Shared by a participant
A small village in Kerala, green, fresh, and clean!
There is a red building standing out in that lush greenery.
A RETREAT is taking place in there.
But one can’t hear the typical discussions, arguments, hurled around opinions, statements of likes and dislikes in the premises even though there are 12 people from various institutes of India, IITs, universities etc.
Why is it so?
The reason is, that the RETREAT is on Natural cognition and there is hardly any need for words in Natural cognition, as it happens through perception, in the realm of experience.
In modernity, language has become the tool of cognition which is creating ‘wrong’ knowledge as the mind plays a big role in it. So, in the Retreat, the focus is not on passing linguistic information as knowledge but, on fewer words, and more experience.
That is shifting the paradigm from word to the world.
The first requirement to enable Natural Cognition is — no arguments, no opinions or judging, no reflections, just pure observation — seeing and listening.
All these are precautions as we, the so-called educated human beings, have the tendency of listening, only to reply or react. The participants, therefore, are requested to listen and hold the doubts and questions, and wait for the realizations to happen over a period of time.
It is a 5-day affair. Every day Jinan conducts not more than two sessions on various issues related to Natural Cognition like the natural content and process of learning How children Learn Naturally, what is Beauty, the Consequences of Literacy, etc.
He also shares some videos and pictures of children’s play which is, in fact, their process of making sense of the world autonomously.
(Jinan has a huge collection of documentation on children’s natural learning, painstakingly done by him and his team.)
During the day there are activities for the participants, designed to differentiate between linguistic/mental experiences versus sensory/ physiological experiences. The activities are more to enhance observations, to understand the way the mind tricks the senses, to connect with nature, and to ‘experience’ Beauty.
Every evening there are films related to the topics without reflecting or having any discussions. This is to hold the experiences and not to use the mind and words.
The participants are engaged in deep observations, and in silence.
During this period, they might have begun the process of undoing whatever conditioning done by schooling and other influences of modernity.
As one of the participants who is a teacher later shared — Now I know what wrong we are doing with children.
There is a person from the ‘Indian Knowledge System’. His confession is-
Rishi Patanjali in Yogasutras talks about valid means of cognition-Pramana. The primary means to know is direct experiences through senses (Indriyas) or Pratyaksha Pramana. This is the universal foundation for knowledge for all beings. Our senses are the receptors of Jnana or knowledge. All other schools of Indian philosophy too agree on this. Knowing through senses also helps in rejection of invalid means of cognition and delusion that have no substantive reality. Also, direct experiences through senses or Pratyaksha Pramana helps in further levels of cognition like inference, analogy, derivation etc.
All this I could understand more clearly after watching Jinan’s documentation and listening to his sessions. Thanks to Jinan I could also understand the delusions of the mind- how the mind creates wrong knowledge.
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To learn about our upcoming retreats on NATURAL COGNITION please join the group https://chat.whatsapp.com/L5PFW4V7nt9C2igBFhUP7J
