/EINPresswire.com/ There we go again. The greatest souls on the planet get together to enlighten us all on peace. Well what we heard at this conference was the same old wine presented in a fancy new bottle but a bottle made up of the same old, same old glass!
“From kindergarten, we have to teach that wherever there is conflict, teaching the use of force is the wrong method. It brings mutual destruction,” the Dalai Lama said. “Wherever there is conflict, the immediate thought in our mind should be how to solve this through dialogue instead of how to solve this through force.” The biggest theme that came out of the peace summit was the Dalai Lama’s observation that we should teach ethics education. Ethics education is more or less brain washing education, as ethics is an attribute of wisdom, and attributes of wisdom cannot be taught! It is like the king of France who did not have a bath in his life. He must have been very stinky while he covered it with more and more perfume. Until you change the physical quality of the brain factory you cannot change the mind and you cannot teach ethics or any other attribute of wisdom.
“The kind of education that is needed has to be thought through because education does not necessarily lead to peace,”- Prof. Pedro Noguera. Again he said, “Education can be used to oppress or to liberate.” When we talk about education that oppresses or liberates, we are talking about emotional intelligence education. Not one speaker said that we need to create a new subject that teaches emotional intelligence education!
One of the most important factors to understand is the brain and mind/self relationship. If we can figure this out we can figure out how to develop emotional intelligence education and even change the fundamental behavior of individuals, groups and countries. We will even be able to find peace and happiness. Much of the mess in the world is due to our ignorance about our mind brain relationship.
Lets consider the following: Suppose there is a special glass tumbler that creates it’s own contents. The physical quality of the glass determines the quality of the contents of this tumbler. Now suppose there is a factory that creates innumerable qualities of glass that go into making each tumbler. Thus everyone of these tumblers creates a different quality (say) juice. This juice quality varies from poison to the very manna of juices. Now the maker and the buyers they all want every tumbler to create the manna of juices.They have no clue how to make each and every tumbler to generate the top quality juice. So they try by adding top quality juice to the poison that is already there. The result is a confused mixture at best, where the best possible result is that the poison gets diluted but does not go away.
Now consider the human brain as the tumbler and it’s physical brain quality as the glass material. The self/mind is suppose the material that the brain produces. Society produces different quality minds/selfs, from totally self centered to selfless and we try to make them of the best quality possible. So we go about trying to improve the self just like in our example: by exposing the brain and mind to superior knowledge, through preaching, pleading, teaching and even rewarding and threatening, without getting the brain to stop generating selfishness. The physical quality of the brain continues to generate selfishness and we keep trying to get the brain and mind to generate good behavior. It is like taking a glass of dirty water and adding pure water to it. The pure water too goes into the ‘brain-tumbler’ and becomes dirty. The only way would be to get to change the physical quality of the brain so that the brain stops generating a selfish self/mind.
The way we educate today is we try to pour into the brain-tumbler confused emotional intelligence knowledge, even if this knowledge is pure it has to compete with dirty knowledge that is being generated by the ignorant brain.
Another way to explain would be to define the self/mind as a fragrance of the brain. Which means the self is a secondary entity. As we cannot produce a fragrance on it’s own we have to nurture the plant, similarly we have to nurture the brain in order to create super mature minds/selfs.
The very nature of the brain is such that the physical brain is set to specific emotional intelligence quality by the time the child is six years old. By the time the child is six years old the brain is set to generating a mixture of emotional intelligence and emotional ignorance. Teaching a child ethics as the Dalai Lama recommended is like pouring pure water into a glass of dirty water. It seldom works. To some extent the child does get brain washed, which in this case is a good thing but the bottom line ignorance remains. What we need is not brain washing even if it is good brain washing. What we need to do is educate parents on how to integrate super maturity in their children. And teach wisdom education to all students especially those who come to the class room emotionally challenged.
We also need to create special emotional intelligence education teachers who can change the physical nature of the brain so that the brain can generate super mature, pure selfs/minds.
Rev. Edwin Leahy said that teaching ethics starts by imbuing students with the notion of personal dignity. Personal dignity is an attribute of wisdom and we can see attributes cannot be taught successfully. Also unfortunately persnal dignity is confused with over confidence, as in “I am the best.”
“This cannot be another conference where we get together and just talk about problems”, Mayor Booker said. “We cannot do the same things we did last year and expect change this year.”
Well what I heard at this conference was the same old wine presented in a fancy new bottle but a bottle made up of the same old, same old glass! Mayor Booker our education system is repeating the same mistakes again and again.