March 21, 2004
Notes on the 200 points on Education
by Mother’s Service Society
Ø A city is full of
life. Greater life teaches you greater things. When life is primitive, the lower
forces are more organised, so one is more defensive. In a city, anybody will be
ready to help you. In a village, everyone will be ready to destroy you, unless
mutual help is necessary.
Ø A city has more
expressions of modern technology. For the curious, the city offers a greater
occasion to understand. Cities have libraries, museums, etc.
Ø
For a person who has a natural endowment of
personality (at birth), he has a greater scope for development in the city. The
city helps develop your personality.
Ø
How? The city helps whatever endowment you have. It
has a maximum and a minimum. If you have opinions, motives, if you are finite,
you will get the minimum out of the city. If you are open-minded and willing to
examine your opinions and motives and subject them to the new opportunity, you
have the maximum opportunity.
Ø
Cities give amorphous, unstructured education. Now
we must give structured, organised education at a higher level meant for
accomplishment.
Ø
Personality is the centralising element in the being
of the person which is open to or receptive to any new experience it can
receive. Such an opening is greater in the city. Character will react.
Ø
Personality is the unformed, unstructured human
energy that loves the challenge of life, is curious to know and has an urge to
act.
Ø
Manners are what I put up for another person. They
can be developed into behaviour by values. Behaviour is what I believe I should
put up. It is changeable, not organised. It can be developed into character by
commitment. Character is structured. Man can change his behaviour, not his
character. Character means the emotions have accepted an idea from the mind.
They won’t change after that. Personality is beyond the character.
Ø
Most people don’t have behaviour.
Ø
If you don’t have personality, you try but you will
accomplish only as much as your father has accomplished. Personality is a development
of the whole. Talents and capacities are partial. Everyone who has accomplished
has a personality.
Ø
Only personality will let you go beyond your
father’s achievement. When skill, talent, and ability accomplish in a
particular field, personality can accomplish in any field or all fields. If you
put Rajaji anywhere, he could accomplish.
Ø
There is no field of life in which there is no
gradation. At any one moment, you are presented with all the gradations. How
you respond determines your future course. It also depends on all the choices
you make before you reach your goal. That which makes the choice is the
personality in life and nature. In the soul, the psychic makes the choice.
The psychic is the soul in nature.
Ø
Making a choice helps to build personality. Any
process that requires centuries in life requires only a split second in Spirit.
What you spiritually and consciously
choose will give you that split second growth. If you are spiritually
unconscious, you know at which level you are unconscious.
Ø
How to become conscious when you are unconscious? 1. Know where you are. 2. Move in that plane
to the positive side. 3. Acquire perfect skill and make it into a talent.
Ø
Don’t be attached to your talents. Aspire to go to
the next higher level.
Ø
Exhaust your energies at this level to go to the
next higher level.
o
Organisation exhausts each level and saturates that.
o
When energy is organised into skill, energy is
exhausted.
o
The exhaustion becomes perfect when skill rises to
perfect level of talents.
o
The perfection helps growth when the attachment and
interest which made perfection possible becomes disinterested detachment.
o
When the disinterested detachment acquires energy of
movement, it is aspiration.
o
Aspiration in this sense makes progress possible.
Ø
Progress that is not continuous is no progress. When you stop progressing, you start dying. Constant
aspiration for continuous growth is the path of human life changing into Divine
Life.
Ø
Skill is at three levels – physical, vital, mental.
Ø
Capacity is the essence of all skills you have
learned.
Ø
Talent is interest organised to perfection. All the
capacity concentrated on one skill raises that skill to a pinnacle of talent.
3.
Inspiration comes from the subconscious. The
surface stores the information.
4.
Mother tongue belongs to the subconscious. No
foreign language ever reaches the subconscious inspiration.
Ø
Only in moments of danger, where life is touched as
a whole, does the subconscious open. Any
foreign language belongs to the surface. No man has produced an original work
in a foreign tongue, especially high
poetry.
Ø
If any country should become great, it cannot become
great by imitation. It should organise itself by its own culture, and
conveniences they can take from any culture.
