This note makes two practical policy suggestions in the field of education. It proposes education to minimize disorders, both individual and collective, that keep humanity fragmented.
Individual disorders generally are in the areas of physical health, mental health, attention, insight, spiritual intelligence and behaviour. Collective disorders are in the areas of sociology particularly in “us” vs. “them” divisiveness.
Freud aptly used a metaphor of an iceberg for the structure of the mind: 10% above the surface of the water representing the conscious mind while 90% below the surface representing the subconscious and unconscious.
We all start our existence as a single cell organism with the seed of our unconscious mind determined by our genetic code. This seed grows as cells divide and the fetus grows. The unconscious mind is more or less developed with the completion of fetal growth. It is our unconscious mind that runs the survival of our body prenatally as an individual being and prepares it for independent existence outside the body of the mother.
At birth, our sensory organs start booting up and we begin to perceive and act. The henceforth unconscious now starts being conscious; subconscious mind is just an intermediate stage.
In our daily lives, we experience wakefulness when we are aware of our conscious mind, a state of dream sleep when the subconscious is active and a state of deep sleep when the only active part of the mind is the unconscious. It is the unconscious, that keeps us alive running the autonomous body functions that must work 24/7.
Everyday life of sense perception surreptitiously cultivate feelings of multiplicity, limitedness, likes, dislikes and fears in the unconscious mind. These unconscious feelings manifest as natural emotions in the subconscious ready to jump into conscious implementation.
The emotions resulting from the unconscious feelings respectively are: (a) “I” vs. “you” and “us” vs. “them”, (b) helplessness while facing life, (c) habits, addictions and appetites, (d) aversions and hate, and (e) frights and phobias.
Such emotions keep us in individual and collective fight or flight. Our individual fight or flight underlies myriad physical and mental disorders, and our collective fight or flight underlies most social disorders.
To resolve our individual and collective disorders, our education must recognize two realities: (1) structure of the mind and (2) strength of the emotions. Current educational systems worldwide recognize the conscious mind paying little attention to the unconscious and the subconscious. We must redress this anomaly.
While we educate the conscious mind to build understanding countering our natural emotions, our education must also cultivate them deep into our unconscious mind. Mere intellectual understanding resulting from educating the conscious is not strong enough to face the strength of emotions rooted in the mighty unconscious ready to subconsciously spring into action.
We can talk to the conscious mind, but we cannot do so to the unconscious. How then do we attend to the unconscious? We have seen that it is the unconscious that keep us individually and collectively in fight or flight mode that underlies our individual and collective disorders. We can attend to the continuous onslaught of the fight or flight mode by consciously eliciting its opposite effect, deep relaxation.
How can we consciously elicit relaxation? It is a matter of simple observation that fight or flight makes our breath fast but shallow: the severer the experience of fight or flight, the faster and shallower the breath gets. Can we then consciously make our breath slow and deep consciously to relax us? Try it out yourself and see. That in fact is true.
Then, a simple physiological process of conscious deep breathing gives us the needed control on fight or flight and its individual and collective ravages. Human mind has discovered various mind-body strategies that lead to physiological deepening the breath.
Teaching of these strategies must be part of our education system to increase the effectiveness in action of educating the conscious mind. Otherwise, education is only partially fully effective in terms of behaviour consistent with our teaching.
The policy proposals are posted on the web platform called Common Ground, thanks to Ontario Liberals for seeking public input for policy development.
The first idea (posted here) proposes to create a culture of unity in diversity through education. Most of us are essentially unaware of spirit-energy as our common ground: spirit by the wisdom of religion and energy by that of science underlies all existence. Isn’t spirit-energy the God besides which there is no God? Aren’t we one in its light? In the age of widespread education, why are we virtually unaware of it? With this lack of awareness, our increasingly diverse country (I live in Canada) runs a risk of conflicting identities hijacking its peace, openness and multiculturalism.
The second idea (posted here) proposes a culture of deliberate deep breathing to create a culture of individual and collective health disrupted by the feelings of mutual fear and distrust, insatiable appetites, strong repulsions and finally helplessness resulting from our lack of awareness of the unity in diversity. Such feelings keep us in a fight or flight mode resulting in stress. Individually stress kills us with myriad physical, mental, behavioral and intellectual disorders. Collectively it upsets our peace, harmony and coherence with social disorders like bigotry, racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, xenophobia, casteism, classism, untouchability etc. Must we suffer the individual and collective ravages of our fight or flight mode underlying the ever present stress when we can deliberately elicit relaxation response to develop stress resilience with deep breathing? We all breathe 24/7 but we breathe without awareness. Deep breathing is deliberate. It is easily learnt and it is also free.
#goodeducation
#goodhealth
#vohcc
