Wednesday 19 December 2012
Society: HUMAN is a SOCIAL ANIMAL
Society is what we expect & what we make for others
RESPECT YOUR PARENTS--- WHEN U NEED THEM............
Friday 14 December 2012
Five Philosophies : Truth about Life
This is all about Life
Lessons of Life
................जीने की राह.......सत्संग ...................
शब्द जीवन के अर्थ बदल सकते हैं और बदल भी देते हैं, लेकिन महत्वपूर्ण है सुनने वाला किस तरीके से सुन रहा है। क्योकि शब्द को सुनते ही मनुष्य उसे अपने भाव से जोड़ लेता है।
सत्संग का महत्व बी ठीक वैसे ही है, जैसे जिस पात्र में वस्तु डालो तो पात्र के आकार की हो जाती है, बर्तन में पानी डालो तो पानी भी बर्तन के आकार का हो जाता है।
इसीलिए कथाओं को सुनने से लोगों का जीवन नहीं बदलता, क्योंकि बोलने वाला सुपात्र हो तो भी सुनने वाला उसे अपने तरीके से ढालता है/ पर कुछ लोगोने अपनी मानसिकता ऐसे बना रखी है जैसे के एक उम्र ढलने के बाद ही सत्संग में जाना चहिए / जो बिलकुल गलत है / जीवन में कही से बी दो शब्द हमें ख़ुशी दे, और हमें आगे बढ़ने का रास्ता बताए ऐसे लोग का संग सत्संग से कम नहीं होता क्या?????????
इसीलिए कथाओं को सुनने से लोगों का जीवन नहीं बदलता, क्योंकि बोलने वाला सुपात्र हो तो भी सुनने वाला उसे अपने तरीके से ढालता है/ पर कुछ लोगोने अपनी मानसिकता ऐसे बना रखी है जैसे के एक उम्र ढलने के बाद ही सत्संग में जाना चहिए / जो बिलकुल गलत है / जीवन में कही से बी दो शब्द हमें ख़ुशी दे, और हमें आगे बढ़ने का रास्ता बताए ऐसे लोग का संग सत्संग से कम नहीं होता क्या?????????
एक सुन्दर कहानी है :
बहुत समय पहले की बात है। एक गुरु अपने शिष्यों के साथ घूमने जा रहे थे। वे अपने शिष्यों से बहुत स्नेह करते थे और उन्हें सदैव प्रकृति के समीप रहने की शिक्षा दिया करते थे। रास्ते में एक शिष्य पत्थर से ठोकर खाकर गिर पड़ा। गुरु ने उसे सहारा देकर उठाया। शिष्य ने क्रोध से उस पत्थर को ठोकर मारी, जिससे उसके पैर में फिर से दर्द हुआ। गुरुजी ने उसे समझाया, 'तुमने ढेले को मारा, ढेले ने तो तुम्हें नहीं मारा। अगर तुम देखकर चलते तो तुम्हें चोट नहीं लगती। तुम्हें चाहिए था कि ढेला राह से हटाकर किनारे कर देते, ताकि किसी दूसरे को चोट न लगे।' इस पर शिष्य ने गुरुजी से क्षमा मांगी और उस पत्थर को राह से हटा दिया।
आगे बढ़ने पर एक उपवन दिखाई दिया। फूलों की महक से आकषिर्त होकर गुरुजी वहां जाकर बैठ गए। उन्होंने गुलाब के पौधे के नीचे से एक मिट्टी का ढेला उठाया और शिष्य को सूंघने के लिए कहा। 'गुरुजी इससे तो गुलाब के फूल की खुशबू आ रही है।' शिष्य ने चहकते हुए कहा। गुरुजी ने पूछा, 'मिट्टी में तो कोई गंध नहीं होती, फिर फूलों की सुगंध कैसी आई?' शिष्य ने कहा, 'गुरुजी, आपने ही तो एक बार बताया था कि मिट्टी की अपनी कोई गंध नहीं होती। वह जिस वस्तु के संपर्क में आती है, वैसी ही गंध अपना लेती है। जैसे वर्षा की बूंदों का साथ पाकर वह सोंधी गंध फैलाती है, वैसे ही गुलाब की पंखुडि़यों की खुशबू इस क्यारी की मिट्टी ने अपना ली। इसी कारण यह ढेला भी महक उठा है।'
