NEO-HUMANIST EDUCATION

"We are only now on the threshold of knowing the range of the educability, the perfectibility of humnanity - we have never addressed ourselves to this before."

Scientìt Dr. Jerome Bruner

"Never once did anyone ever make it clear what I was beìng educated for."

Beatles' Paul McCartney

Like a stream relentlessly pushing its way toward the sea, for three billion years the flow off life has been ceaselessly pressing forward toward its invisble goal - producing higher and higher organisms with subtler an subtler thinking capacity, swelling the skulls of the creatures and compressing into them increasingly convoluted brains with ever expanding capabilities. We human beings contain within our heads today the culmination of these aeons of slow and steady brain evolution: an "enchanted loom" of ten billion neurons all inter-connecting with each other, with the ability to weave trillions of patterns of tought and feeling - most of which we have never glimpsed. The innate capacity of the human mind is indeed awesome, and every child born with this miraculous brain-mind is a potential genius.

But the great promise with which every child is born seems completly shattered today. Human being s start out as butterflies - and end up in cocoons. Each generation produced under scholling is becoming more and more shocked, criplled, violent, aggressive, hostile, confused, defiant and despairing; and as a result, the social fabric is disintegrating faster an faster. Everywhere rhere is an increase among youth of autism and brain damage, school dropouts, illiteracy, drug abuse, vandalism, venereal disease, runaways, mental illness and suicides. A recent study revealed that 25% of young American Navy recruits could not read well enough to understand basic safety instructions, and 40% of 17 year olds could not draw conclusions from written material. In Japan a "national emergency" has been declared as incidences of child violence are on the rise - grade school students burning each other with lighted cigarettes in the bathroom, and knifing their home-room teachers to death.

Billions of dollars and billions of human-hours are currently being spent in attempts to reform the educational systems anywhere. But unfortunately most of these "solutions" are doomed to failure because they focus on the wrong problem - providing information. In many countries, recent educational "reform" means merely increasing the hours and the months of schooling, and pumping more and more information down the unwilling students'throats. But it is this very preoccupation with information that has dehumanized our school and alienated our youth. When children are conceived as containers of receptacles whose primary function is to receive, hold and regugitate subject matter on call, learning becomes mechanistic and the bored students yent their frustration in aggression, or simply seek escape. Youngsteres today want change - and they want it now.

NEO-HUMANIST EDUCATION

If it is true, as scientists today so emphatically proclaim, that we are utilizing only 1% of our human potentiai, then the foremost duty of education must be to “lead out” our total potentialities to make us fully human. This is the goal of Neo-Humanist education - the concerted effort to develop the highest human potential in every child, of all times and in all places.

Neo-Humanist education educates the whole child: it does not merely feed information to the intellect, or train the students, like robots, to please the teacher with the “right” answer. But what the “whole child”? What are all the dimensions of personality that must be developed if we are to become fully human? First we must understand what is a human being, for this clear understanding is the solid foundation upon which the Neo-Humanist curriculum of instruction is built.

THE LEVELS OF LIFE

According to the ancient teachings of spiritual masters - and the current theories of modem physics - existence is not a single reality but a continuum of various layers of being ranging from the coarsest and densest (the physical) through subtler and finer psychic layers, to a unified field of infinite consciousness. In the same way, as many psychologists maintain, the human mind is itself a continuum of several levels from coarse to subtle. In each succeeding layer there is a more joyful and expanded awareness, for the high layers contain vast reservoirs of energy and knowledge:

1) CONSCIOUS MIND - THE SENSES

2) SUBCONSCIOUS MIND - INTELLECT

3) SUPERCONSCIOUS MIND - CREATIVITY (the first layer)

4) SUPERCONSCIOUS MIND INTUITION (the second layer)

5) SUPERCONSCIOUS MIND - SPIRITUALITY (the third layer)

On one end of this mental continuum is the physical body, and on the other, beyond the subtlest layer of the superconscious mind, is the realm of infmite consciousness, the pure Self within. In this state of perfect peace, all conflicts and contradictions of the lower mind dissolve... here all is one. When one attains this state, even for a moment, one's entire existence is flooded with inexpressible joy.

These layers are not merely theoretical concepts of psychologists, but functional levels which can be experienced by anyone with the training and discipline to explore them. Unfortunately, average human beings do not realire the profoundest levels of the innermost self; they experience only the lower two levels of mind - the conscious and subconscious - because the surface restlessness of the shallower layers prevents them from going beyond.

What makes Neo-Hummist education unique is that, unlike other systems and methods of education, which seek to develop only one or another of these levels, it systematically develops all the layers of human existence and leads the individual gradually and joyfully towards the goal of infinity. Thus it is in the truest sense a holistic education, for in it no expression of human consciousness is neglected, no aspect of human life is ignored.

Ac. Shriidhara / +39 349 8523007 / shriidhara@gmail.com