In this follow-up episode of Legends of the Philosophy of Science, Arup K. Chatterjee returns in conversation with Professor Naresh Singh to explore a question that sits at the crossroads of modern life: Can spirituality meaningfully inform public policy? Moving “slightly counterintuitive,” as Arup K. Chatterjee puts it, the discussion shifts from equations and experiments to Vedanta, Swami Vivekananda, and the inner life of the policy maker—without ever leaving the terrain of rigor, method, or contemporary relevance.
Swami Vivekananda and Spirituality Beyond the Cave
The conversation begins with Swami Vivekananda, a figure often revered as a spiritual icon but rarely discussed as a thinker who shaped India’s scientific and institutional imagination. Arup recalls Vivekananda’s role in inspiring the Indian Institute of Science and his insistence on physical work and worldly engagement—famously suggesting that playing football might do more good than merely reading scripture.
Professor Singh uses Vivekananda to overturn a persistent misconception: that spirituality belongs to seclusion—to caves, private shrines, and withdrawal from the world. True inner realization, he notes, can indeed make solitude deeply attractive, but the lives of Vivekananda, Gandhi, and other spiritually grounded figures show that spirituality can also be a force for action in the world. It is this insight that shaped his own work and the naming of his centre: Applied Spirituality and Public Policy.
Secular Spirituality and the “Atheist-Friendly” Question
One of the episode’s most striking moments comes from the classroom. Professor Singh recounts teaching a course on Applied Spirituality and Sustainable Development Policy, where a student asked if he could make the course “more atheist-friendly.” He replied by noting that he had not used the word “God” once during the course—and then turned to a famous anecdote about Vivekananda at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago.
Asked what he would say to an atheist, Vivekananda reportedly answered: An atheist is “someone who does not believe in himself or herself.”
This becomes a key pivot in the episode: spirituality here is not framed as belief in a deity, but as deep trust in one’s own true nature—a recognition of the divine or luminous dimension within, distinct from ego. This reframing allows spirituality to remain secular, experiential, and methodologically serious, while still pointing beyond purely materialist views of the human being.
Icons, Appropriation, and Integral Humanism
Arup raises the problem of iconization—how figures like Vivekananda or the Buddha are easily appropriated, politicised, or frozen into slogans. Drawing on Alan Watts’ interpretation of “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him,” the discussion turns to how true “Buddha-nature,” or Self-realization, cannot be commodified or flattened into mere identity-markers.
This leads naturally to Deen Dayal Upadhyaya’s Integral Humanism, a body of thought with which Professor Singh has worked closely. He describes it as an attempt to link village life and livelihoods with a larger national vision—a form of thinking that is neither narrowly technocratic nor purely ideological. Building on this, Singh and his colleagues have developed an “integral approach to public policy” that explicitly weaves together:
- the inner psychospiritual dimension of the human person,
- the behaviour and choices of individuals and communities, and
- the wider systems of economics, governance, and ecology.
Echoing Gandhi’s “be the change you want to see in the world,” Professor Singh argues that policy makers must recognize themselves as part of the system they seek to transform, not detached engineers standing outside it.
From Inner Realization to Policy Experiments
The episode gains further traction as it turns to concrete research projects that embody this applied spirituality:
- At the Deen Dayal Research Institute in Chitrakoot, teams are exploring whether people who regularly practice some form of yoga or inner work (hatha yoga, meditation, etc.) show measurable differences in livelihood outcomes, sustainability practices, or happiness. This feeds into a proposed SHINE index (Sustainability and Happiness Index for the New Era), which attempts to link inner life with outer well-being.
- In Maharashtra, a doctoral project is working with a large water-access programme (Mission 500) to see whether deeper self-awareness and inner connection influence how communities perceive and use water resources, and whether such insights might reshape water policy.
- A proposed (but unfunded) study on Kashmiri Sufism aims to examine how the spiritual dimensions of Islam have historically influenced politics and public policy in the region.
In each case, the commitment is clear: if inner realization has no impact, the research must be prepared to say so. The integrity of the process is as important as the possibility of affirmative results.
From Human Doing to Human Being
Towards the close, Professor Singh offers a simple but profound reframing: we call ourselves human beings, not human doings. Modern political economy and public policy have largely been structured around doing and having—production, growth, distribution, consumption. But what happens if we centre being instead?
Drawing on contemporary thinkers like Rabbi Michael Lerner, he asks what public policy might look like if its core objectives were harmony, unity, and love, rather than purely material expansion. This is not a call to abandon economics, but to re-root economic thinking in a deeper understanding of human nature.
A Dialogue that Transcends Categories
Arup closes the episode by noting that the conversation seems to transcend both science and philosophy, moving into a space where inner experience, rigorous inquiry, and public responsibility meet. This instalment of Legends of the Philosophy of Science invites viewers to reconsider long-held divisions—between spirituality and policy, science and wisdom, individual realization and collective action.
It is an episode for anyone curious about what it might mean, in practice, to bring consciousness, compassion, and inner clarity into the heart of public life.
Arup K. Chatterjee 