गुरु ने प्रसन्नतापूर्वक कहा, 'हां वत्स, इसलिए मनुष्य को प्रकृति से सीखते रहकर सत्संग का लाभ उठाना चाहिए।'
आगे बढ़ने पर एक उपवन दिखाई दिया। फूलों की महक से आकषिर्त होकर गुरुजी वहां जाकर बैठ गए। उन्होंने गुलाब के पौधे के नीचे से एक मिट्टी का ढेला उठाया और शिष्य को सूंघने के लिए कहा। 'गुरुजी इससे तो गुलाब के फूल की खुशबू आ रही है।' शिष्य ने चहकते हुए कहा। गुरुजी ने पूछा, 'मिट्टी में तो कोई गंध नहीं होती, फिर फूलों की सुगंध कैसी आई?' शिष्य ने कहा, 'गुरुजी, आपने ही तो एक बार बताया था कि मिट्टी की अपनी कोई गंध नहीं होती। वह जिस वस्तु के संपर्क में आती है, वैसी ही गंध अपना लेती है। जैसे वर्षा की बूंदों का साथ पाकर वह सोंधी गंध फैलाती है, वैसे ही गुलाब की पंखुडि़यों की खुशबू इस क्यारी की मिट्टी ने अपना ली। इसी कारण यह ढेला भी महक उठा है।'
गुरु ने प्रसन्नतापूर्वक कहा, 'हां वत्स, इसलिए मनुष्य को प्रकृति से सीखते रहकर सत्संग का लाभ उठाना चाहिए।'
दोस्तों ठीक इसी तरह से हमारी आत्मा बी उसी मिटटी की तरह है जिसके संग में रहेगी , उसीकी महक ले लेती है /उसी तरह अछे लोगो के संग में रहेगे तो हमारे अन्दर अछे संस्कार,विचार और जीवन के प्रति हमारा रवैया सकारात्मक होगा, और हम हमारी आनेवाली पीढ़ी को संदेशा दे सकते है / मन्युष्य कभी बी बुरा नहीं होता ; उसे उसकी परिस्थितिया एसा बनती है / जो हमने हमारे अन्दर दबा कर रखा है उसकी शुद्दता कुछ अछे विचारो से हो जाती है/ फर्क हमारी समज में है सिर्फ/ जिस तरह से हम अखंड दीप को किसी पूजा या अर्चना में हमेशा रखते है ठीक वैसे ही विचारो की शुद्धता हमारे बहार के और अन्दर के जीवन में शांति फेलाते है / ये महज़ बाते नहीं है ,सिर्फ एक बार अपनी जीवन में उन रिश्तो को याद करे और खुद ही सोचे के ऐसे कितने हमारे दोस्त है, जिनकी वजह से हमें जीवन में आगे बढ़ने की शक्ति मिली या हमने उन लोगो के साथ रहकर कुछ सकारात्मक भावना जोड़ी है /
सत्संग बाहरी होता है पर वो अन्दर रूहानियत पे ले जाता है / हमारी सोच को धीरे धीरे बदलता है / और हमें खुद के लिए सोचने पे मजबूर करता है के क्या सही है और क्या गलत है!!!!! अगर इतना बी इन्सान अपने जीवन में पा लेता है तो जीवन की काफी तकलीफे हल हो जाती है / जिस कोलाहल में हम जी रहे है उसमे हमारी आन्तरिक शुद्धि करनी है, जिस तरह से पुत्र पिता का रुण अदा करता है ठीक वैसे ह़ी हमें हमारे अन्दर जा कर खुद के लिये प्रयत्न करने है/ सत्संग में गुरु या अपनों के वचन हमें हमारे अत:करण की शुद्धि का जरिया बनते है/ यह प्रयत्न हमें खुद करना है ,कोई हमारी इसमें सहायता नही कर सकता/
अंत में हम जिस तरह से आये वैसे ही चले जाएगे/ न कुछ लाये साथ में और नहीं किसी गुनिजन का फायदा उठाया !!!!!!
