How can spiritual wisdom be introduced in academic curricula?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

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So can spiritual wisdom be introduced in colleges and universities as syllabus? If you ask, how can it be done? Sri Prabhupada certainly wanted it. He said that when he was at the GTU, Graduate Theological Union in America, he said that there should be a university that studies the soul, Department of the Study of the Soul. Certainly spiritual knowledge has to be there and there has to be some system of education, some university or some educational body that provides that knowledge.
Now how that will be integrated into present education system, that is a challenge. If it is presented as philosophy, then the problem is there are different schools of philosophy. And why should one particular philosophy be considered as the absolute to be taught, to be taught in schools.
So that is a challenge which will come up. If it is presented as science, then we need empirical evidences. And there are some empirical pointers like past life memories, near the experiences.
But they are not yet adequate enough to make the concept of soul acceptable to mainstream science. So then where could it be introduced? It could be introduced as values for additional value education. So if you have a spiritual foundation, then there can be ethical values, ethics, business ethics, corporate ethics, social ethics, whatever.
These will be given, this will have a stable intellectual foundation. And you can move towards a more ethical society with a spiritual society, when society has a spiritual orientation. That is one way of introducing it.
So there are different ways in which things can be done. It should be done and because the mainstream education system right now is largely centered on producing money making machines. So the success of the education is if people can generate money and get salaries.
They should become efficient cogs in the economic wheel. That is the primary purpose. So yes, we say that dharma artha kama moksha, dharma also leads to artha.
But in the Bhagavatam’s idea, dharma is for transcendence, it is not for artha. So how it can be introduced, that is something which our generation, future generations of devotees will have to, in each individual situation adapt and then present. There are devotees who have been successful to some extent in each of these.
There are devotees who have done philosophy doctorate and things like that. And then as a system of philosophy, when they present the Bhagavad Gita with the bhakti wisdom, it is in many ways intellectually superior to other schools of thought. It may not be presented in the mainstream education as the absolute source of knowledge.
But even if it is shown as one of the sources of knowledge, people themselves will see, oh this makes much more sense than others. There are some devotees who have done that. As a co-curricular extracurricular course in Italy, Matsyavatar Prover’s made several courses which are fairly good parts of, which have got mainstream respectability.
Some other devotees have entered into academics and they are trying to do some things. So with respect to science, it’s a challenge. Because the concepts of God, soul, these don’t have very easy empirical evidences.
And they are scientifically controversial. So it will take more time. But I would say the best way right now to penetrate the education system is through values.
Whether we talk about value education for students, whether we talk about ethics for corporate professionals, and if we can present how the spiritual wisdom can help shape a more ethical society, a more ethical student body, a more ethical corporate culture, then that is a way in which we can penetrate the mainstream education system also.