CEILING ON DESIRES LESSON PLAN - I AM Mother Earth



CEILING ON DESIRES LESSON PLAN

CHARACTER CRAFTING – THE LIFE OF RACHEL CARSON

Group 3

Purpose: In what ways can we save the environment through a connection with Ceiling on Desires?

Materials needed: copies for each student of “Global Balance for Peace” and “Reducing Your Environmental Impact” (attached), paper, pens/pencils

1. 3 Oms, 3 Gayatris, Guided Light Meditation

2. Quotation

“In order to protect Nature, man has to practice a ceiling on desires.” Baba

3. Discussion

What are some ways that capping our desires can protect Nature? (see attached sheet, “Reducing Your Environmental Impact”)

4. Global Balance for Peace

“The whole Cosmos is made up of the basic elements of Space, Air, Fire, Water and Earth. Sound, touch, form, taste and smell represent their attributes. All these have emerged from Sat-Chit-Ananda (being, awareness, bliss), the prime source.” – Baba, May 15, 2000

By revealing this Divine relationship between man and the five elements, Baba has raised all objects in Nature – animate as well as inanimate – to a level of sacredness. We should conserve, enrich and love Nature in all its bountiful diversity. (Preface, Sri Sathya Sai Educare Lesson Plans, Sri Sathya Sai Bal Vikas Trust, Mumbai, India)

However, instead of conserving Nature, our unlimited desires have strained the very fibers of this earth:

“Man's misadventures have created several problems for the entire mankind. He has polluted the five elements causing havoc on the earth. There is pollution everywhere -- in air, water, food and so on. His misdeeds coupled with his evil thoughts and feelings have degraded human life on the earth. If man acts in the righteous way, there will be no pollution at all.” – Baba (15 May 2000, "Divine Origin of Five Elements," Brindavan)

5. Rachel Carson –Standing up for the Environment

Before sharing the story (attached), ask the students how many of them have heard of Rachel Carson. Let them share what they know about her before going into her experiences. If none of the students have heard of Carson, ask if any of the students have ever seen an eagle (in the wild or in a zoo). (The eagle was almost driven to extinction due to the chemical DDT. Rachel Carson’s work led to an awareness of the dangers of DDT and its eventual ban.)

6. Discussion

If humans practiced a ceiling on their desires, how would this have changed this story?

7. Placing a Ceiling on Desires to Protect Nature

Sai Baba urges us to develop a lost art, “the golden quality of contentment,” and to place a curb on desires as an essential step in spiritual development. A Ceiling on Desires is necessary for leading a peaceful and meaningful life. “There are four components in the term ‘Ceiling on Desires.’ They are respectively, curb on excessive talk, curb on excessive desires and expenditure, control of consumption of food, check on waste of energy.” The object of the program is to “prevent waste of money, time, food, and other resources, and to use the difference for the welfare of the people.” (Suggestions for Study Groups and Individual Use of the Ceiling on Desires Program, by Phyllis Krystal)

We are told that less is more; the trouble is we don’t believe it. We have absorbed from personal experience that more money is better than less, and more food is better than less. Not only does more seem obviously better, but we believe that if we have more, we get more, and we are happier. But to get what we want, we become slaves to our desires. Wanting takes away our freedom. It is only when we have no desires that we are free. Baba says, “Man is deluded by his unlimited desires – he is living in a dream world. He is forgetting supreme consciousness. That is why it is important to keep our desires under control, to place a ceiling on them. Desires are prisons. Man can be freed only by limiting his wants. You should have desires only for life’s bare necessities.”

