LESSON: 2: Joy and Pain Shaft🔗

Introduction: Introducing how we connect our thoughts and create joy and pain shafts

Goals: To make them understand that the shafts doesn't exist. It is just selective memory. The very shaft is your imagination.

Click: We constantly create shafts of pain or joy.

About the topic: A small diagram is shown, to understand how thoughts flow through the mind; and how you connect them. Each thought in the mind is shown in different shape, size and color. One may be related to joy or a joyful experience; the next may be related to some pain. Life is filled with different kinds of incidents related to joy, (school, party, friends, parents, tour) You don't look at life as it is. What do you usually do? You collect only the incidents related to joy and create a shaft, connecting only those ideas, and you think your life is nothing but joy. You think that your life is a long chain of joy, a joy shaft. The joy that you experienced last year, the joy that you experienced this year, the joy that you experienced yesterday, the joy that you are experiencing today are all independent, individual, unconnected thought shafts. At the present moment, you connect all those thoughts and create a big shaft of joy. You may identify your joy with an object, a person, or a space like a particular vacation resort. Now you will try again and again to bring that shaft of joy back in your life; to bring that person, that object, that space or that same incident back in your life. Ask the child to try and recall some experience with any person or object or space wherein with the same person (mother, father,

friends, grandma, grandpa) or object (ice-cream, chocolate, toys) or space (beach, resort, vacation) but the experience would be varied and not the same. So make them understand that they will not be able experience the same joy again. This puts you in further pain. In life, we constantly create either shafts of pain or joy. If you create the shaft of joy, you try to elongate it! But you don't understand that you can neither elongate the joy shaft nor break the pain shaft – simply because the shaft itself doesn't exist. It is just selective memory. The very shaft is your imagination.

Assessment:

Evaluation: Evaluate if the child is able to express how they connect the thoughts and create the joy and pain shaft.

Art of the Day - Bits of paper collage

Materials needed: Color bits of paper, plain sheet, glue.

Procedure: Give the materials needed to each child. Explain to the child that they can cut bits of colored paper and stick it on the plain sheet in their own design or pattern or figure.

Inference: Our mind comprises of many thoughts like the bits of paper but when we organize our thoughts we can create wonders.

© 2011 Copyright Nithya Gnanadhan Trust

Activity - Repeating the same action

Goals: To enable the children to be aware of being in the now and concentrating on one activity.

Presentation: A child is given an action that he loves to do and is asked to repeat the same action again and again, till he feels what is the point of this action? Then again change the action and ask the child to repeat it in the same manner. Now explain how the mind really gets bored even if we are crazy about repeating the action.

Interpretation: This activity focuses on being in the now and concentrating on the present activity without having any thought.

Workshop-1 Debate Children can debate on pain versus joy

© 2011 Copyright Nithya Gnanadhan Trust

Unclutch - The Nature of the Mind