Reclaiming the primacy of senses, body, and experience in Knowing and Being
Overview of the workshop
Experientially explore the centrality of experience. The resultant destruction of life around is the result of the denial of experience, body, the senses, and the feminine. To critically explore how the screens (the digital and the textual) have rewired our cognitive architecture, reshaped our behavior, and alienated us from life. The workshop will provide an opportunity to understand the detrimental cognitive habits instilled by the screens- text and digital. Explore ways to de-school and unlearn these habits and establish processes that are life-sustaining from the very start. The process also helps in re-integrating our fragmented selves.
Self-transformation explorations
Contemplative — Experiential — Non-rational
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From known to the unknown - reclaiming our original value system
From word to the world - reclaiming our original cognitive system
Learning to see - structurally sound but functionally damaged
Being Beauty - the biological roots of aesthetics
Reclaiming the Verb -the experiential nature of language
Re Rooting -Being in experience
Objectives of the workshop
The objective of the workshop is to experientially explore and reclaim our senses- the primary knowledge-making tool and to understand how we became fragmented, hierarchical, alienated from our own biology. In other words, trace the journey that led to the making of the anthropocentric humans from their original nature-centric or biocentric being-ness.
The modern man is alienated from life in a fundamental way which is evident from the nature of the modern beingness which is linear, fragmented, hierarchical, exclusionary as is evident from the way we use words and the way we respond to symptoms and hardly ever the cause.
The use of the following expressions and words point to afterthoughts as our response mechanism. A critical examination of all these words points to the fact that we are responding after we have destroyed.
Inclusion, experiential learning, meaningful life, out of box thinking,
The hierarchical nature is evident from the following words
Illiterate, underprivileged, developed, civilized, educated, etc
These words also reveal the linear nature in which we see life.
Deficit syndrome is the manner in which modern man approaches everything as if only by their intervention, things would be set right. It begins with educating children and extends to controlling nature. The first lesson the children learn subconsciously is that they lack something which the parent and the teacher will provide and once you get educated your subconscious lesson is that you are superior to the uneducated.
RETRACING THE JOURNEY
We are formed by what we engage with.
It is very evident that the screen is damaging the way our brain is functioning. There are several studies now showing how children’s brain and behavior is getting rewired due to the screen. We are formed by what we engage with. But we are yet to examine how the previous screen- the book has impacted our formation.
A screen means that something is covering something or obstructing the view. It is obstructing the view of the real world and on the screen, we are looking at ‘not the real world’.
But Book is also a screen that has obstructed our view much before the digital screens came into the picture. With the coming of the printing press in 1436, the real world began to be covered and by the time we reached the 17th century with the proclamation of the Age of Reason…We announced the death of the senses
Process
The process will revolve around grounding students into the sensory mode and reclaiming 18th-century skills to address the 21st Century needs. The course attempts to draw the participant's attention to their own attitude, aptitude, and skills so that they can be on a path of self-improvement. It will also involve shaking up preconceived notions and working towards breaking habits that restrict independent exploration.