सिर्फ अपनी सोच को बदलो और अपना जीवन खुद महकाओ/ खुद बी उस फूल की तरह मेह्कोगे और दुनिया को भी महकाओगे /
सिर्फ इतना सोचे की हमें हमारे बच्चो को क्या देना है , वोही जो हमारे पास होगा!!!!!!!!!
दो घड़ी का ऐसे इंसानों का संग, जो हमें हमारे मूल तक ले जाए क्या वो सत्संग नहीं है??? जरा विचार जरुर करना!!!!!!!!
‘Modern’ (Mis-)Education: Ethical Concerns
‘Modern’ (Mis-)Education: Ethical Concerns
By Yoginder Sikand
The more I think of ‘modern’ education the more problematic it reveals itself to be. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that it’s definitely one of the major malaises affecting contemporary humanity. Being centred wholly on this-worldly ‘achievements’, knowledge and skills, while being silent on, and implicitly hostile to, life after death and the need to prepare for it, ‘modern’ education fails miserably as far as spiritual development is concerned. But even if one leaves debatable issues about religion and spirituality out of the discussion and focuses solely on ‘secular’ or the this-worldly life, ‘modern’ education is found to be woefully lacking on a major score: in the ethical or moral development of students. And that is something that even folks who aren’t interested in the extra-worldly realm or life after death ought to be worried about.
‘Modern’ school education is geared essentially to imparting a body of knowledge to students. The ultimate purpose of this process is to prepare them for their future careers, through which they will assume certain roles in the modern economy. That is why schools are conventionally judged in terms of their ability to produce graduates who get ‘good’ jobs—by which is meant jobs that come with hefty salaries and fancy perks.
It is thus hardly surprising that schools pay only lip-service to the moral or ethical growth of their students. Helping their students to become good, loving, kind and caring human beings, as opposed to ‘good’ (by which is essentially meant rich) scientists or economists or whatever, is definitely not their major purpose. They might make some cosmetic concessions to ethical concerns by introducing moral science or civics classes, but these are hardly taken seriously by both teachers and students. The latter often think of them as a burden that they have to suffer in silence in order to be promoted to the next grade. Other than this, schools generally have no other arrangement for students’ moral or ethical growth.
In fact, contemporary ‘mainstream’ schooling is geared to inculcating a whole set of negative attitudes and attributes, which so damage their students that only some fortunate few manage to overcome them in later life. One of these is fear. Most teachers maintain and reinforce their authority over students by instilling abject fear in them. Students sometimes cringe before their teachers and generally dare not question them or ‘misbehave’ (and this may be just something as harmless as sharing a whisper with another student during class-hours) for fear of being punished—scolded or even beaten—by their teachers. I lived in mortal dread of my teachers while at school. Some of them took sadistic delight in beating us for even the most petty ‘misdemeanour’, such as for having not polished our shoes or coming to class a minute late.
Then, of course, there is the ever-present fear of ‘failure’. Learning, for most students and in most schools, is far from being a pleasurable activity. It is the fear of failing that drives most students to study, as well as the fear of having to face the wrath of their parents and the taunts of their class-mates. And if children are so carefully schooled in fear right from infancy, they carry on being fearful for the rest of their lives. In turn, this plays havoc with almost all their relationships.
‘Cut-throat competition’ is also what schools actively work to instill in students from a tender age onwards. Learning in ‘mainstream’ schools is not a group process, something that students and teachers together participate in and grow together doing. Rather, ‘learning’ in modern schools is geared to train students to become aggressive competitors once they leave school and enter the job market. The conventional examination system reflects that purpose. Being structured in such a way as to produce ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, ‘toppers’ and ‘failures’, each student is made to believe that his ‘success’ is dependent on the ‘failure’ of others, whom he comes to see as his competitors, or even as ‘enemies’. He can ‘succeed’, he comes to think, only if others ‘fail’ or, at least, fall behind him. It’s almost like a war, with each student being set against the rest. This, of course, can only produce aggressive selfishness in students and an absolute indifference, or even hostility, to the welfare of others.
