Right Nourishment for Hungry Ghosts: A Total Transformation of Education

• In Event: A Vital Life Force Approach to Reanimate Nature and to Build Equality and Respect Among All People

Abstract

Purposes

This paper makes the case for a contemplative-holistic paradigm of education in response to the ecological crisis that is increasingly precipitating climate related disasters world-wide.

Perspectives

There is a mounting recognition globally that climate change and its devastating effects can’t be denied and dismissed anymore. The most powerful movement in this recognition started with a 16-year old student, Greta Thunberg, from Sweden, who made the decision to walk out of the class and to go and hold solitary demonstrations outside Sweden’s parliament. What is the use, she argues, of studying at school when she saw no healthy future for herself, others, and the whole planet? In support of the Thunberg-started protest movement that is spreading internationally, our paper will examine and reveal the corrupt and bankrupt state of the cultural practices that manifest in education, which we will frame as a phenomenology of dehumanization that includes what we call “Vampire Operation” “Hungry Ghosts Roaming,” “Machine Impersonation,” and so on. The Vampire Operation refers to the practice of imprisoning students inside a building for much of the day, preventing them from freely communing with trees, animals, rocks, rivers, skies, thereby creating a consciousness alienated from Nature-Earth. The Machine Impersonation refers to the makings of the Industrial Age mind that is especially prepared to be slaves to the Machine that operates the ceaseless cycle of production and consumption. Modern schooling, we will argue, operates on the process of starving students of psychic and energetic nourishment and artificial feeding on individualistic consumerism, which results in human beings perpetually hungry and rapacious.

Modes Of Inquiry

Philosophical inquiry coupled with experiential and embodied inquiry

Materials

Materials for our paper are derived from the world wisdom traditions (e.g., Buddhism and Daoism) as well as contemporary literature in holistic and contemplative education and ecopsychology.

Substantiated Conclusions and Scholarly Significance of the Work

We offer a resolution (not a solution) for changing the focus and practice of education. We will argue that the fundamental aim of education is learning to live in peace and harmony with all earthly beings, which requires humans to be attentive to the needs of other beings, and be respectful of all beings and their “birthright” to exist.

Our paper addresses the practicality of shifting the education system to the contemplative-holistic paradigm that emphasizes cultivating the whole person and community, as well as working with the spectrum of consciousnesses, whereby integration of mind-body-heart-soul-spirit takes place within (self-to-self) and without (self-to-other). Teaching in this manner is not about teaching some special subjects on self, community, and consciousness. Rather, such teaching is about infusing, embedding, and enacting whatever we are teaching with ways of contemplative consciousness: in short, contemplative pedagogy and androgogy. We will introduce a variety of contemplative practices that can be incorporated readily into the daily schedule of teaching, such as the Check-in, Pause, Breathwork, Contemplative Reading, and Mindful Listening.

Authors

• Heesoon Bai, Simon Fraser University

• Avraham A. Cohen, City University of Seattle