Episode Details

📎 Main topics in this episode:

- Applying the six levels of thinking to the study of the sastras

1) Memorizing

2) Understanding

3) Practical application

4) Thinking and analyzing

5) Evaluation

6) Hypotheses

- Why is it useful to study the Vedanta-sutra?

- The Bhaktivedanta Bhasya

The main ideas:- Applying the six levels of thinking to the study of the sastras.

- An idea that is prevalent in modern educational psychology to promote higher levels of education and thinking is Bloom's Taxonomy, based on six stages of thinking.

- It offers a framework for analyzing and evaluating concepts, processes, procedures, and principles, rather than just remembering information.

- It teaches the students how to go deeper in their studies and understand and apply what they are learning. This is a technology that can be very useful when we study the sastras, bringing us from the level of just reading information, to the level of being able to understand and apply it.

- Reaching the higher stages can help us in better understanding and finding practical applications for the spiritual knowledge we are studying.

- Still better is that the advanced levels of thinking are more efficient methods of study, in other words, they help us to learn things faster than the lower levels.

- As we gradually understand and progress through the six levels, we can improve our ability to understand the sastras and apply their knowledge to solve the practical struggles we find in our day-to-day lives and on our path back to Godhead.

- This scale therefore is nothing new, it just describes a natural process. This same scale can be applied to all areas of knowledge.

1) Memorizing

- The first level is remembering, or memorizing pieces of information. This is what children do in primary school when they have to memorize the arithmetic table or verbal tables and give the correct answers in exams, for example.

- This level may be necessary when we need to memorize small bits of information that we will have to frequently use later. We read, repeat, answer questions, and so on. We get down to this level when we try to memorize using flashcards, for example.

- However, this level is not very efficient, because it is very tedious, and restricts us to just little bits of information, doing little in terms of understanding the information we memorize or developing critical thinking.

2) Understanding

- The second level is based on trying to comprehend some text, lecture, or other piece of information we are studying.

- When we operate on the first level, we will just see it as a pile of information we may try to memorize. The soul is eternal, Krsna is God, the three modes of nature are goodness, passion, and ignorance, and so on.

- On the second level, however, we try to understand it, see the logic behind it, and see how these different pieces of information fit together.

- As we understand, we become able to also explain it. One example of an exercise that helps us to develop this stage of thinking is explaining something we read using our own words.

- This ability is essential when we speak about transmitting Krsna Consciousness because we need to be able to explain the concepts of the scriptures in simple ways, according to people's language and understanding.

- Two persons may be reading the same book, but they will have completely different results when doing it at the first or second level.

- At the first level, one will just remember bits of information from the text, but will not be able to understand or remember it as a whole, while someone reading at the second level will be able to remember the basic logic