VALUE ADDED COURSE: - VALUE
EDUCATION
Spirituality, Stress Free Living and Value Education
NAME: - VIPUL SANJAY KAKLIJ
CLASS: - F.Y.B.COM, SEM II
DIVISION: - E
ROLL NUMBER: - 486
Spirituality: -
Is life beautiful or is it complicated?
What makes it beautiful and what makes it complicated?
Why can’t life be only simple and beautiful?
These questions have always baffled me till I found the answer.
Our life is always beautiful, it is our beliefs, our thoughts, our perceptions, our judgements, our
knowledge from our experiences that complicates the beauty in our lives.
If we put the above as a constant reminder in our mind, we will save ourselves from all the
stress, worry, overthinking, anxiety and even depression.
Our mind holds a lot of strength but we tend to underestimate it most of the times. We all have
the power to relieve ourselves from any pain, or struggle or any challenging situation. It all
comes down to whether you choose to heal yourself or not. This is where spirituality can help
you to make the right choice by giving meaning to your life, simplifying what is important to
you and finding ways to achieve inner peace.
Spirituality can be in the form of prayers, meditation or a belief in the higher power, but it’s
not limited to only that, it can be in music, art or any other field. Spirituality can be found in
everything that you may do which makes your life meaningful, gives you inner peace and
makes you a happier person.
So how can spirituality help you in finding answers and imbibing strength to lead a happier,
healthier and a (stress) free life? Well, there may be numerous ways by which spirituality can
help but I’m going to tell you few ways that have helped me spiritually, thus made my
connection stronger with spirituality:
To Believe – This is the most important aspect, according to me it’s all about believing that
how your actions can change the course of your life if you are spiritually connected. It all starts
from the belief – keeping your mind in the right place and not letting doubts cloud your
judgements and decisions. It is the belief that if a situation didn’t go as you planned then it was
a part of your life’s learning. It is the belief that you are part of a bigger plan where you have a
role to play; and your hardships that you may be going through or have gone through will lead
you to that role.
Be Mindful – Be aware of how you feel, what you think, what you say and how all that affects
you. Recognise and accept whenever your mind wanders and goes into the phase of
overthinking or worrying. Bringing the focus back and not getting lost in the maze of thoughts
is a crucial step to avert overburdening your mind with unnecessary thinking. By practicing
mindfulness, you can separate yourself from all the thoughts or behaviours that may lead to
stress and then connect with spirituality to bring calmness in you.
Show Gratitude – To accept that if life brings challenges it also in some way brings blessings
and being grateful for it is an important step towards having a happier and free life. Being
spiritual helps you in accepting and seeing the positive side of your life even during a
struggling phase. This is what gives you strength to take on life knowing that there will always
be an umbrella to protect you from the rain.
Don’t be hard on yourself – Stop being critical about yourself or your situations. Being
overly critical only brings out the worst. Don’t focus only on negative things that may happen,
visualise things that may go right. Being spiritual is not about being immune to stress, it is
about having the strength to be resilient in the most difficult times and not get swamped under
stress.
Bring Calmness – Being calm is something that doesn’t come naturally to us humans, as we
are made of emotions, feelings and thoughts. Our thoughts can invoke various emotions or
feelings which may not necessarily keep us calm. This is where spirituality and meditation
help. Meditation as a tool can help in managing our thoughts, emotions and feelings. Calmness
should not be confused with being passive or a ‘yes person’ or being timid. Calmness is all
about keeping the storm of thoughts or emotions within your control and not let any situation
big or small to bother you so much that the storm keeps showing up. By embracing spirituality,
we can see the repercussions of bringing the storm out (through mindfulness) and if we are
aware that the repercussions can be bad, we would never bring out the storm brewing inside us,
rather we would find other ways to handle the situation.