This tendency is further reinforced by the way school students are carefully and deliberately insulated from the harsh realities of the real world around them. This is particularly the case with the so-called ‘best’ schools, which, of course, cater to the rich. When I was at school we weren’t given even a clue about abject poverty or, for instance, caste discrimination or other such bitter facts of contemporary India. None of our books ever mentioned such ‘unpleasant’ things. Presumably, these were too embarrassing to recognize or perhaps too politically volatile to tell children about. If you read the Civics and History texts which I studied when I was at school, which is where one would have expected to find some mention of such issues, you’d imagine that every citizen of what they hailed as ‘the Independent, Democratic, Socialist Republic of India’ was hale and hearty, perfectly contented and bursting with prosperity! I suppose this continues to be the case today as well. How, I wonder, can one expect students to have any social concern if they are left—and probably deliberately so—entirely ignorant of such matters?
Of course, it isn’t just by reading about such social realities in textbooks that students can be sensitized to the bitter social realities of poverty and oppression that continue to plague India. Ideally, students should be exposed to such realities through short field visits, including to organizations and groups working on these issues, so that they can witness them for themselves. But that, of course, doesn’t happen at all. At least none of the high-brow schools I know about does anything remotely like this. On the contrary, they do everything to make their students completely blind and wholly insensitive to such realities, and, instead, to programme them to accept Western-style culture and consumerist hedonism as normative and ‘natural’ and, as it is now called, the ‘in-thing’. They might have special Spanish dance classes, for instance, or arrange an additional course for French cooking or even take their students for a football course to Russia, but would they ever take their students to the slum just next-door to learn what life is like for their poor neighbours?
If you really care to think, you might find that many of the ‘un-educated’ folks you know are definitely better human beings than those who’ve earned fancy degrees and are therefore considered ‘highly-educated’. In fact, it seems to be the case that the more ‘educated’ you are the less chances you have of being a kind, considerate and socially-conscious person. At least that’s been my experience so often that I am tempted to make almost a generalization in this regard. And I don’t see why this shouldn’t be the case, given the fundamentally flowed ethos, structure and purpose of ‘mainstream’ (mis)-education.
All wealth belongs to the Divine and those who hold it are merely its trustees-Aurobindo.
Supreme Happiness in life is conviction that we are loved
By Yoginder Sikand
The more I think of ‘modern’ education the more problematic it reveals itself to be. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that it’s definitely one of the major malaises affecting contemporary humanity. Being centred wholly on this-worldly ‘achievements’, knowledge and skills, while being silent on, and implicitly hostile to, life after death and the need to prepare for it, ‘modern’ education fails miserably as far as spiritual development is concerned. But even if one leaves debatable issues about religion and spirituality out of the discussion and focuses solely on ‘secular’ or the this-worldly life, ‘modern’ education is found to be woefully lacking on a major score: in the ethical or moral development of students. And that is something that even folks who aren’t interested in the extra-worldly realm or life after death ought to be worried about.
‘Modern’ school education is geared essentially to imparting a body of knowledge to students. The ultimate purpose of this process is to prepare them for their future careers, through which they will assume certain roles in the modern economy. That is why schools are conventionally judged in terms of their ability to produce graduates who get ‘good’ jobs—by which is meant jobs that come with hefty salaries and fancy perks.
It is thus hardly surprising that schools pay only lip-service to the moral or ethical growth of their students. Helping their students to become good, loving, kind and caring human beings, as opposed to ‘good’ (by which is essentially meant rich) scientists or economists or whatever, is definitely not their major purpose. They might make some cosmetic concessions to ethical concerns by introducing moral science or civics classes, but these are hardly taken seriously by both teachers and students. The latter often think of them as a burden that they have to suffer in silence in order to be promoted to the next grade. Other than this, schools generally have no other arrangement for students’ moral or ethical growth.
