|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
In this book, Avraham with his acute psychological understanding documents how this process of shutting down and becoming numb typically happens. This process happens everywhere and anytime, from the earliest moment of our babyhood. When babies cry from distress, and parents do not attend to their needs because they are following family doctor’s advice of scheduled feeding (thankfully, this is no longer the norm), or because the parents are too distressed themselves from overwork and a million other reasons, these babies begin to shut down in the face of what appears to them an indifferent or even hostile world. When well-meaning teachers continually demand—clamor for—students’ attention in the name of instructing them, they are in effect impairing individual autonomy—the capacity to be oneself, to fully be one with self. Fullness of being does not flourish when attention is continually drawn away and drained out from self, as in conventional modes of schooling. Every time a person’s sense of reality is invalidated or not recognized by another person, be it a parent or a teacher, parts of him or her shut down, even if only ever so slightly. Little by little, doors of perception close, and the person is incrementally and insidiously removed from reality.
For Avraham, education is an emancipatory project. Individuals learn to gradually throw wide-open shuttered windows and bolted doors that incarcerate their true nature. His philosophy and practice of education let in radiant warm light and vitalizing fresh air, and further the process of liberation for the authenticity of the individual and the classroom collective. It is the birthright of humanity to experience the full measure of radiance and bliss. So long, in the name of individual survival and social progress, much of both formal and informal education has functioned as an oppressor that, instead of liberating humans into more expansive and vital dimensions of Being, ends up creating one-dimensional devitalized beings whose hunger for fulfillment knows no bounds and no season, for we are starved of Beingness. We are the Hungry Ghosts in the Buddhist lore. Until we are awakened and opened, and can connect directly with the source of Being and Vitality, we are perpetually hungry and are driven to seek nourishment but in empty calories of success and entertainment.