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It is argued that when people recognise poetry as, say, beautiful, the poet cannot identify with their recognition unless she already knows that it is beautiful, and that it is her real self that lets her know this. Both mind and its products exist at a higher (deeper, wider) and more enduring level than the body. Creative mentation taps into the supramental consciousness of the ground state, which is immortal by any conception, and its products have the potential to last as long as there is human being. Recognition, by contrast, is always at the level of the physically embodied community, and those who equate the postbody longevity of mental products with recognition tacitly presuppose that mind is reducible to body. Moreover, it is argued that it must be the case that we choose our own destiny and circumstances: we little bits of the infinite place ourselves in the finite, we choose the time and circumstances of our own birth. Knowing this, we take responsibility for everything and do not shift responsibility onto others. We achieve success in life, or fulfilment, by realising our destiny or dharma; success does not depend on achieving wealth, celebrity or power. Singh gives a moving account of her experience of failure, and it is agreed that failure is most fundamentally leading life falsely or inauthentically. Principles for success in life are enunciated: accepting responsibility for everything; clarity or coherence; and honesty. To reach the most sublime heights is just to do the best you can, which means being true to your self.

The recovery of truth is vital for emancipation, as it is also for our survival as a species in these times of endgame. Because it is oppressive and exploitative, capitalist modernity has produced layers of mystification, necessarily and systematically, precisely because people are essentially creative, loving and free. How can people—the only moving forces in history—come to see through this mystification? Humans spontaneously struggle to be free and engage in learning processes; and explanatory critiques can assist. But ultimately people themselves have to come to see, and all you can do is dialogue with them and explain that everything is sustained by their ground-state properties. No one can make them see this truth, but at the level of their real selves, they already know it, often without understanding that they do. Once they understand this, they are on a dialectic of self-realisation that sooner or later will bring their embodied personalities into synch with their ground states, effecting ‘an internal revolution of self’. People can transform society only if they first transform themselves. This is the lesson of the demise of actually existing socialism: the educators did not educate themselves, and the new bureaucratic master-class stifled creativity, love and freedom. By eliminating the sources of heteronomy within themselves, people will be cutting off the supply lines of heteronomous social structures, because social structures loop through people. Gradually they will become more and more free until there is universal self-realisation. This is the only way we can be free. If the system collapses before the planet does, then we are free.

This chapter gives the reader an indication of what was uppermost in Bhaskar’s mind at the time of crystallisation of the philosophy of metaReality. At that stage, he was writing a book with the title Re-enchanting Reality. This was not published as such but served as a working draft for The Philosophy of MetaReality, which appeared at the end of 2002. Bhaskar’s concern here is to whet the reader’s appetite for the new philosophy. Its key theme is that, contrary to most spiritual traditions, nondual or spiritual states of being and agency are not just peak experiences but ubiquitous features of everyday life, the necessary basis for anything to happen, and the very mechanism that sustains structures of heteronomy and alienation. The emphasis shifts from transcending dualism and split in theory, as in the earlier philosophy, to doing so in practice—bringing our embodied personalities (relative reality) into line with our ground states (absolute reality), by shedding heteronomous structures (demi-real relative reality). The priority is to transform ourselves (attain self-realisation or enlightenment) by shaking off the heteronomous elements within ourselves and expanding the nondual zone of our being. This is prior because it is the only way to achieve transformative social change, and we cannot be fully realised until everyone is free. There is no algorithm for this; the path that each person follows must be decided by them. The task of the spiritual teacher is to act as a stimulus to awaken the autonomous real self to its own activity, which is buried inside us within layers of heteronomy. We are all on the path of self-realisation. When we are self-realised, history proper will begin. We will shed the illusion of disenchantment, understanding that reality is always already meaningful and valuable, or enchanted, with depths that we have hardly begun to explore. And we will really enjoy the Earth.