Ø
Today, education is to make the children fit in to
the society. It is social, not psychological. The world, at least in the West,
is tired of making children ‘fit in’ and wants them to discover themselves.
That is what I want our schools to give. Every boy has a natural talent. We
must have an eye for that.
Ø
Give him the entire freedom, so that once in a blue
moon his talent will come out. Eventually, every student will become an
outstanding student in some talented area. If you have the penetration to see each
child’s potential, you can make all children geniuses.
Ø
That is not personality. Personality needs values.
Something higher than values, are the laws of life or truisms of life. They are
the original ideas on which humanity is developed. My aim is to give the
children all these 20 truisms.
1.
Caution.
2.
God is the origin.
3.
Fundamentals cannot be ignored.
4.
Limits must be honoured.
5.
Life is sustained by the presence of great souls.
6.
Subtle knowledge is the only knowledge.
7.
Growth of GOOD needs freedom.
8.
Romance is the savour of life.
9.
Selfishness is callous.
10. The greater is
devotion, the greater is doubt.
11. Man is mean.
12. Love is divine;
human love is selfish.
13. Life is amoral.
War is amoral.
14. Society is an
integrated live organism.
15. Man’s inner life
is creative. The outer is only an expression of substance in Space and Time.
16. Between Man and
God, there are three inversions.
17. Taste of
Ignorance changing into taste of Jnanam is evolutionary transformation.
18. The creation is
for the Delight of Brahman rediscovering Himself.
19. Perfect Perfection
is the only Perfection.
20. Divine life is
letting the Spirit live in life.
5.
Any
field progresses by measurement, construction of scales, and devising of tools
necessary for measurement.
We measure time, distance, health, fix prices for products and every
conceivable field and every possible aspect of fields are measured. Tools are
devised for such measurements. This is the major cause of progress over the
last 200 years. Psychological aspects like values, attitude, strength,
understanding, judgement today are not measured. There are no scales and no
instruments. For the progress of education to develop, skills for every
psychological trait, scale and measuring devices must be discovered. The
aptitude test is alright. The IQ test is completely unreliable and unrelated to
the intelligence of the person. This is because we don’t know life as a
whole, we don’t know the full man. We understand these things by the
result, which is too late. Even that understanding is not based on any rational
conception. In recent history, we know biographies of many leaders. Can we
evaluate their work for humanity? If such a scale were there, it would help us.
Measurement of individual traits and tools necessary for them are sorely
lacking. Suppose all those things existed, there would be considerable
progress in isolated areas, i.e. the tallness of the man does not indicate his
intelligence. The pretty face never reveals the temperament behind. It is often
the case that children surprise their parents at crucial moments. More
importantly, it happens to ourselves. Our reactions, our responses surprise us.
Apart from construction of scales and the tools of measurement of our
psychological existence, it is necessary to know the origin (Self) which means
self-awareness. Only he who is aware of his own self would be able to
measure the value of the other person, the value of an act and the significance
of an event. This means one needs to know the whole of existence outside, which
can be known only inside.
We know the value of product
rating which enables us to choose the product and get the maximum possible
credit. Money is a measurement of man’s efficiency, worth, performance,
accomplishment, and can largely help assess his future accomplishment. Suppose
money is now withdrawn. Or, before the period when money was discovered, what
would be the difference in the efficiency with this society? It may not be necessary for us to list all
the existing measurements and their tools. Imagine for a moment that all these
things are not there, or a period before all these things were invented. How primitive
we were at that time. In the field of education, we are in a comparable
situation. Every human activity, skill, capacity, talent, ability,
movement, their speed, their correspondence, the local and the wider results
they cause, must be measured by an individual scale, and tools devised. They can be
physical tools or subtle psychological tools. It will give birth to the science
of Life.
