exploitation.

That is the work of sadvipras. In Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti’s own words, a sadvipra is “a person who is a moralist and a spiritualist and who fights against immorality.” Ánanda Sútram places them at the nucleus of the cycle, not on its rim: they belong to no class, follow the moral code of yama and niyama described in the fourth question, and act the moment the ruling class starts to exploit. Their means fit the kind of power they face. Where exploiters rule by arms, Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti allows force; where they rule by ideas, the struggle is a revolution in ideas; where money rules through elections, sadvipras must contest and win elections.

Why must they be spiritual? Because only someone who wants nothing from power can be trusted to watch over it. Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti’s test is concrete: a sadvipra will not move against honest people even when he or she dislikes them, and will act against dishonest people even when he or she likes them. Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti adds that no sadvipra society has yet been formed anywhere. It is an invitation, not a description.

A just society will not be built in one generation, and hunger does not wait for a theory to be implemented. Service, sevá, is how the collective path begins today, with whatever one has. The first question described sevá as service that asks nothing in return. Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti names four kinds of it, after the same four mentalities.

All four, Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti says, are of equal standing, though their effects last for different lengths of time. Food helps a hungry person today, and for that person at that moment nothing matters more. Teaching lasts longer, because it changes how a person moves from then on, so Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti calls intellectual service the best. A full life of service includes all four, and in the spirit of Neohumanism it reaches animals and plants as well as people.

Service also shapes the one who gives it. Offered to the Supreme in another form, it leaves no room for vanity, and it trains exactly what a sadvipra needs: courage, honesty and the habit of looking first at those who have fallen behind. Without service, PROUT remains a blueprint and Neohumanism remains a feeling.

Put the pieces together. Neohumanism widens the heart until nothing is left outside it. PROUT makes the widening concrete: needs met, accumulation limited, economic power with the people. Sadvipras keep it honest, and service begins it now. Behind all of it stands one idea that Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti called cosmic brotherhood. All beings come from one source, so humanity is one family. Spiritual philosophy, Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti wrote in 1959, “stands for universal fraternity.” One family does not mean one uniform: differences of dress, custom and language are to be welcomed and encouraged. Only divisions made against people are rejected.

Here the circle closes. The first question found that every mind wants a happiness without end, and that only the Infinite can give it. The second found that all of us come from that Infinite and are on the way back to it. The way back turns out not to be a private road. Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti calls the principle that joins the two sama-samája tattva, the principle of social equality: advancing toward the Supreme by building a society free of inequality, with the whole human race moving in unison.

So the purpose of a human life and the purpose of a society are the same: to move together toward the Supreme, carrying those who cannot walk, until the many become One. That is where the circle began, and anyone can begin there again.