It is argued that the characteristic labour of women in the domestic sphere both instantiates all the main moments in the development of critical realism and prefigures the good society. Women necessarily and spontaneously tend to (1) recognise the intransitivity of nature (the truth of the body); (2) engage in ‘right-brain’ thinking (intuitive, holistic, unconditional, in tune with the qualities of the ground state) that runs counter to the ‘masculine’ ‘right-brain’ instrumental, conditional thinking that shores up male domination and skews science in that direction; (3) consciously understand their work as reproductive and transformative; (4) continually make valid transitions from facts to values, and practice an ethics of love and care rather than subjective preferences; (5) find ways of transcending dichotomies and dualisms (e.g. reasons and causes); (6) be aware of absence, lack and deficiencies in human practices; and (7) be more in their ground state than men. This last point suggests that women do not need to wait upon emancipatory theory to engage in the process of self- and social transformation. The postmodernist emphasis on difference and uniqueness is considered both as reinforcing alienation and split and as providing grounds for women to be more assertive.

This conversation draws all the strands of Bhaskar’s critique of the philosophical discourse of modernity together into an overall account for the first time. Versions of this were shortly published in the metaReality books, but this chapter uniquely gives an account of Indian modernism as a telescoping of classical modernism, high modernism and modernisation theory into a unitary theory, and a critique of modernism and postmodernism as dialectical antagonists who share a common false understanding of both individuality and universality as analytical and abstract. A constructive critical assessment of both poststructuralism (Foucault and Derrida) and postmodernism is developed, including a brief critique of Nietzsche and a more detailed and scathing critique of Rorty, in the course of which Bhaskar elaborates his own concepts of concrete and dialectical universality and universalisability. Both bodies of theory are praised for calling attention to the missing moments in the abstract universality of modernism and globalisation (difference, geo-historical trajectory and individual uniqueness), but severely criticised for turning their back on human unity at a time when the species is globally more interconnected than ever.

Here, it is recounted how, having got a first and started a DPhil on the economics of developing countries at Oxford, Bhaskar discovered that the dominant approach in economics prohibited comparison between a body of theory and the world, and how, having traced this prohibition to the taboo placed on ontology by Hume and Kant, he switched to philosophy and set about revindicating ontology and establishing the outlines of a new non-Humeanontology, viz. transcendental realism. It is shown that transcendental realism, building on developments in the philosophy of science in the fifties and sixties, provides a radically new philosophical understanding both of the natural world and of natural science, and how this made it possible to think the possibility of a nonpositivist critical naturalism in which social and natural sciences are sciences in the same sense, but not in the same way because they must respect differences in their objects.

Four recent turns (realist, processual, holistic and reflexive) in social thought are discussed and related to the four dimensional schema of dialectical realism the author has recently outlined. It is shown how ontology matters, and indeed is not only necessary but inevitable, The nature of the reality of ideas (of different types) is demonstrated and the most prevalent mistakes in the metatheory of ideas and ideation analysed. The significance of categorical realism and the character of those specific types if ideas known as ‘ideologies’ are then discussed. Finally some good and bad dialectical connections of ideas and related phenomena are sketched.

In a talk Roy Bhaskar gave to a group of students in India in 2002, we can discern some elements of his theory of education . This chapter is a transcription of it and it is reproduced in this chapter from Chap. 11, Bhaskar (2002) From Science to Emancipation: Alienation and the Actuality of Enlightenment , New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, London, Sage. In Roy Bhaskar’s actual words: ‘I think that if you are truly spiritual, if you really have no ego, if you really love other people, then you must be engaged in activities of practical transformation in the world. So real spirituality for me is what I call practical mysticism. That is very down to earth, and that is entirely engaged in putting yourself in the service of the cause of human emancipation, in fact universal self-realisation. But it is also interestingly enough the approach which is implicit in western and secular theories of emancipation. That is very similar to the standpoint of Marx—and Marx was an atheist—when he said that in a communist society the free development of each would be the condition of the free development of all. In other words, your well being , your flourishing was the condition for my own. It was as important to me as mine. In other words, it is no good my being free, it is no good my being the most fantastically improved and perfect person, if you are still miserable and unhappy.’

