COURSE of STUDIES

A draft of the course proposed for wisdom seeking students of the Narayana Gurukula.

Possible venue for studies are tentatively at Fernhill, Nilgiris, Tamil Nadu; Sreenivasapuram, Varkala in Kerala, ShantiNagar, Palakkad, Portland, Oregon and Bainbridge, Washington, in the USA.

Narayana Gurukula Foundation is a contemplative institute for higher education to benefit all wisdom seekers, irrespective of the student's country of origin, faith, language, gender, economic means, and educational status. As the Narayana Gurukula Foundation is founded by Nataraja Guru holding in his mind Narayana Guru as an exemplar in wisdom appreciation, there is bound to be a bias for the fundamental teachings of Narayana Guru, in the course proposed. The roots of Guru's value vision belong essentially to classical Indian studies of Aryan and Dravidian origin. This natural affinity of the Gurukula to India's historical culture and civilization doesn't exclude the basic stand of the major religions of the world: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam of the Semitic areas of contemplative mysticism and the Jain, Buddhist religions originated from India, and the theistic Indian religions like Saivism, Vaisnavism and Sikhism (or recent origin).

The period for this course of studies is limited to seven years. Therefore, it is not possible to make extensive studies in any of the above mentioned disciplines. The main interest of this course is not to make a historic survey, but to help students to evolve ultimately into their own utmost development, which thy have to achieve by continuously making their immediate and present interest and abilities progressively channeled to their unfoldment to fit into the future of their physical, aesthetic, moral, intelligent, and spiritual advancement.

Two basic aims of the Narayana Gurukula Foundation are:
1. Self realization in its accurate and fullest sense
2. To become a fellow citizen of every living member of the human family of the world at large.
In other words each person should be able to take upon him or her a total commitment to the welfare of mankind as a whole with unlimited liability. Such a course of study is to be placed within three spheres:
1. The enormous unlimited field of the possibility of search with a view of turning to the relevant field of the most probable.
2. Helping each person to become fully experienced researcher by making his or her program of action fundamentally based on the ultimate probe by which one can narrow the field of the possible into the most probable.
3. The exposure to the expanding consciousness of extending one's avenues of interest to the maximum opportunity of promoting the most relevant probability into the facts of life by which actualization of values can result in one's personal endeavor.

Where to Begin and What Should be the Priorities?

The search is to begin with an introspection of each individual. By listing the person's value vision and making a studious effort to define, describe and illustrate the values which each person holds supremely important to the individual's actualization of life's goal. Out of the value matrix each person can make convincingly a chosen path for his or her ultimate pilgrimage.

Why Values?

From microbes to the fully developed wise person two questions are held before each.
1. Where is one placed? This question can be put better for human beings as 'where am I placed?'
2. Subsequent possible question are 'what or whom am I related to?'
Ultimately there may arise the question, 'how can my chance relationship be fully taken advantage of to arrive at the most satisfactory performance. This necessarily has to include in it the uniqueness of a person as well as the participation of the person in the universal context. The desired result can be achieved only through positive relationship of caring, sharing, and working together from the basis of a commonly accepted criteria of universal and benevolent knowledge.

Why Uniqueness?

To explore a possibility of each person's position in the world is to be considered only by interlinking a person's position in time and space. No person or no thing can be simultaneously at two places in a given time. Thus, the position of the seeker comes instantaneously where the search is to be commenced. It is in reference to the 'position in time and space' that the vista of a certain possibility might arise as an area of consciousness with deep temporal and futuristic significance. The first delineation that comes in deciding th size of the possibility is by relating everything in the world to the uniqueness of the seer or the knower who will invariably also be the doer. Hence possibilities stem mainly from the uniqueness of the 'position' held by the programmer, to a position of factual relationship in which the objective environmental aspect and the subjective imperiential aspect can be brought to bear upon on each other in the most meaningful manner. By pursuing less the same methodology of reduction one comes to the unique fact of actualization. Thus without confirming the uniqueness of the educand, no program of education can be commenced.

Why Universal?

The uniqueness of an individual, the individual's position and the individual's structural and functional reality are stemming from a homogeneity that constitute the universal concept of space and time. There is an ever-changing, shifting, moving, streaming flux of being which is held paradoxically in the changeless law of purposive change. Thus the universal is a matrix of innumerable varieties of uniqueness. This brings the categorized requirements of reaffirming the time commencement and it's closure. Thus space time continuum necessitates the individual to be unique. The same law necessitates the uniqueness of the individual to generate the universality of the social matrix to which uniqueness belongs.

What Order Follows When Relating the Uniqueness to Universality?

The incomparable uniqueness and universality gives the monitoring of the greatest theme of search in education. Our continuous search is for becoming fully conversant with values of the highest order. The values invariably belong to the relationship between two unique units and as if in magic both the unique and the universal contribute to the universality of the flux of being. In other words the most desirable study is to decipher all values to make the most valuable probe into the seemingly irrefutable values and make every individual able to arrive at the certitude that can be self-evident. The probability thus resides in the varying and variegating relationship between several sets of uniqueness.

Is it Possible in the Carving of a Program in the Search for the Possibility Without Recognizing the Position That Leads to a Certain Possibility?

The probability of healthy relationship btween units and maintianing the position of a unique perosn can be a hypothesis which may bring contraries. The epistemologies of the unique and the univerals can be correlated only by designing an overall epistemology of the unique and the universals. This is achieved only by exposing the unique individual to the universal society and the universal society coming into encounter with various units which all share collectively. What results from it is well known in the world of science as evolution.

We begin this course of study with an invitation to those who understand that they may have to plunge into fundamentals. For that they may have to question the precedent convictions which are honored ad the bulwark of faith held true for many eons.

At the first step of our entry into this universal search, let each one of us prepare our own bio-data as a value seeker. Use the following chart for it:

1. Time of birth
2. Exact place where you were born.
3. The name and a short history of your father.
4. The name and a short history of your mother.
5. The structure of your family and your position in it.
6. You can leave out any comment of the schooling you had and the public programs in which you happened to be associated with. Instead give genuine questions that have come to your mind up to now.
7. The search you have made, if any.
8. Is the search continuing as an inner urge or have you given it up to revise and restart?
9. What are your personal convictions about you, your relationship with your most intimate partner or co-worker with whom you share your most intimate thoughts?
10. Do you have any religious faith? If yes, what?
a. To what conclusion has that taken you?
b. Are you fully satisfied?
11. If you are joining the course of studies of the Narayana Gurukula Foundation what considerations prompt you to look into its possibilities and probabilities?
12. What is the exact field where you want to actualize your highest search?