Imagination plays a great deal in learning

Great learning, understanding and acquiring new knowledge (in all subject matters), to me, come from unlimited and broad imagination. Without great imagination, children won’t be able to learn, to grow and to change. In the conversation between Scott and Jane Goodall, an internationally renowned primatologist and the world’s foremost authority on chimpanzees, they mentioned about suffering (dukkha in Buddhism) in two elements: one is that we want escape things that make us unhappy, thinks that cause pain. The other one is our longing to be aligned with something greater than we are right now. This second thing is very important for us to recognize. Thus, the important thing is if you don’t strive to find it then life seems to lack meaning. Jane stated that our life is a series of attempts to get higher ad higher toward the goal, we can’t cope by ourselves. There is a real longing in people to reach up to this higher state of being. Yet, children these days seem to lack—connection with everyone else. Children in the West have so many things, from video games to cell phones, and yet they have a lot of loneliness and sense of anxiety. Children used to play and laugh and have fun and being creative, and they have a sense of connection with everyone else. We, as adults, seem to take all these things away from them. We are going to tell them they need a video game to be happy. Once children have grown up with the video games and the violent movies, it is very difficult to change their mind stream. Therefore, they need to be instilled the goodness or plant the seeds for goodness and peace—more meaningful and imaginative

Goodall stated about the state of togetherness and the tools for change that we needed to break down the artificial barriers we’ve created between the rich and the poor, between countries, between cultures, between religions, between ethnic groups, between countries, between old and young very often, and between humans and animals. If you imagine that I give you a seed and you take it to Tibet and you plant it, well, it will grow in Tibet only if it’s nurtured by the Tibetan people. And when the fruits come, they’ll be the Tibetans’ fruits. I can take a seed and plant it in Congo and the same will be true. When all these fruits and leaves blossom out there they will be something we all made together.” The Future of Peace,Page 325

The law of Dharma and the Learning of a second/foreign language...some connection there!?

After the read on The Future of Peace, I could not help but quesioned myself of the connection between the teaching of the Buddha and teaching English as a second or foreign language. During the discussion between Scott Hunt and Maha Ghosananda (known as The Ghandhi of Cambodia), Maha Ghosananda stated, “If you look down upon people, are very proud and haughty, your mind will become ignorant. If you are respect everybody, because the whole world is your house and all human beings are your mother. Then you will become very wise. You must have su, chi, po, li. Su means to listen, chi means to think, pu means to question, and li means to record. To listen, to think, to question, and to record, these make you become very wise. If you don’t have them you become ignorant. That is the law of dharma.” (The Future of Peace, p.175)