What does SHEN do?

Spiritual Heritage Education Network Inc. (SHEN) is a network of its stakeholders although spread far and wide but many of whom reside in the Kitchener and Waterloo area in Ontario, Canada. The work of our network is therefore in general aimed globally though its direct community outreach is primarily local.

This section of our website attempts to outline the work of the SHEN network in both local and global domains. It should be kept in mind that what is applies locally is also valid globally and vice versa.

All the work that we do is inherently educational in nature. The purpose of our educational endeavor is to open our collective hearts and minds to the fact that all beings, animate and inanimate, in the universe owe our existence to a collective ground of being which is spiritual in nature. Being spiritual, our shared ground of being is beyond our sense perception yet well within the reach of the media of our consciousness: our intellects, hearts and minds. Our sense of our very existence is extremely meaningful in determining how we as perceiving, feeling and thinking human beings relate with each other. Our consciousness of a shared ground of beings at once unites us enabling transcendence of our limiting self interest for love, compassion and fellow feeling for all excluding none.

What prevents us fro loving the others? It is our consciousness of our self interest that keeps us apart from the others and acts as a barrier to our spiritual development. We are conscious of our self interest because we perceive a gap between our ambitions and our achievements, between our wants and our reality of what we feel we have on the ground. The perception of this gap exhibits itself as stress in our minds. The greater the perception of this gap between what we want and what we have on the ground, the greater is the degree of stress. Stress therefore is a barrier to being spiritual. The higher the level of stress, the bigger the barrier to our being spiritual and loving of the other. The higher the level of stress, the more the consciousness of our wants and self interest preventing us from loving.

Can we eliminate stress completely from our minds? Perhaps, not. But we can learn to manage it. Therefore, stress management workshops in the community is a major practical community involvement of SHEN besides its academic undertakings such as courses of study, research, publications, seminars, and conferences of spiritual nature. By learning to manage our stress level, we feel fulfilled learning to transcend the wants and desires otherwise perceived as unfulfilled.