Neohumanism is a world-view characterized by love for the Supreme. In the early stages of developing one’s spiritual devotion, the adoption of Neohumanistic principles – that is, abjuring all prejudices against other races, groups, religions, and less-evolved creatures – will safeguard and enhance the development of that devotion.

And once, in turn, a person comes to feel devotion for the Supreme, that devotion or love will ultimately overflow onto all objects created by the Supreme. One will come spontaneously to love all beings and objects as one loves the Supreme, free from any discrimination.

So devotion expands one’s world-view, and the more expansive the world-view, the more one finds the ecstasy and peace of devotion.

Yet in the course of fighting for a Neohumanistic society, one will have to use all one’s rational faculties and all the resources of information at one’s command. One will have to take a courageous and also a very hard-headed approach in identifying and combatting forces of selfishness and vested interest.

In The Liberation of Intellect: Neohumanism, Shrii Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar has laid the foundations of this sublime yet uncompromising philosophy. The eleven chapters of this book were delivered as discourses, mostly as Sunday discourses, between December 31st 1981 and March 29th 1982.

The author was clearly conscious of the latent global impact of this series of discourses, and perhaps more than in any other of his Bengali discourses, was careful to provide equivalents for key terms and phrases in the global language, English. While preparing this edition, the editors made it a point to identify those English terms, some of which had been overlooked in previous editions due to time pressures, and incorporate them into the text.

Footnotes by the translators have all been signed “–Trans.” Unsigned footnotes are those of the author.

Square brackets [   ] in the text are used to indicate translations by the editors or other editorial insertions. Round brackets (   ) indicate a word or words originally given by the author.

The author uses a certain shorthand for explaining etymologies of words. Under this system, a minus sign (–) follows a prefix, and a plus sign (+) precedes a suffix. Thus ava – tr + ghaiṋ = avatára can be read, “the root tr prefixed by ava and suffixed by ghaiṋ becomes avatára.”