Stress Free Living: -
Stress is a common experience of all organisers. Even the inanimate world of matter has
been found to experience stress. Though common and universal, stress has till now been
regarded only as a dreaded something to which one has to somehow adjust. Recently,
however, the trend in psychology is to look at the positive aspect of stress, called ‘eustress’, so
as to discover in it an evolutionary force that by disturbing the lower equilibrium within and
around us forces us to enter into a higher equilibrium. The article touches upon this issue
briefly.
The adaptive systems
Our physical body has not only to adjust to the external environment but has also to maintain
an internal environment for proper functioning. The maintenance of a stable internal
environment (homeostasis) is achieved through regulatory mechanisms that coordinate systems
with divergent and conflicting functions. One such important regulatory mechanism is the
Autonomic Nervous System which has to balance two components:
(a) the sympathetic-adreno-medullary system that gears the organism for expenditure of
bodily energy (catabolism) to cope with threats, and
(b) the parasympathetic system which helps in restoration and conservation of bodily
energy (anabolism).
Faced with a stressful situation, the harmonious balance between the two components gets
disturbed and one system temporarily comes to dominate the other. This is nature’s adaptive
device to prepare an organism for offence or defence when under threat. One has to be
physically and emotionally aroused to cope with an emergency. When a tiger growls, one
cannot continue to recite poetry, one has to run. The sympathetico-adreno-medullary· system
becomes dominant to mobilise bodily resources for the intense muscular effort needed.
Sufficient blood must flow through the skeletal muscles, heart, lungs and brain; the heart must
beat faster, the pupils should dilate for better vision while the urinary and rectal sphincters
tighten and the more leisurely activities like intestinal movements and intestinal secretions
slow down as part of the body’s economical adjustments. Besides, one cannot simultaneously
be in a holiday mood — one is frightened, tense, anxious or enraged (one needs to be a yogi to
remain composed) one must be both physically and emotionally vigilant to face the challenge.
A question often raised is, what responds to stress first — the body or the emotions? Some
argue that emotional arousal is followed by physical arousal. William James believed the
opposite to be true and proposed that feelings, including anxiety, were merely the individual’s
conscious awareness of physiological processes antecedent to the emotion. The controversy
remains unsolved.
From the perspective of Integral Yoga where personality is studied not as a finished product
but along hierarchical planes of consciousness with universal forces acting at different levels,
one could theorise that depending upon the level of interaction, either the emotions (vital) or
the body (physical) could be aroused first or both could even be aroused together. In the
Integral Yoga, the vital-physical is that plane of personality which is involved in the reactions
of the nerves and the reflexive sensations and feelings (1).
“It [the vital-physical] is also largely responsible for most of the suffering and disease of mind
or body to which the physical being is subject in Nature”(2).
Return to the base-line
The tiger, however, cannot be allowed to growl for long and eventually a time comes when the
danger ceases (one runs out of the forest). Logically this implies that when the stressful
situation abates, the sympathetic-ad reno-medullary system must cease to dominate; the
internal physical environment must revert to the status quo and the harmony should be
reestablished. This is just what should ideally happen to a healthy individual.
The maladaptive trend
Unfortunately, sometimes or in some individuals, even after the external threat ceases to be
relevant, the sympathetic-adreno-medullary system continues to be unnecessarily dominant for
an extended period of time or a state of sustained emotional arousal continues, no more as an
adaptive but as a maladaptive trend. Such a state is strenuous for both the physical and mental
health of the individual. As a result, a host of illnesses can erupt, depending also on mediating
variables like genetic predisposition, environmental influences, personality traits, organ
vulnerability and psychological conflicts. Thus, one may develop physical manifestations of
generalised anxiety, a psychosomatic disease or an emotional disorder. Using the Mother’s
description, one can ascribe such an illness to a functional imbalance. Once a person is ill, the
illness itself acts as a new threat — a new stressor, exacerbating the disharmony and
establishing a vicious cycle that entangles one as in a spider’s web.
