Steminist blog
Non-Duality and Fatherhood
Guest Blogger: Swapan Mukherjee
Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, collectively known as STEM, are considered some of the most important fields of education. They foster creativity, innovation and divergent thinking alongside fundamental disciplines. The world needs more and more STEM graduates to keep pace with the advancement. A longitudinal study conducted with students in New South Wales, Australia, highlights complexity and importance of parental influences on student aspirations to go for this field. Statistics indicate that women remain significantly underrepresented in STEM on account of gender-biased culture, stigmas around many STEM fields and opinionated mediocrity.
The influence of a father on his daughter can create an impact which sprouts and promotes the growth of young minds.
तत्त्वमसि (तत्त्वम्असि)
Tat tvam asi
‘THAT ART THOU’ OR ‘YOU ARE THAT’. This central tenet of Chhandogya Upanishad, a Sanskrit text embedded within the Sama Veda, one of the ancient scriptures in Hinduism upholds thousands of years ago that there is only one universal self the Brahman, an ultimate singular reality and we all, the Atman are one with it as the individual inner self. This Advaita (non-dual) Vedanta philosophy of Upanishad refers that the Brahman, the pure consciousness only is ultimately real whereas the world around us appears as Atman-the soul or individual self, in multitude is an illusory presence of Brahman in the form of self-reflexive nature of consciousness.
With the advent of quantum physics, one of the most remarkable developments of the 20th century, the ancient philosophy of Upanishad echoed the eternal truth in the modern STEM field. The familiar reality of classical physics was disrupted by one that seemed to be too crazy to be true. This indicated that subatomic particles could behave in ways that defied the predictions of classical physics. The famous physicists, Einstein, Bohr, Schrodinger, Heisenberg and others were deeply troubled and discovered that their notion, that the world we see is not the reality itself but a projection onto our consciousness, wasn’t completely new. Quantum physics insists that reality exists as waves, and wave-particle duality arises due to observation. Because we cannot perceive the true wave nature of reality, our observation reduces it to the incomplete reality we see.
The essential truth of life thus, is non-duality, the consciousness. STEMinism spiritually and scientifically disproves gender-biased dogmas, feminist related stigmas around many STEM fields and opinionated intellectual mediocrity of women. As a father of a successful STEMinist daughter, I always believed the non-duality principle and practically never observed any differences between boys and girls except imaginary reflections in the form of physiology, biology and cultural expectations. Feminism, on the contrary is considered in Hindu philosophy a dynamic soul that would significantly be easier to be groomed in the STEM field. I believed the term “daddy’s little girl”, in addition has genuine spiritual connect with daughter which instilled great confidence in my daughter and in turn developed her colossally as STEMinist and a true human being. I tried to facilitate everything that was necessary for the upbringing of a child in common and never isolated her from any domain of intellectual and physical growth. Systematic planning of my daughter’s development revealed prominent results at every stages of her rearing with high accolades in multifarious activities, education, music, dance and somewhat in sports. She developed insatiable curiosity and logical thinking about the world around. It was gratifying to see her grow from the first self-goal in soccer field to lead the soccer team as captain of her Business Enterprise in STEM fields.
The belief, “Man proposes but God disposes” must be visualized from the perspective of apparent reality of nature similar to the wave-particle duality we observe in quantum physics. So does the prevailing beliefs in hiring women in the STEM jobs. The broad-spectrum beliefs differentiate men over women on productivity matter are: work/life balance, family responsibilities and perception of engineering fields as laborious. Physics clearly describes that we will have to go higher and not to be controlled by the entropic principal of nature. As a father I had to guide and tweak here and there in the path of my daughter’s job finding obstacles that was naturally inevitable for the feminist STEM professional that too as a Mechanical Engineer. Ultimately, the immense satisfaction of the Little Girl’s Daddy was seeing her boldly fight her way through each obstruction, created by narrow mindset-the imaginary perspective of the society, standing tall and strong.
