Question- Describe importance of Spiritual Values in human life and explain its determinants. How to establish Spiritual Values in Indian Society?

Answer -

Spiritual values are important because they support your purpose in life.

The point of having your own unique experiences as an individual in this world of constant change is that it leads to continual personal growth, and that means growth in consciousness.

Because the mind is nonphysical, human consciousness can be expanded. Your physical brain may be approximately the same size as everyone else’s, but your field of consciousness is free to expand. Growth in consciousness is, literally, growth in the size of your mind because the mind is independent of the brain.

You can demonstrate the separateness of brain and mind by observing the following paradox. Go into the deepest state of meditation that you can achieve and observe what happens. The process involves slowing down your brainwaves so that your mind can rise to higher frequencies of consciousness. Meditation slows down the brain cycles to a lower frequency so that your nonphysical mind can become free to rise in frequency and reach higher realms of consciousness.

The physical brain is a receiver, processor and transmitter of thoughts. Your mind is nonphysical and therefore has higher capabilities than your physical brain. Your mind lives on forever and grows with the experience that you gain in life.

The spiritual meaning of life is that we are here to continually grow in consciousness.

Factors affecting Spiritual Values

Family and Values

Acquisition of spiritual values among school children lies in the parental teachings and parent’s own value laden behaviour. Children are keen in their observation of how parents interact and behave with their family members, neighbours and friends in their life. To study the parental effect on value learning by children a study was conducted to examine the values of 37 girls from kindergarten in fifth grade. They interviewed and asked those children to give written and verbal assent. They found that children’s acquisition of moral values had direct effect of parents and other adults particularly girls were found to be experiencing a communal sense throughout their interaction with adults.

The type of family also influences spiritual values development among children. The forces of social change including urbanization and westernization has lead the trend of nuclear family system where unfortunately the grandparents and other elderly figures are crucial. Parents are working and nobody is left at home to guide their behaviour by correcting them as what is right and what is wrong. Social values of parents and children living in joint and nuclear families were examined. The main objectives were to examine the difference in the social value of children and their parents living in joint and nuclear families. The sample consisted of 360 participants (240 parents and 120 children). Findings of this study revealed that there was no significant difference between the values of children and parents living in joint families. However, significant difference was found between the social values of children and parents living in nuclear families. Thus, family structure does influence the values of children.

Schools and Teachers

Indeed, after parents teachers are at the ideal position in children’s life to teach them values. Even at certain stages of development in the process of identification children follow more of the saying of their teachers than parents. At such situations teachers have the key to cultivate spiritual values in children by guiding them to the right path. Theoretical writing as “A Teacher has to set a high standard of moral behaviour before the child” supports this notion. The school plays a very important role in the moral values of the child. Through the organization of various curricular and co-curricular activities, teachers can foster among children various moral qualities. In the teaching of different subjects like languages and social studies etc., teacher may stress moral qualities like love, sacrifice, self-control, truthfulness, uprightness, etc. Dramas, games and sports provide many opportunities for an appeal to the moral sense of the students.

Spiritual Dimensions of Indian Culture

Spirit is the non-material, animating and immortal part of man. According to Sri Aurobindo, Spirit is the self existence being, with infinite power of consciousness and unconditional delight. All contacts with the Spirit or Self, the Higher Consciousness and Divine are termed as ‘spiritual’: For man to become divine in consciousness, and to act and live inwardly and outwardly the Divine Life, is meant what is meant by Spirituality. As explained by Sri Aurobindo. Elsewhere he has further defined Spirituality as “the attempt to know and live in the highest self, the divine, the all-embracing unity, and to raise life in all its parts to the divines possible values.”

Indian culture is a continuing culture – a living factor – in the life of nearly one-seventh of the human race, unlike the ancient cultures, e.g., Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman and former Chinese, which are now of the historical value only.

The Indian tradition provides a very rich of concepts and ideas in the domain of personality development. These ideas have been presented elaborately in the Vedas and Upanishads which are the richest sources of understanding personality development in ancient Indian thought. The issues of self, soul, human nature, human existence, and human experience in terms of what they are, what they mean, how they are determined, their manifestation in the human being and their role in mediating personality development from the core themes around which personality development can understand according to the ancient philosophical tradition. As we have seen above, the meanings of the terms communal and communalism are more or less clear, despite the bitter controversies between supporters and opponents. By contrast, the terms ‘secular’ and ‘secularism’ are very hard to define clearly, although they are also equally controversial. In fact, secularism is among the most complex terms in social and political theory. In the western context the main sense of these terms has to do with the separation of church and state. The separation of religious and political authority marked a major turning point in the social history of the west. This separation was related to the process of “secularization” or the progressive retreat of religion from public life, as it was converted from a mandatory obligation to a voluntary personal practice.

Secularization in turn was related to the arrival of modernity and the rise of science and rationality as alternatives to religious ways of understanding the world. In India secularism is largely practiced with tolerance and deep rooted spiritualism.

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