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Notes on counselling

A consciousness perspective of disability

Dr. Soumitra Basu

Abstract
Society has changed its attitude towards the disabled from the times of ancient Rome and Sparta. This
article tries to understand the phenomenon of disability from the itinerary of ‘waste’ as elaborated by
Sri Aurobindo. His evolutionary paradigm also shows that the recalcitrant parts of the body have to be
dealt with love and care so as to enhance receptivity to transformational changes.

For a long time children with disabilities, continual supervision. Given a choice, many
handicaps, developmental delays and pregnant women would opt for abortion if
deformations were considered to be an antenatal screening suggested disability. It
unwanted burden, a product of divine is a hard fact that such disability imposes
displeasure or a result of some hypothesised considerable psychological, social and
bad parental karma in some past life. Even the financial burden on the family, drains out
great Aristotle favoured a law that would resources and deprives the non-disabled
not allow any deformed child to survive. In siblings of adequate parental care, love and
ancient Sparta, abandonment of deformed attention.
infants was a legal requirement enforced by
the State regardless of parental wishes. Despite all these difficulties, parents,
guardians and caregivers go on attending,
Society has become more humane in recent nursing and loving disabled children, serving
times. Moreover with parents opting for them without any great expectation. It has
fewer offspring, the scenario is different to been found many times that at the demise
when larger households had less inhibition of such disabled children, parents, usually
in dispensing with a disabled infant. One mothers had a mixed response. On the one
cannot however vouchsafe that unconscious hand they felt gratitude to the Almighty as
death wishes are not harboured by otherwise the child had been relieved from undesirable
commendable caregivers of chronically and unwanted suffering. On the other, they
disabled, non-ambulatory subjects who found it difficult to live with a vacuum in
have been bed-ridden since birth and need life as they had spent a lifetime sacrificing

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