Psychological threats
The response of the homeostatic regulating mechanisms which prepare an organism to cope
with an external threat is a protective device perfectly suited for the subhuman animal species
and our forest-dwelling human ancestors. However, in our self-acclaimed ‘civilised’ society,
many of the threats we face are in essence not physical but psychological. The probability of
being physically devoured by tigers is less than facing threats from examinations, lawsuits,
share market fluctuations, marital discords and unpredictable office bosses. Work overload,
retirement, status change, social isolation, interpersonal conflicts, boredom, life-events or the
demands of a changing society are more important stressors today. Besides, one has to face
internal threats from unacceptable and unconscious conflicts and instinctual forces that have
not been adequately ‘repressed’. There is the stress arising from the conflict between one’s
achievements and ambitions, from the distortion of one’s self-image, from the inflated
demands and insatiable desires of the ego. Scientists believe that usually such stressors are
aversive events that most people would prefer to do without. If animals could be given a
choice, they would either avoid these situations or escape.
As a matter of fact, in a study we conducted on missing children and adolescents from
welltodo families in Calcutta, 42 per cent of the boys ran away to avoid the excessive stress of
studies and 53 per cent of the girls eloped to avoid the stress of forced marriages (3).
Unfortunately, we lack the romantic vigour of adolescence and if we do not ‘run away’ by
committing suicide, we become ill when overwhelmed by stress.
It is interesting to note that we react to psychological threats in the same way as we react to a
physical threat. Selye, one of the pioneers of stress research, finds that psychological events can
produce the same stress responses as physical stressors (4). This means that whatever may be
the source of the threat, most of us continue to physically and emotionally react to the
stressors of modern life in the same way that we did as inhabitants of the wild – a habitual
response which we now find difficult to unlearn. If this be true, then, obviously, in the area
of stress reaction, the remarkable elevation in biological status is yet to be satisfactorily
accompanied by a progressive elevation in Consciousness. It is high time we outgrew our
habitual reactions and responded with more maturity to stress.
Man is a mental being and we do of course psychologically react to stress, though this reaction
appears immature. In fact, we use a number of psychological manoeuvring techniques like
blaming others (projection), minimising the importance of the situation (denial), or avoiding
the stressor (repression) (5). Such skills are based on internal defence mechanisms.
The study of psychopathology has shown how the use of defence mechanisms can in turn be
ecompensatory and give rise to mental illness. In the Integral Yoga, psychological defence
mechanisms are considered to be features of the vital mind. One must acknowledge that our
present coping skills are at best compromise formulas that do not aim at mastery – one remains
at the same level of consciousness.
The integral approach
Therapists are busy with methods that could help us to face ‘stress without duress’. None,
however, feels the necessity of doing away with the stress reaction altogether. It is too utopian
to surpass; it is easier to repress.
The Integral Yoga which envisages not only a mechanical evolution of forms but also a
psychological evolution of consciousness holds the promise that the hiatus between our
achieved biological status and an idealised utopian state of perfection can be progressively
bridged. Instead of makeshift compromises that may break down at any point, a radical
transformation of consciousness can alone help us to unlearn and outgrow our habitual reaction
to stress. This would free us from stress-linked diseases.
“ And it is only with this spiritual capacity of rising to a higher level and replacing the animal’s
unconsciousness by a spiritual super-consciousness that there comes into the being not only the
capacity to see the goal of existence and to foresee the culmination of the effort but also a
clear-sighted trust in a higher spiritual power to which one can surrender one’s whole being,
entrust oneself, give the responsibility for one’s life and future and so abandon all worries.
Of course, it is impossible for man to fall back to the level of the animal and lose the
consciousness he has acquired; therefore, for him there is only one means, one way to get out
of this condition he is in, which I call a miserable one, and to emerge into a higher state where
worry is replaced by a trusting surrender and the certitude of a luminous culmination — this
way is to change the consciousness (6).”