Physical experimental science has taken a few hundred years to devise
the existing tools and measurement. So we may think that devising of these
scales and tools will take centuries. Looked at from that point of view, that
may be right. But such a subtle science has existed all over the world when the
society was non-physical. Hence, there are clairvoyants, astrologers, In
Education will really progress when the society is supplied with such
tools and scales and is permeated through and through by a scientific quest of
human nature. But in the absence of such scales and tools, we can today in our
school have some glimpses of these aspects and use them to advantage. (The
instance of Vineet) In this case we know according to the social vision of the
school the boy is unintelligent but he reveals an extraordinary talent which
other children do not have. Suppose we have such measurements, we will know his
real worth. In that case, the school can help the boy to become outstanding.
Therefore, scales for the measurement of personality as a whole, and the
society as a whole are necessarily to be created. Assuming that such things are there in our
country today, it is possible to discover one extraordinary hidden talent of each
child who are now considered dull. What the school needs is a spiritual vision,
not a social view. Suppose there were such scales today, we will find no child
is dull and many children are capable of far greater performance. Their numbers
will be in thousands and millions. Over night
6.
It requires a genius to know the working of the
idiot's mind. You can become a genius if you can see how a stupid man thinks.
What we call human progress and science today is the result of mind
trying to know matter. The matter is the idiot. It has its own method. It can’t
talk to you. You cannot make it respond. But when thousands of scientists apply
their minds to different aspects of matter over a hundred years, what emerges
is our knowledge of metals, minerals,
inert matter, their structure, their qualities and properties all of which has
resulted in the discovery of the atomic fission, modern computer, CDs and video
cassettes. Suppose we have the same patience with people whom we presently
think to be idiots, and follow where he begins in his thought, how he
approaches events, why he does so, what his reasoning is, we will discover the
behaviour of the physical substance of the brain. It requires a genius to know
an idiot’s mind. That is the minimum result. The maximum result is every idiot
will be discovered as a genius in his line of existence, because the Spirit in
all is equal. Their ways are different. On a minor scale, suppose we assume
that every child is equally brilliant in some line of mental activity, and try
to discover that, the first result will be the teacher will develop Himalayan
patience. And it will raise his intelligence to the level of its acme which
will together lead to a greater self-awareness that will make him see himself.
He will be a self-realised soul. He will not be in time, nor will he be in
timelessness, but he will be moving to the subliminal plane of simultaneous
integrality of time eternity and timeless eternity. Man thus becomes universal.
His mind becomes universal. It will help him to make his senses universal.
Theoretically, he can make his body universal. Inside the classroom, there will
be the quiet of the silence or the peace of the Silence behind silence.
Children will be learning not from the teacher or from the subject but from the
store of universal knowledge which is in the subliminal mind where the
superconscient light is constantly transforming the subconscient darkness. It is so because the subliminal plane is the
point at which the superconscient meets the subconscient. Presently man is in
the surface mind which is separated from the subliminal by the inner mind. The
surface mind is in time, the inner mind is in Timelessness. The subliminal is
in the simultaneous integrality of time eternity and timeless eternity. As
everywhere, here too there are two choices. One who is in the subliminal can
choose to incline either towards the Light or the darkness. When he inclines
towards the darkness, he becomes a clairvoyant, astrologer, etc. When he
inclines towards the superconscient, he becomes a rishi of universal dimension.
But only when he does not make a choice to incline either way and integrates
both sides in his personality, God and Nature meet in man. That is the point
from which he can ascend to the cosmic heights and integrate himself with the
higher superconscient light which is buried in the subconscient darkness.
7.
The other man's point of view expands the
finite into the Infinite.
When you see your own point of view, you become more efficient in
preserving yourself which means you acquire selfish efficiency. Man is not
created as a lone individual. One of his major instincts is gregariousness. It
is the One that has become the Many for the purposes of the play between
consciousness and consciousness. The Play comes into existence only when you
relate to other people. You can relate to other people, as everywhere, from
your point of view or his. When you relate from your point of view you become
exclusive, rigid, aggressive, violent. Terrorism is the result. When you relate
to the other man from his point of view, you know much more of what he is and
what he is to you. It is a point where contradictions resolve into complements.