Two years before Roy Bhaskar’s death, we met to prepare a proposal to a funding agency to conduct an empirical piece of research and we recorded the conversation. This conversation touched on a number of important issues relating to critical realism and its applications in real life. In particular, we focused on the possibility of doing empirical work in the field. The text below is an account of the conceptual framework that we eventually adopted, and it is focused on issues central to the development of a theory of education : interdisciplinarity , laminated systems , anti-reductionism, and the possibility of providing a bridge to allow us to make a connection between knowing and being . The existing literature on interdisciplinary research is overwhelmingly epistemologically slanted. Typically absent from it is any discussion about what there is in and about the world that makes interdisciplinarity possible and necessary. On the basis of a much fuller and more comprehensive account of interdisciplinarity than has hitherto been available, this chapter is able to disambiguate and identify barriers or inhibitors on interdisciplinarity which stem from ontological, as well as epistemological, features of the context of interdisciplinary research teams.

(2002). The Philosophy of Meta-Reality, Part I: Identity, Spirituality, System. Alethia: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 21-34.

1. Introductory Perspectives. By: (Roy Bhaskar),Karl G. Hoyer and Petter Naess, 2. Critical realism in resonance with Nordic ecophilosophy: ecophilosophical themes in the development of critical realism By: Roy Bhaskar, 3. Nature, Technology and Environmental Crisis By: Arne Johan Vetlesen, 4. Towards an Ecophilosophy. The Nordic Contributors, By: Karl G. Hoyer, 5. A Biosophic Perspective. Humans as a Tragic Species, By: Peter Wessel Zapffe, 6. The Deep Ecological Movement: Some Philosophical Aspects By: Arne Naess, 7. Gaia versus Servoglobe By: Sigmund Kvaloy Setereng, 8. The Myths of Progress, By: Georg Henrik von Wright, 9. The Extension of Time and the Order of Things By: Torsten Hagerstrand, 10. Human Rights and Ecology as Premises for Practical Standpoints By: Jon Wetlesen, 11. From Ecophilosophy to Degrowth,By: Karl G. Hoyer and Petter Naess, 12. Ecophilosophy, Precaution, and Theory of Science, By: Karl G. Hoyer, 13. Between Critical Realism and Nordic Ecophilosophy, By: Trond Jakobsen, 14. Selected titles, published in English, By: Karl G. Hoyer and Petter Naess.

Introduction- Chapter 1 - Contexts of Interdisciplinarity Chapter 2 - Coda to 'Contexts of Interdisciplinarity': The Case of Climate Change-Critical Realist Interdisciplinarity: A Research Agenda to Support Action on Global Warming Chapter 3 - Seven Theses on CO 2 -reductionism and Its Interdisciplinary Counteraction Chapter 4 - The Dangerous Climate of Disciplinary Tunnel Vision Chapter 5 - Consumption-A Missing Dimention in Climate Policy Chapter 6 - Global Warming and Cultural/Media Articulations of Emerging and Contending Social Imaginaries: A Critical Realist Perspective Chapter 7 - Climate change: Brokering Interdisciplinarity across the Physical and Social Sciences Chapter 8 -- The Need for a Transdisciplinary Understanding of Development in a Hot and Crowded World Chapter 9 - Knowledge, Democracy and Action in Response to Climate Change Chapter 10 - Technological Idealism -The Case of the Thorium Fuel Cycle: A Critical Analysis Chapter 11- Food Crisis and Global Warming: Critical Realism and the Need to Re-institutionalize Science Chapter 12- Towards a Dialectics of Knowledge and Care in the Global System Chapter 13-Epilogue - A Conference Tourist and His Confessions: On the Travelling Circus of Climate Change