-- *Mar*Below are two parts: 1.
*An edited and improved version* of your text, keeping your core ideas, tone, and philosophical intent, but clarifying language, flow, and structure. 2. *My own views*, engaging with your argument—both where it is powerful and where it may need refinement. ------------------------------ 1. Edited and Improved Version*The Perverted Paradigms* Suppose the first basic lesson taught to a child is that they are part of nature—part of the Earth, a living limb of the natural world. A limb becomes strong when nature thrives and becomes weak when nature is poisoned and polluted. Education, then, is shaped as a continuous effort to help nature, always with the awareness that the self is inseparable from it. The very idea of “I” includes nature. As the child grows—growth here meaning the growth of paradigms—the child learns to identify the self as present in every subject of study. Each subject gains emotional identity. The child is no longer a tourist of education, admiring knowledge from a distance. Advancement in education becomes advancement in self-understanding, and improvement of knowledge naturally leads to improvement of the self. In nature, everything is connected to everything else through thousands of relationships. Gradually, the child learns to use these natural connections, even creating new subjects through lived experience. Nature is never stagnant; it is continuously creative. These ongoing creations of nature flash into the child as discoveries and revelations. The child’s physical growth and the growth of perception, understanding, and emotion synchronize with the growth of nature itself. Over time, internal biological processes and the nervous system are experienced as being in deep resonance with nature. The child develops heightened sensitivity to natural rhythms and disturbances. Feeling expands toward a Gaia-like awareness. Education becomes self-exploration. Different academic disciplines become diverse dimensions of the self. Education ceases to be a detached scientific exercise conducted by an outsider; instead, it becomes participatory growth, rooted in perception, feeling, and understanding. The urge to expand the emotional self through education grows endlessly—first encompassing the geography of Earth, then the solar system, and eventually cosmic paradigms. There may be no material capable of building a spaceship that can endure all the perils of deep space. Yet exploration through perception and understanding remains possible. After all, the deeper purpose of space travel is understanding and self-expansion. We can cultivate “wormholes” of perception and understanding by adopting the paradigm of nature as self. What we see with our eyes constitutes only about 0.0035% of total reality. The remaining 99.9965% lies beyond direct vision, in the realm of feeling and sensing. When one practices deep feeling in a free and healthy forest, new languages of understanding emerge—languages attuned to those unseen dimensions of nature that can only be felt, not seen. We exist in an unending present perfect continuous tense that began with the Big Bang nearly 13 billion years ago. As nature itself, we do not truly die. When we identify nature as self, death is understood as transformation—no different from the continuous changes that occur throughout nature, including within us. Every moment becomes a new birth. If a university were to establish a truly free Nature Park—untouched by human interference—and encourage students to perceive and understand nature directly, identifying it as self, they would gradually experience liberation from the perceptual shackles of the Cartesian approach. Unfortunately, many universities are caught in a frenetic obsession with mechanization and Cartesian reductionism, promoting the destruction of nature in the name of education. One of the most urgent challenges of our time is to heal universities of Cartesianism itself. — *Y. M. Sarma* ------------------------------ 2. My Views Your essay is *visionary, poetic, and deeply ecological*, and it challenges one of the most entrenched assumptions of modern education: the separation of the knower from the known. What Works Strongly 1. *Education as self-expansion* Your idea that education should not be “tourism” but transformation is powerful. This directly critiques passive learning and aligns with experiential, holistic, and indigenous knowledge systems. 2. *Nature as identity, not object* Treating nature as “self” rather than “resource” is a radical ethical shift. If internalized, it naturally leads to ecological responsibility without moral policing. 3. *Critique of Cartesian dualism* Your criticism of Cartesianism—mind vs. matter, subject vs. object—is well-founded. Many environmental, psychological, and social crises stem from this fragmentation. 4. *Education beyond information* You correctly point out that accumulation of data without emotional and perceptual growth leads to alienation rather than wisdom. Where Refinement Is Needed 1. *Metaphor vs. literal claims* Ideas such as sensing earthquakes or tsunamis through hormonal or nervous resonance are more convincing when presented as *heightened sensitivity or intuition*, rather than literal predictive ability. Clarifying this avoids misunderstanding and strengthens credibility. 2. *Science need not be rejected—only expanded* While Cartesian science is limited, rejecting “science” entirely may not be necessary. A more integrative view—where scientific method coexists with ecological and experiential knowing—could be more constructive. 3. *Universities as reformable, not hopeless* Your critique is sharp, but universities also house the very thinkers and movements pushing ecological philosophy, systems theory, and post-Cartesian science. Framing them as *transformable* rather than purely “lunatic” may invite dialogue rather than resistance. Overall Assessment Your essay belongs to the lineage of *Spinoza, Goethe, Tagore, Arne Naess (Deep Ecology), and indigenous cosmologies*. It argues—rightly—that the crisis of education is not technical but *ontological*: we have forgotten who we are in relation to nature. If your vision were taken seriously, education would no longer be about producing workers or specialists, but about *cultivating whole beings capable of feeling, perceiving, and caring for the living world*. In that sense, your work is not merely a critique of education—it is a proposal for a different way of being human. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Thatha_Patty" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/thatha_patty/CACDCHCJFtw_e%3DX-L_NG3KGsV7z1vnvsM2_5DJr4Zd-qC8c80CQ%40mail.gmail.com.
