Meditation and it’s Impact on Rural Development Activities in Nepal

Abstract

Nepal is economically one of the least developed countries. Nepal’s society is predominantly rural. Development of Nepal is rural development because 80% people reside in rural areas. Most of the development notions views development solely as economic development. The truth is development is not only related to economic changes, but also changes in people’s attitude, customs and beliefs. Human resource is one of the most important determinants of rural development because the proper utilization and mobilization of other resources depends upon the capacity of human resource. Various developmental approaches consider human development as crucial prerequisites for development while the human development approaches strongly advocates that human capital is a major contributor to the development and no other development approaches are successful unless accompanied by development of human capital. Meditation has been defined as: "self regulation of attention, in the service of self- inquiry, in the here and now. Vipassana is a distinct meditation technique. It is a logical process of mental purification through self-observation. It is a non-sectarian, scientific, result-oriented technique of truth realization. The technique of Vipassana is a simple, practical way to achieve real peace of mind and to lead a happy, useful life. The objective of the study is to evaluate the relationship between Vipassana meditation and rural development. Most of the definitions of development is not complete because it gives more emphasis to material welfare only and the more important aspects of any development that is the psychological and spiritual aspects is left untouched. Actually development in its true sense is the balance between both material as well as spiritual aspects of life, because money alone can’t buy happiness. This is the experience of many rich countries. And the source of happiness is within oneself and one has to search within oneself to experience peace and happiness, which is possible only through meditation. Dhammakitti Vipassana center and Dharmashringa Vipassana center were taken as the study area. The sample design adopted here was purposive sampling method. This sample design had been adopted because of the vastness of the study and limitation of time factor. In this study 50 meditators were studied through questionnaire to obtain the required information. The data required for this study was taken both from primary and secondary sources to fulfill the objectives of the study. Traditional methods such as participation, observation, structured questionnaire and interview were used to collect the necessary and reliable data. And the collected data were analyzed descriptively. The results demonstrate that, at average Vipassana has proved to be highly beneficial to the meditators and the majority of subjects benefited immensely in all aspects of their life by practicing Vipassana. The results also indicate that Vipassana is a scientific technique and has the capacity to reform human mind and character and to bring about positive changes in the lives of meditators. Hence rural development in its true sense is not possible without meditation and Vipassana is one of the best meditation techniques. It is recommended that Vipassana should be recognized by the Government and new policy should be introduced to promote Vipassana throughout the country so that the dream of “New Nepal” can become reality where everybody’s material need is completely fulfilled and more and more people are practicing Vipassana to experience the ultimate peace and happiness that the existence can ever offer.