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Everything, if we consider educating as a process of helping individuals to become fully human, by which I mean ‘enlightened’ in the sense of Eastern enlightenment traditions. In Education for Awakening, Professor Yoshiharu Nakagawa (2000) speaks of Eastern philosophy having a “certain ontology that sees reality as a multidimensional, stratified structure and assumes the deepest dimension” (p. 18). Eastern enlightenment aims at waking us up into this multidimensional reality, which is the pathway to becoming more fully human. Sitting meditation, inner work, and other contemplative practices are the essential means that aid the awakening process.
Sleepwalking teachers cannot be models of awakening. If we want our students to be awakened to full reality and become more fully human, then it is essential that educators are engaged in the process of accessing this multidimensional reality. Now I better understand why Avraham insists on sitting every day on his meditation cushion, in front of the big windows, watching the crows and seagulls swoop by. To the extent he is awake, to that extent, he will be able to aid his students to become more fully awake. But what is this esoteric-sounding talk of awakening? Surely, I don’t mean it literally. Or do I?
Avraham’s book, whose manuscript I read many times over the past few years during its various stages and versions of preparation, addresses in detail (and in plainer language than I am couching here) what this awakening process is like, looked at from the humanistic educational perspective. Avraham came into the field of education through a circuitous path. He is an experienced psychotherapist and group facilitator, a potent educator of counseling students, and most centrally he is a facilitator of the process of awakening, which takes seeing psychologically how we became asleep in the first place. Being asleep means we are not in touch with reality as it is, and we may not even be aware that we are asleep. Psychologically speaking, we lose touch with reality when parts of us are denied, blunted, crushed, and shut down, hence we become un seeing, unsensing, and unaware.