The energy spent in conflicts, fights, disharmony, destruction will be
converted into harmonious construction of mutual enjoyment of collective
growth. In the Western world of trade, this truth has been discovered. They go
out of their way to satisfy the customer. The customer is treated as a friend,
not as a rival or enemy. This has contributed to the exponential expansion of
their business. Democracy is born and thrives when man in the collective tries
to discover the other man’s point of view. That is the reason why
democracies do not go to war with each other. Physically, knowing the other
man’s point of view dispenses with fights, duels, and wars.
Suppose the teacher tries to know the point of view of the child, and
the point of view of every other teacher, the school, the family, the society,
the point of time in which he exists, the point of space in which he lives, how
much his vision will be expanded. By
that time, he will no longer live in the mind.
He will be rising vertically in the ranges of the spiritual mind (higher
mind, Illumined mind, Intuitive mind, Overmind) leading to the Supermind. That
is the path of becoming God by which the Supramental being will be born. If
that is the peak, I am insistently trying to be on the same scale at the bottom
at point No. 1. Suppose a teacher does it, she will be human, will not speak
from her nerves, will not be rough or crude or violent. It would be impossible
for her not to understand any child from his point of view. She will
incidentally discover her capacity to teach the child is infinitesimal compared
with his original capacity to learn by himself. When the teacher brings the
child to that point and in the measure she brings him to that point, she must
recede in the background, withdraw her imposition, and leave him to
himself. Then, with that freedom, the
child is capable of organising his negative personality to become a scoundrel
or thief or inert matter. The teacher,
by rising above the positive and negative (Sat and Asat) positions herself in
the Absolute Brahman so that the weight of her personality will prevent the
child from choosing the Asat and compel him to choose the light. This being the
process of creation, its version in the classroom is, endless strength of
infinite patience.
8.
The distinction between facts, data,
information, ideas, knowledge, thinking, conception, hearing, listening,
sensing, and understanding is essential for an educationist. To devise a scale
and a method to measure each in different fields is essential for educational
progress in any country.
Impression is far from reality. By impressions I don’t mean rumours.
When the facts about historical impressions which are universally accepted and
admired come out, they look very different, sometimes opposite. One can see the
fullness of the truth of this statement in one’s own family or life. Often we
think we are strong in a certain subject or faculty. If you ask your friends, they may say that it
is your weakness, your defect. By analysing your immediate past, their
statements will be confirmed. When a man who thinks he is in very good health
and who can rate himself 100% in his health, is subjected to a medical
examination, his health will be rated 65%, or 45%. Because when one aspect of
the personality is overflowing, it gives a general impression that one is
strong in all aspects. Imagine a class where there is no examination or scores.
How many of the students, will think themselves to be top students or above
average. It is the mark sheet that reveals the truth, because the mark sheet is
the measure of evaluation. In hundreds of things, measurements have been
introduced. In millions of fields they remain to be introduced. For our
purposes, there is no measure to evaluate the capacity of a student
academically, socially, and psychologically. Very partial work has been done in
many of these fields without any basic understanding. Even when the results
speak to the contrary, impressions prevail. It is a vast subject, but the basis
is to approach the student as a whole, to consider him as a whole part of the
whole of the family. And further, to consider the family as a miniature whole
of the whole society. This view is not there in the world today at all.
The world has developed its capacity for constructing scales and if
that capacity is fully used and every scale of physical, vital, and mental
faculties is developed, i.e. physically the ability to hear, see, speak, and
sense, vitally to communicate, pleasantly relate, to organise a few people,
mentally to understand the physical environment, the social environment, an
academic argument, to concede, they will be found to be very valuable tools in
the hands of the teacher right from a young age. Assuming that such scales are
available, which are not arguable, the performance of any student can be
quadrupled when we devise methods to correct the defects, improve upon the
potentials, and intelligently use the measurements, to which we will come
later.
The capacity to define in a graded fashion data, facts, information, ideas,
knowledge, thought, conception, requires a definition of each of these things.
