Many people experience our unity with God and thus believe that a spiritual basis for Values Education (VE) is important. This paper suggests that a sense of unity can be achieved through cosmology, which means we can use science and the humanities to educate for a sense of unity.
Science tells us that the universe is a unity of energy in time and perhaps beyond time. For example, all the water on earth, like all the elements and many molecules that make earth and life possible, came from a condensing cloud of fire and stardust. In all its forms, the core of all the matter on earth was created billions of years ago in dying stars. So the life enabling water in our bodies and most if not all of the atoms is older than the earth. Every drop in oceans, rivers, lakes and drinking fountains was born from cosmic explosions, as were all the elements in the periodic table.
Thus, whether in the beginning was the word, or the thought of God, and we are created from God's consciousness, or whether in the beginning was cosmic energy, which by accident formed stars and made all life possible, either way, our existence is an unfathomable miracle, a great wonder, and our consciousness, at its best, is enchanted by our gift of being, whether that gift is gift wrapped by God or a beautiful accident.
Either way, here we are and we want to make the very best of it. We want to celebrate being alive and being with one another. And we want to celebrate the knowledge and wisdom that our ancestors have gifted to us through words, tools, attitudes and habits, passed like the first fire from generation to generation.
The important question for VE is not whether we find our morality in unity with God's, for even if there were no God, there would still be unity. The unity would be in the fact that we are all the same miracles of time, sun, matter and DNA, of tenderness and language. We all want to be cared for, respected and loved. We fear hunger, deceit, loneliness, and death. We all respond to kindness unless somehow we've been terribly wounded. We love to chatter with friends, to laugh, to see courage, kindness and beauty.
So let us agree that God is NOT essential for everyone to justify Values Education. After all, many atheists are profoundly moral and many religious people have harmful values. Even if their God says thou shall not kill, they will stone their child if that child breaks a commandment, and they will say it is holy work to kill another who worships the same God, but in a slightly different way.
This is not to suggest that God is not present and that God's presence is not the source of our quest for values. Let's simply agree that we do not have to find our unifying theme in God. It is enough to know that we all are of the same creation; made from the same energy, have the same hopes and fears, and all hunger for recognition, kindness, support, fun and tenderness.
Thus, we can say that the basis of VE is our unity with each other and with each grain of sand, seed, flower, bee, tear, sunbeam and smile. All exist, products of one-cosmology, one-galaxy and solar system, one-biology and ecology, one-social and cultural continuum. That is a great deal to have in common.
Once we sense our unity, then we are drawn to treat the world and others as we wish to be treated. But to be consistently kind, we must develop our awareness by observing that many times our minds and hearts are divided and we are not kind to others or ourselves. We are ambivalent or worse--very judgmental, very cruel. We gossip and bully, ignore, threaten and hurt others. What we fail to see is that our cruelty, our judgmental thinking and behavior then casts a rejecting, angry shadow back on us, or actually originates within a rejecting shadow within us, a shadow that we carry.
This is why both spiritual and secular traditions in religion and in psychology teach us to witness or be mindful without judging. We are advised to heal the division in our minds and hearts, to heal the divisiveness in our attitudes so we will NOT nourish this fragmentation, and then unconsciously turn it against ourselves.
In mindfulness or witnessing we are taught to let our minds become like a clear stream, to let all our thoughts and feelings be like fish that swim through. Just as the stream does NOT hold onto the fish, so our egos, or our consciousness, should NOT hold on to what is good or bad because if we hold on, then the mind is stopped from the perfect stillness that flows, and we stop growing, stop expanding our awareness, stop achieving an ever more subtle appreciation for the creation that flows within us and outside of us--making us and every moment possible.
Thus, the important thing for VE may not be a unity based on spiritual beliefs, but simply a sense of the unity of creation, and our gift of awareness that enables us to know that unity, and to then feel our responsibility for the creation and for each of the creatures and things in it.
Nature is the unity in the world from which life springs, so when we let ourselves be at one with nature, we sense this unity and we sense our instinct to be stewards, caretakers of nature, just as we have an instinct to be caretakers for one another.
The challenge of living in such unity is to accept ourselves with all of our fears, impulses, destructive and selfish habits. We must learn to see that we make ourselves superior by making someone else inferior. We are better because we are richer, stronger, smarter, taller, tougher, smaller, prettier, younger or older. All these ideas of specialness hurt us because they divide us first within ourselves, and then from others. In this division our insecurity is expressed, and so too our careless, thoughtless, and destructive behavior--as if we want to prove that we don't have to care because if we care then we too are vulnerable and must have compassion born of not yet realized self-acceptance or self-love.
Our secular world's emphasis on specialness is the opposite of cultivating humility. For it is in being special like everyone else, or in our commonness, in our sense of community, in our caring and communication, that we find our unity. The seed of our most caring consciousness is born in our sense of others, and of equality.
This has profound implications for how we design and explore all learning. We see that we do not want to divide or fragment people as we teach for assessments. This of course occurs when students study for competitive tests.
Further, we do not want to divide the world into disconnected subjects and facts, because such division destroys the teacher's and learner's sense of unity that spurs curiosity, exploration, and wonder. Instead, we want to discover how all things are related, interacting, sustaining, and creating. Hummingbirds, snakes, snails, and whales, we need to know that we all sip the same ancient water and inhale the same leaf-green air while living our shared DNA guided lives.
We are naturally curious and each sincerely asked question nourishes new questions. We are greatly enriched when we discover the miracles of how water and oxygen are formed and forever refreshed, how butterflies, salmon, lobsters, and swans migrate, and how DNA changes gills into lungs, scales into feathers and skin.
We also want to enable people to discover how the mind that is relaxed and focused sees clearly, so art, play, building, learning, communicating and caring, nourish compassion unified in the unfathomable, and very likely, Godly beauty of being.