Introduction to the Inaugural Volume of Consciousness, Spirituality & Transpersonal Psychology

Abstract

It gives us enormous pleasure, as the Directors of Alef Trust, to write an editorial for this inaugural volume of our journal, Consciousness, Spirituality & Transpersonal Psychology. It is eight years since the social enterprise that became Alef Trust was founded, and it is intensely satisfying to witness the many ways in which our founding vision is being realised. We started with a dozen students on one MSc programme; today we have some two hundred students across a range of studies including Open Learning, Certificate, Master’s, and Doctoral programmes – all exploring leading-edge knowledge in the topic areas of concern to the Alef Trust, and engaging in innovative whole-person and transformative pedagogic approaches. The coherence, strength, and dynamism of the Alef Trust community is perhaps our greatest achievement. A team of dedicated individuals – scholars, practitioners, and facilitators – have become an extended family of co-creators, nourishing a heart-felt, forward-looking, and pro- active community of learners and change agents sharing in vision and values. Our shared vision speaks to nurturing individual and collective transformation through whole-person education, practice and research. We value multiple ways of knowing, embracing somatic, spiritual and indigenous pathways and practices alongside intellectual inquiry. We acknowledge the important role that our indigenous and wisdom traditions must play in the betterment of our human ways, recognising and honouring our embeddedness in nature and cosmos. By reconciling a diversity of voices and epistemologies, we hope to foster a thriving ecology of knowledges (de Sousa Santos, 2018) that balances reason and rationality with embodied presence and communitas (Turner, 2012), and that goes some way towards addressing the societal and systemic inequalities and injustices that continue to haunt us to this day.