Surpassing the role of anxiety
It is interesting to note that while anxiety is still an important feature of the struggle for
existence — it motivates us to goal-orientated activities and has a survival value in activating
us during an emergency — anxiety fails to develop in a tamasic environment devoid of
motivation and striving. This was demonstrated by Kral’s study of a concentration camp near
Prague where stress-related disorders failed to develop, even in anxiety prone individuals, in
the absence of the ruthless struggle for survival. On return home, some of the subjects again
developed anxiety-related symptoms as they were back in a world of competition that required
motivation and striving (7).
It could be argued that an easier solution would be an elimination of all stress-provoking
situations. This again is difficult to conceive; after all, a shift from the savage to the modern
man has meant a shift from a largely physical to a largely psychological basis of stress. One
cannot regress to a stress-free vegetative existence; the only other way for a life free of
stressors is a gnostic society that comes as a culmination of a mutant transformation — a
radical change of consciousness.
Value Education: -
Education is a weapon for the people by which they can live a high-quality life. Furthermore,
education makes people easy to govern but at the same time it makes them impossible to be
enslaved. Let us take a look at the incredible importance of education with this value of
education essay.
Importance of Education
Education makes people independent. Furthermore, it increases knowledge, strengthens the
mind, and forms character. Moreover, education enables people to put their potentials to
optimum use.
Education is also a type of reform for the human mind. Without education, the training of the
human mind would always remain incomplete.
Education makes a person an efficient decision-maker and a right thinker. Moreover, this is
possible only with the help of education. This is because education acquaints an individual
with knowledge of the world around him and beyond, besides teaching the individual to be a
better judge of the present.
A person that receives education shall have more avenues for the life of his choice. Moreover,
an educated person will be able to make decisions in the best possible manner. This is why
there is such a high demand for educated people over uneducated people for the purpose of
employment.
Negative Impact of Lack of Education
Without education, a person would feel trapped. One can understand this by the example of a
man who is confined to a closed room, completely shut from the outside world, with no way to
exit it. Most noteworthy, an uneducated person can be compared to this confined man.
Education enables a person to access the open world. Furthermore, a person without education
is unable to read and write. Consequently, a person without education would remain closed to
all the knowledge and wisdom an educated person can gain from books and other mediums.
The literacy rate of India stands at around 60% in comparison to more than 80% literacy rate of
the rest of the world. Moreover, the female literacy rate is 54.16% in accordance with the 2001
population census. These figures certainly highlight the massive problem of lack of education
in India.
To promote education, the government of India takes it as a national policy. The intention of
the government is to target the very cause of illiteracy. As such, the government endeavours to
eradicate illiteracy, which in turn would lead to the eradication of poverty.
The government is running various literacy programmes like the free-education programme,
weekend and part-time study programme, continuing education programme, mid-day meal
programme, adult literacy programme, etc. With the consistent success rate of these
programmes, hopefully, things will better.
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA-NC
Conclusion: -
Spirituality is widespread and increasingly influential. There is a growing use of the term
‘spiritual capital’ with reference to the potential value of spirituality in everyday lives. What
does this term mean? Capital means wealth so spiritual capital is a kind of wealth, that we do
not spend, but one we live by. It stimulates creativity, encourages moral behaviour, and
motivates us to live a more meaningful life. We have the related term ‘spiritual intelligence’.
This provides access to our deepest meanings and motivations. All humans have innate
potential to access their spiritual intelligence and lead a spiritual life.
Stress is a normal reaction to life events. It is what you feel when life demands more than you
are used to or more than you can handle. Some stress can be useful. For example, the stress
reaction can help you catch the last bus of the day, study for a test, or meet a deadline at work.
But stress that occurs too often or for too long can cause problems. It can affect your emotional
health and interfere with relationships and normal daily activities. Too much stress can weaken
your immune system and increase your risk for physical illness. If you already have a medical
problem, stress can make it worse.
Education is one of the most effective ways to make people better and more productive. It is a
tool that can make people easy to lead but at the same time difficult to drive. Education
removes naivety and ignorance from the people, leaving them aware, informed, and
enlightened.
