Value Education: Self-Exploration & Acceptance

Values

• Importance or participation of a unit in a larger order.
• A pen's value is its ability to write.

Human Values

• A human's participation in the larger order of existence.
• Requires understanding human reality and its relationship with every unit in existence.

Value Education

• Education that instills basic and ethnic values, enabling understanding of what is valuable for human happiness.

Self-Exploration

• This is the process of finding what is valuable by investigating within oneself.
• Involves judging what is right and true for oneself.
• Helps understand our relationships with family, nature, etc., by observing within.

Natural Acceptance

• Mechanism of self-exploration
• Unconditional acceptance of self, people, and environment.
• Absence of exceptions from others
• Accepting the good things naturally

Experiential Validation

• Infuses direct experience with learning.
• Validates existing beliefs through situations and outcomes.
• Uses direct experience and focused reflection to increase knowledge, develop skills, and clarify values.
• Influenced by others' views of us.

Svatva

• Innateness of self, natural acceptance of harmony.
• Identifying what one truly wants to be.

Swatantrata

• Being self-organized, in harmony with oneself.
• Establishing a dialogue with one's innateness.

Swarajya

• Self-expression, living in harmony with others.
• Expressing inner harmony through behavior and work, extending to surroundings.

Happiness (Sukh)

• Harmony/synergy in one's state/situation.
• A holistic state of mind that creates inner harmony.
• A state of liking the situation of harmony.

Prosperity

• The feeling of having more than required physical facilities.
• Requires identifying the required quantity of physical facilities.
• Requires ensuring production/availability of more than required physical facilities.
• Depends on limiting the need for physical facilities.

Right Understanding

• Understanding harmony at four levels of living: self to existence.
• Higher-order human skills: learning and utilizing intelligence effectively.

Physical Facilities (Suvidha)

• Physiological needs and comforts of life.
• Seeking physical comforts and sources to attain them.

Animal Consciousness

• Living only for physical facilities, without right understanding and relationship.
• Assuming oneself as only a body.

Human Consciousness

• Living with right understanding, relationship, and physical facilities.
• Prioritizing right understanding, followed by relationship and physical facilities.
• Living with views of justice, resolution, and truth.
• Understanding the human being as a coexistence of self and body.

Value Domain

• Domain of wisdom that helps identify and set the right goals and direction.

Domain of Skills

• Competence to learn and practice methods to actualize goals in real life.

Process of Value Education

• Involves self-exploration, verification at the level of natural acceptance, and experiential validation.
• Proposals are presented, and individuals verify them and examine their living in that light.

Content of Value Education

• Understanding what is valuable for human happiness.
• Includes all dimensions (thoughts, behavior, work, and realization).
• Includes all levels (individual, family, society, nature/existence).
• Understanding myself, my aspirations, my happiness; understanding the goal of human life comprehensively.
• Understanding the other entities in nature, the innate interconnectedness, the coexistence in nature- existence and finally the role of human being in this nature/existence entirely.
• Encompasses understanding of harmony at various levels.
• Learning to live in accordance with this understanding by being vigilant to one’s thoughts, behaviour and work.

Content of Self-Exploration

• Focus is on understanding oneself as a human being
• Focus is on answering fundamental questions:
  • What is my desire/goal?
  • What is my plan for fulfilling that desire?

SVDD

• Sadhan Viheen Dukhi Daridra: Materially deficient, unhappy, and deprived.

SSDD

• Sadhan Sampann Dukhi Daridra: Materially affluent, unhappy, and deprived.

SSSS

• Sadhan Sampann Sukhi Samriddha: Materially adequate, happy, and prosperous.
• Natural acceptance for all human beings.

Need for Value Education

• Helps improve one's value system and its application.
• Facilitates examining and controlling life choices.
• Enables understanding needs, visualizing goals correctly, removing confusions, and bringing harmony.
• Utilizes technological innovations rightly.

Basic Guidelines for Value Education

• Universal: Applicable regardless of caste, creed, nationality, or religion.
• Rational: Appeals to human reasoning, not dogmas or blind beliefs.
• Natural and verifiable: Naturally acceptable and experientially verifiable.
• All-encompassing: Transforms consciousness and living, covering all dimensions and levels of human life.
• Leading to harmony: Promotes harmony within the individual, among humans, and with nature.

Need for Value Education in Today's Scenario

• Correct identification of our aspirations and continuous fulfilment.
• Understanding universal human values.
• Evaluation of our beliefs.
• Complementarity of values and skills.
• Addresses the missing link in the present education system, i.e. human values, alongside technology.

Need for Value Education in Technical and Professional Institutions

• The present education system has become largely skill-based which may prove to be counterproductive and serious crises at the individual, societal and environmental level are manifesting.

Values and Skills

• Values are importance or participation, and skills are qualities, training, and capabilities.
• Both are necessary to fulfill our aspirations and achieve human happiness.

Self-Exploration Process

• What is presented is a proposal.
• Explore within yourself, on the basis of it being naturally acceptable to you.
• Neither accept these as true immediately nor reject them prematurely without proper exploration.
• Do verification on the basis of your natural acceptance.
• Live accordingly to validate it experientially.
• Results in realization and understanding.
• On having realization and understanding we get assurance, satisfaction and universality.

Mechanism of Self-Exploration

• Natural acceptance
• Holistic sense of inner harmony, tranquillity and fulfilment.
• Experiential validation
• direct experience with the learning environment and content

Basic Human Aspirations

• Happiness (mutual fulfilment) and prosperity (mutual prosperity).
• Happiness is ensured by the relationships with other human beings and prosperity is ensured by working on physical facilities.
• Requirements: understanding, understanding of relationship and physical facilities.

Animal vs. Human Consciousness

• Animal Consciousness: Priorities to physical facilities only.
• Human Consciousness: Living with understanding, understanding of relationship and physical facilities.
• Transformation can be accomplished only by working for right understanding as the first priority.

Prevailing Notions of Happiness and Consequences

• Trying to maximize accumulation and consumption of physical facilities,
• Problems manifesting at the individual level.
• Problems manifesting at the domestic level.
• Problems manifesting at the Society level.
• Problems manifesting at the Nature level.

Relationship between Right Understanding, Relationships, Physical Facilities

• When we use right understanding with relationships it gives us mutual fulfilment.
• If we have right understanding, then we can be happy in ourselves and work to have fulfilling relationships with humans.

Value of a Human Being

• To understand harmony at all the levels of existence
• The participation of human being at different level in this order to maintain harmony

Difference between Prosperity and Wealth

• Prosperity is a feeling of having more than required physical facilities.
• Wealth is just a physical thing :money, physical facilities.
  • We mostly fail to make this distinction today.
  • We keep working for wealth, without realizing that the basic desire is for the feeling of prosperity, to have a feeling of having enough.

Suvidha vs. Sukh

• Suvidha implies that it is looking for physical comforts and all the sources of attaining such comforts.
• Sukh is a holistic and all encompassing state of the mind that creates inner harmony.
• People think that their happiness depends upon suvidha (facilities) but is it not so; happiness depends upon our thinking or our mental satisfaction.

Physical Facilities for Animals vs. Humans

• For Animals physical facilities are sufficient and complete to fulfil their needs.
• For Humans physical facilities are necessary but not complete to fulfil our needs.