Are we living with Human Consciousness or Animal Consciousness?

 

The basic human aspirations are happiness and prosperity. The fulfillment of these aspiration can be done with right understanding, right relationship and prosperity. The urge to learn and make the most use of our intelligence is referred to as right understanding, which deals with higher order human skills.The term right relationship describes the social connections that a person makes throughout his or her life, including those made at home, at work place and in the community. Physical facilities represent both the comforts and the demands of existence and take into account people's physiological needs like food for eating, house for living, clothes, etc. It refers to having or being able to have more physical resources than are required.

With right understanding human can develop right relationship with the others starting from family to the society and the entire existence. Right understanding also helps in the right assessment of the required physical facilities leading to prosperity. In today’s world most of us believes that having money alone equates to having success, and we try to base our explanations of this phenomena on untrue or incomplete information.Now a day’s wealth is treated as a mark of prosperity. People having more wealth are treated as prosperous. So, we are trying to achieve prosperity by maximizing accumulation and consumption of physical facilities.

Now, considering animals, what are their basic requirements? It is food and shelter. Anything else? When an animal feels hungry it searches for the desired food and after having the required amount it gets settled and relaxed in its habitat. Does an animal try to get or collect more food after sufficient feeding? No.  So, it can be said that the physical facilities are necessary and complete for animals to be alive. The animals in their complete life span works only for the physical facilities. Simply working only for physical facility can betreated as living with animal consciousness.

What about humans? Are physical facilities only necessary for human beings? Or human requires something else beyond it? Yes, although physical facilities are necessarily required for human beings but they are not complete for them to fulfill their needs. After having sufficient amount of food to eat, place to live human desires for other plans like entertainment, reading, gaining knowledge, spending time with family and friends, etc. Thus, it is clear from this that although physical facilities are important for humans, it is insufficient on its own to provide all of our demands. Living with right understanding, relationship and physical facilities can be called as human consciousness. Hence this can be concluded that for animals, only physical facilities are necessary and sufficient. But, for human being physical facilities are necessary but not complete.

What is the status of humans today? With misleading prosperity as more physical facility we are only focused on accumulating more and more physical facilities. With having one small car, we try to buy bigger car, with having a sufficient space house we try to own a bigger and luxurious house and so on. Our needs for physical facilities are never ending. For, accumulating all the physical needs we in a practice of using all the fair and unfair means, we are exploiting others and rest of the nature too. While in the race for the physical facilities we are not bothered about the relationships with our family and friends, even with the entire nature and existence. Is this a living with Human Consciousness or with Animal Consciousness? The answer to this question lies within ourselves and we should try to find the answer to this at priority and earliest before being lost in today’s material world.

The answer to all such questions may be resolved with the help of value education.  At JIMS, Greater Noida (https://www.jimsgn.org/) we are practicing value education as a part of teaching learning process to inculcate human values among the students which would be helpful in resolving such types of conflicts.

 

 

Devanshu Dube

Assistant Professor,

BCA Department,

JIMS Greater Noida