Shiv Talwar

Dr Shiv Talwar, a Books for Peace 2020 award winning author of a book entitled The Common Ground Vol 1: A Unified Basis for Existence, a retired professor of civil engineering in Canada, is the founding president of Spiritual Heritage Education Network Inc (SHEN, http://spiritualeducation.org, est. Sept 2,000).

SHEN is dedicated to research and developing education to cultivate lived feelings of unity in diversity.  It is a solutions oriented response to the experience of interreligious genocide in 1947 at the partition of India. Shiv wants to prevent a repetition of this experience anywhere in the world. The following is an account of his approach to envision the future of education.

Religious bigotry, like its racial counterpart, is largely unconscious. While acknowledging that there is a significant explicit bigotry, Dr Jennifer Eberhardt of Stanford, a leading expert on unconscious bias concludes that the naturally high speed of human life or stress is the cause of implicit bias underlying the explicit; and an effective countermeasure is to slow down to move our thinking from the primitive, reactive parts of the brain to more reflective ones.

Monastic contemplators used conscious regulation of breath as a strategy of moving their thinking to the reflective parts of the brain. Natural breath is autonomic with a high frequency symptomatic of the natural speed of life, we can consciously slow it down. Doing so reduces mental distractions calming the reactive mind. Sustaining reflective calm with conscious breathing, we move to a state of undistracted focus on contemplative inquiry seeing things which we otherwise miss. This is typical of all research and learning.

When we breathe deep, not only do we think deep and up regulate our cognition, but we also upregulate the states of our physical and mental health. A national study in the Journal of the American Medical Association reports that 60% to 80% of primary care doctors’ visits may have a stress-related component. Thus, creating a culture of conscious deep breathing at all levels in our educational systems can transform our society with holistic health and harmony eliminating bigotry as it enhances our state of physical and mental health, incisive perception and research potential.

To be effective, conscious regulation of breath, must be a part of a wider program of change. For that reason, Shiv envisions education of the future to develop from its existing state to include the following:
1. Practice of conscious regulation of breath to train attention and cognition supported by an understanding of the science underlying its effectiveness in upregulating human consciousness and its benefits in health,  wellness, learning, research and development,
2. Contemplative inquiry and learning of various levels of realities ranging from the obvious immediate to the infinitely subtle ultimate, and
3. Subtle and profound findings of our eminent contemplatives.

The primary source of the findings of our contemplative inquiry in the subtle ultimate domain is our scriptural literature. Organized religion presented it as belief; science admitting only critical reasoning and validation with replicable empirical experiments had little use for belief systems. Thus, humanity got deprived of profound truths painstakingly discovered by our prophets, sages, seers and philosophers in their contemplative searches. Einstein’s energy-mass equivalence, quantum physics and general theory of relativity changed all that. Science became a bridge of reason to access profound scriptural wisdom historically dismissed till then by modern seekers.

Our research shows that there is invaluable, scientific and transformational wisdom in human scriptures, the use of which can help us resolve many intractable problems humanity faces today.  Our ancient prophets, sages and seers were serious researchers, not speculators as commonly portrayed by our elite. Thys used inner resources for their investigations whereas external resources dominate in our modern methods. Just like there we are realities missed by modern epistemologies, there were facts missed by the ancient epistemologies as well.

Our research and development for the future of education uses a multidisciplinary systems approach integrating knowledge of five broad categories: (1) Human scripture, (2) Natural sciences, (3) Life sciences, (4) social sciences and (5) humanities.

There are many reasons for the  proposed interdisciplinary lens for mining the scriptural wisdom: (1) it is a filter to separate doctrine and dogma from wisdom, (2) it enhances the intelligibility of ancient scriptural narratives for modern scientific understanding, (3) it enhances our ability to communicate the scriptural wisdom, and (4) by showing the impeccable science of the ancient contemplative and transformational epistemologies, it enhances the fruitfulness of modern epistemologies and pedagogies.