We have been conditioned to regard money, food, time, and energy as our possessions. Actually, they all belong to Baba. Therefore, we are not the owners, but their managers. We need to ask ourselves if we are good managers of money, food, time, and energy. Are we using all of these divine resources as He would want us to? Our daily question should be: “How does Baba want me to use His gifts of money, food, time, and energy today?” This relieves the heavy burden we carry when we consider each of the four areas as our own personal possessions and use each one for selfish purposes. (Suggestions for Study Groups and Individual Use of the Ceiling on Desires Program, by Phyllis Krystal)

Placing a ceiling on our desires protects the natural world as well. “Nature is more progressive than Man, and to protect nature, Man has to exploit it within limits. When Man tampers with Nature recklessly, it reacts adversely and trouble arises. In order to protect Nature, Man has to practice Ceiling on Desires.” – Baba (Sanathana Sarathi, February 1993, p. 45)

How do our actions impact nature?

a. Arrogance and irresponsibility: believing we have a right to use resources.

b. Consumerism: arises from lack of contentment stimulated by all forms of advertising media and encourages rapid and wasteful depletion of resources.

c. Greed: using more than we need, sometimes through ignorance.

d. Laziness: not liking to do the work or take the necessary steps to change wasteful habits, such as learning to reduce, reuse, and recycle.

8. Activities

a. Have the students brainstorm ways in which we can reduce harmful effects to the environment.

b. Next, hand out “Reducing Your Environmental Impact.” (attached)

c. Next, have them write down on paper any interactions they had with the environment the day before. On another sheet of paper, have them write down ways in which they could improve that day, taking into account wiser uses of energy and more respect for the environment.

d. Next have the students as a group create a description of a model community and how it would look if everyone had more respect for the environment and wiser usage of energy.

9. Affirmation

I respect the environment and help to protect it.

10. POWERPOINTS (Pearls of Wisdom Enhancing Resolve) -- Public Speaking

Students write down three “pearls of wisdom” they learned during this lesson. Then one student will get up and discuss one of these at the end of the lesson.

11. Life Application

See how many ways you can participate in Reducing Your Impact on the Environment this week, using the list handed out. Record these in your journal.

Rachel Carson –Standing up for the Environment

“Man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.” – Rachel Carson (CBS television interview, 1963)

Rachel Louise Carson was always a writer. Born in 1907 in Springdale, Pennsylvania, she developed a love for reading and writing at an early age; her first story was published in the St. Nicolas literary magazine when she was 10. Though she was captivated by birds and all of nature as a child, her interest in writing led her to choosing an English major at Pennsylvania College for Women. In her junior year, a biology course reawakened her “sense of wonder” about nature, prompting her to switch her major to zoology.

While studying at the Marine Biological Laboratories in Woods Hole, Massachusetts she first saw and became enchanted with “the enormous mysteries of the sea” (Scientists and Thinkers of the 20th Century, Time Magazine, March 29, 1999, p. 187). From this point on, her writings focused more and more on marine zoology, and in 1951 she won the John Burroughs Medal and the National Book Award for “The Sea Around Us.”

Success permitted Carson to write full time and her new celebrity gave her the opportunity to speak out on concerns she felt strongly about. As early as 1945 – before most people were aware of its dangers – she spoke out about government abuse of new chemical pesticides such as DDT, in particular the “predator” and “pest” control programs, which were dispensing poisons with little regard for the impact on other creatures. Her initial writings about the impacts of DDT on all life in the treated areas went unnoticed.

Meanwhile, the insecticide arsenal had been augmented by dieldrin, parathion, heptachlor, malathion and other compounds many times stronger than DDT, all of which were distributed by the Department of Agriculture for public use. “The more I learned about the use of pesticides, the more appalled I became,” wrote Carson. “I realized that here was the material for a book. What I discovered was that everything that meant the most to me as a naturalist was being threatened, and that nothing I could do would be more important” (Time Magazine, March 29, 1999, p. 188).

With her fame and reputation for precision, Carson could count on the support of leading scientists and conservation organizations. However, magazines had little interest in this gloomy subject. Then, in 1957, wildlife started dying after a mosquito-control campaign near Duxbury, Massachusetts, followed by a pointless spraying of a DDT/fuel oil mix over eastern Long Island to eradicate gypsy moths. Next, an all-out war in the South against fire ants did such widespread harm to other creatures, that the public started to get alarmed. A great furor arose across the country over the spraying of cranberry plants with aminotriazole, which led to an Agriculture Department ban on all cranberry marketing just before Thanksgiving 1959.

