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Abstract
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This paper develops a spiritual interpretation of emancipation and the implications this has for the critical and social accounting projects. I argue that critical and social accounting scholars will need to undertake more explicit engagements with the spiritual dimensions of social change if we are ever to fully realize the emancipatory potential of the critical and social accounting projects. This paper explores some of the implications that spirituality might have for re-thinking how we've approached social change in our critical and social accounting literatures.
One of the major insights that comes out of this paper is that emancipatory accounting research and practice may be falling short of not only effectively addressing the social injustices and environmental crises that it is concerned about but also of realizing of the full emancipatory potentialities of accounting practice because it has neglected, in various ways, to make spiritual realization the heart of its practice. These limitations come through, for instance, in how extant emancipatory accounting research and practice does not make enlightenment (the realization of the egoless state) the basis of its engagements and interventions, how it tends to privilege external transformation over inner change, the way it gives a lot of visibility to past processes and future goals while neglecting the eternal Now, and how "love" - one of the greatest values humanity has come up with - is almost completely absent in its discourse.
What this might point to, in light of all this, is that there may be a need for new forms of accounting and accountability practice - what I call, awakening accounts and awakened accounting that are based on the realization of enlightenment and on "awakened doing" - that can go beyond these limitations and that can help to realize a "new heaven" and "new earth"; that can help to realize heaven on earth. These new kinds of accounting and accountability practices involve an ontology, epistemology, axiology and practice that are very different to much of those that have historically informed accounting discourse since they are grounded on the premise that not only is all suffering, violence, conflict and dysfunction able to be transcended and that we are meant to live in sacred joy, love, beauty, creativity, truth, and inner peace since that is what we are in essence because we can do so by realizing unity with that dimension of life which is eternal, indestructible, infinite and unconditioned; which is the power, the intelligence, the One Life at the heart of life - and that means also our life; the life that we are. These accounts are, in other words or symbolically speaking, based on realizing atonement (at-one-ment) with God, the realization of Edenic bliss, a world of peace and love, the bringing of heaven to earth.
This paper was written from a belief nourished by my own experience that, though we might forget it, we are in essence light and love and that therefore we ought to be making awakening our overriding aim, the centre of our strategies of social change, and love, its consequence, the very heart of our discourse. It is the greatest value that humanity has come up with, that expresses who we are in essence, who we are at our very best. It is hoped that this paper contributes in some small way then to bringing light and love more explicitly into our academic ethical discourse. |