In fact, contemporary ‘mainstream’ schooling is geared to inculcating a whole set of negative attitudes and attributes, which so damage their students that only some fortunate few manage to overcome them in later life. One of these is fear. Most teachers maintain and reinforce their authority over students by instilling abject fear in them. Students sometimes cringe before their teachers and generally dare not question them or ‘misbehave’ (and this may be just something as harmless as sharing a whisper with another student during class-hours) for fear of being punished—scolded or even beaten—by their teachers. I lived in mortal dread of my teachers while at school. Some of them took sadistic delight in beating us for even the most petty ‘misdemeanour’, such as for having not polished our shoes or coming to class a minute late.
Then, of course, there is the ever-present fear of ‘failure’. Learning, for most students and in most schools, is far from being a pleasurable activity. It is the fear of failing that drives most students to study, as well as the fear of having to face the wrath of their parents and the taunts of their class-mates. And if children are so carefully schooled in fear right from infancy, they carry on being fearful for the rest of their lives. In turn, this plays havoc with almost all their relationships.
‘Cut-throat competition’ is also what schools actively work to instill in students from a tender age onwards. Learning in ‘mainstream’ schools is not a group process, something that students and teachers together participate in and grow together doing. Rather, ‘learning’ in modern schools is geared to train students to become aggressive competitors once they leave school and enter the job market. The conventional examination system reflects that purpose. Being structured in such a way as to produce ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, ‘toppers’ and ‘failures’, each student is made to believe that his ‘success’ is dependent on the ‘failure’ of others, whom he comes to see as his competitors, or even as ‘enemies’. He can ‘succeed’, he comes to think, only if others ‘fail’ or, at least, fall behind him. It’s almost like a war, with each student being set against the rest. This, of course, can only produce aggressive selfishness in students and an absolute indifference, or even hostility, to the welfare of others.
This tendency is further reinforced by the way school students are carefully and deliberately insulated from the harsh realities of the real world around them. This is particularly the case with the so-called ‘best’ schools, which, of course, cater to the rich. When I was at school we weren’t given even a clue about abject poverty or, for instance, caste discrimination or other such bitter facts of contemporary India. None of our books ever mentioned such ‘unpleasant’ things. Presumably, these were too embarrassing to recognize or perhaps too politically volatile to tell children about. If you read the Civics and History texts which I studied when I was at school, which is where one would have expected to find some mention of such issues, you’d imagine that every citizen of what they hailed as ‘the Independent, Democratic, Socialist Republic of India’ was hale and hearty, perfectly contented and bursting with prosperity! I suppose this continues to be the case today as well. How, I wonder, can one expect students to have any social concern if they are left—and probably deliberately so—entirely ignorant of such matters?
Of course, it isn’t just by reading about such social realities in textbooks that students can be sensitized to the bitter social realities of poverty and oppression that continue to plague India. Ideally, students should be exposed to such realities through short field visits, including to organizations and groups working on these issues, so that they can witness them for themselves. But that, of course, doesn’t happen at all. At least none of the high-brow schools I know about does anything remotely like this. On the contrary, they do everything to make their students completely blind and wholly insensitive to such realities, and, instead, to programme them to accept Western-style culture and consumerist hedonism as normative and ‘natural’ and, as it is now called, the ‘in-thing’. They might have special Spanish dance classes, for instance, or arrange an additional course for French cooking or even take their students for a football course to Russia, but would they ever take their students to the slum just next-door to learn what life is like for their poor neighbours?
If you really care to think, you might find that many of the ‘un-educated’ folks you know are definitely better human beings than those who’ve earned fancy degrees and are therefore considered ‘highly-educated’. In fact, it seems to be the case that the more ‘educated’ you are the less chances you have of being a kind, considerate and socially-conscious person. At least that’s been my experience so often that I am tempted to make almost a generalization in this regard. And I don’t see why this shouldn’t be the case, given the fundamentally flowed ethos, structure and purpose of ‘mainstream’ (mis)-education.
All wealth belongs to the Divine and those who hold it are merely its trustees-Aurobindo.
Supreme Happiness in life is conviction that we are loved
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)