Carson’s poignant description of the dangers of pesticides in her 1962 book, “Silent Spring,” galvanized both her supporters and opponents: “There once was a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings....Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change…. There was a strange stillness....The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of scores of bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.”

Although this description was of a fictitious town, its depiction was completely accurate. Scientists at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service discovered that exposure to DDT or related chemicals, even when doing no observable harm to the parent birds, could seriously affect reproduction by causing the shells to be too thin to support chick development. The most famous of all birds to be affected is the symbol of the U.S. – the bald eagle. This bird was almost driven to extinction because it could not reproduce. It is only in the past few decades that eagle populations have returned to healthy levels.

Carson was violently assailed by threats of lawsuits and derision; a huge counterattack was organized and led by the chemical industry – including such industry giants as Monsanto, Velsicol and American Cyanamid, and supported by the Agriculture Department and the mainstream media.

However, Carson brought two strengths to this battle: a scrupulous respect for the truth and a remarkable degree of personal courage. She had checked and rechecked every paragraph in Silent Spring, and the passing years have revealed that her warnings were, if anything, understated (introduction to Silent Spring by Vice President Al Gore, 1994 edition). Conservation groups rallied to her defense. Audubon and National Parks Magazine published excerpts from the book, raising the public’s awareness and causing Carson’s attackers to back off. In their campaign to defame Carson, the chemical industry had only increased public awareness.

Carson was not a born crusader but an intelligent and dedicated woman who rose to the occasion to fight for something she believed in passionately. “The beauty of the living world I was trying to save,” she wrote in a letter to a friend in 1962, “has always been uppermost in my mind – that, and anger at the senseless brutish things that were being done. I have felt bound by a solemn obligation to do what I could – if I didn’t at least try I could never be happy again in nature. But now I can believe that I have helped a little.”

And help she certainly did – one of her legacies was the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 – established in large part due to the concerns and the consciousness that Rachel Carson had raised.

Reducing Your Environmental Impact

1. Turn down the heat and air conditioning

2. Replace incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs

3. Caulk leaks around windows, doors and electrical outlets

4. Turn off the power:

➢ Avoid using electric and gas appliances when you can i.e. leaf blower, electric can openers, hair dryers

➢ Turn off lights, computer, TV etc. promptly when finished with them (Phantom load – televisions, stereos etc. with remote controls, computers, telephone answering machines and appliances with clocks use electricity even when off)

5. Replace old appliances with energy efficient ones

6. Use less hot water:

➢ Turn down the thermostat on hot water heater

➢ Insulate the hot water heater

➢ Run dishwasher and washing machine with full loads

➢ Install low flow shower heads

➢ Take shorter showers

7. Recycle everything you can:

➢ Curbside – cans, glass, plastic, paper or at a recycling center

➢ Plastic bags can be recycled at grocery stores

➢ Ink cartridges from laser printers can go back to the manufacturer

➢ Packing Styrofoam peanuts can be taken to Mailboxes stores

➢ Repair or refurbish appliances instead of replacing whenever possible

8. Buy recycled products (toilet paper, tissue, paper towels, napkins, paper, file folders, plastic bags, sponges

9. Reduce use of products made from oil or other mined minerals (insect and weed control products made from herbs and other plants

➢ Use soap made from plants as opposed to detergents made from oil

➢ Reduce use of disposable plastic items such as plastic bags and wraps

➢ Reduce use of Styrofoam cups and plates

➢ Use rechargeable batteries when batteries are required

10. Reduce use of products made from trees

➢ Don’t waste paper

➢ Cancel unused magazine and newspaper subscriptions

➢ Recycle all paper allowable in your area & use recycled paper products

➢ Avoid excessive packaging whenever possible

11. Keep appliances and cars maintained

12. Use microwave, toaster oven or other small appliance to cook small amounts of food, and pressure cookers for foods that cook a long time

13. Food

➢ Don’t waste food

➢ Vegetarian food uses fewer natural resources to produce

➢ Freshly prepared food and locally grown food saves the energy used at the processing plant, packaging and transportation costs

➢ Organic food is not grown with fertilizers and pesticides made from oil

14. Plant a tree

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