The difficulty here is, the physical facts are different from vital, mental
facts. To draw such distinctions under each category above listed requires a
lot of work on the part of the teacher and further, the faculties in the mind
that discriminate between datum and a fact and information are not now existing
in any conscious form among people. It requires the study of the basic
faculties such as observation, sensation, perception, processing data into
information, constructing the idea from the facts and information, drawing the
essence of knowledge from the ideas, knowing the process of thinking,
developing the faculties of conception. It is a wide territory by itself. Even
the primary capacities like hearing, listening, sensing, understanding,
accepting, deciding, determining, committing, require a keen focussed training
in thought. These are all wide psychological subjects. Our research can be
confined to the narrow field of education. The one advantage is, we have all
these capacities in an unformed, unorganised, unconscious possession. All that
we have to do is, form the faculties out of the unformed material, become
conscious of the unconscious, organise the unorganised. In forming a capacity
out of an unformed potential, we have to make a distinction between forming and
formulation. Formation is wider, formulation is narrow.
The term ‘organisation’ is a very common term. It is least understood
and has never been defined. When we start from an act and go to activities, we
systematise them. Systems are brought together under an organisation, which
further matures into institution, culture and collective and individual
sensitivities. In any accomplishment, positive or negative, the determinant is
the sensitivity. All of them exist in four levels (physical to spiritual). It
is necessary for us to know each process under each head, which is the process
of psychological conditioning. Only that will help us to decondition. What we
call in society maturity is structured conditioning. What we call human wisdom is the readiness to
shed an old structure and acquire a new structure for the occasion. All these
processes are automatically happening all the time in the mind, at lightening
speed. When we are functioning in time (the successive process of time) our
learning or unlearning should take an enormous time. When we are in the
Timeless, their speed is enormous. When we are in the simultaneous time, we
shall be able to create as God intends to reveal Himself in humanity.
9. Teaching is not learning. Education
is not teaching. All of them are different from experience.
Teaching is a communication which carries mental authority. In that
measure, it is a conditioning. When the authority is removed, it becomes
learning. When the authority is removed,
the child will not learn anything at all if his interest is not held. By
interest we mean, the child’s interest in the teacher. Mostly that is the only
interest in the school. What is a more meaningful interest is the interest in
the subject. Interest has higher grades.
Interest for interest’s sake in the mind is curiosity. In the vital it is
dynamism. In the physical, it is to be energetic. At whatever level there is
interest, the boy begins to think, act, accomplish. That is what is called
levelling off.
Further, there is the interest in the school created by the atmosphere
of the school. It is partly social. Psychologically, one can be interested in
himself. It could be selfish or unselfish interest. Selfish interest would be
mercenary, unmannerly, crude, boorish. Unselfish interest will be generous,
pleasant, expansive, outgoing, benevolent. None of these things is in the hands
of the child, teacher or parent. From this point of view of enquiry, the child,
the teacher, parent and society are totally unconscious. The capacity to create
this interest and accomplish through that depends upon what one is really
interested in. It is this truth that the Gita speaks as one can achieve whatever
one wants.
For a teacher to be prepared for this purpose, he has to be a student
who finished his education in our school. Till then we have to have compromises
at all levels.
Teaching becomes real only when the teacher is constantly learning how
to teach. The very best teaching is not
to teach. We know learning is better than teaching. Even in the best
conditions, learning becomes a self-conditioning. One learns at the level in
which he is. For the higher development of the mind, unlearning is more
important that learning. Those who talk of living every moment, imply the
capacity not to learn from outside. What you learn from inside depends on what
you are inside. In other words, learning from outside is social conditioning. Learning from inside is psychological
conditioning. As we speak of an open mind, the capacity not to learn from
outside or inside may be called the open soul, better still, the open, evolving
soul. Even that is conditioned by your swabhava, nature, because it is
expressing the force in the form, swarupa. When the swabhava refuses to express
the swarupa, swarupa dissolves making you naked before God. That is the basis
of the beginning of becoming the Supreme. Once the individual swabhava is shed,
one has to shed the universal nature. The only method available for that is
surrendering one’s nature to the Divine Nature.
When we come down from these philosophical heights standing before a
class as a teacher with this philosophical information behind, all this
summarises into good human manners, native cheerfulness that is infectious and
a patience that is pleasant.
10. When we change the plane from the
physical to the vital to the mental to the spiritual, the same thing acquires a
different hue.
Without going into all possible details, we can illustrate physical
skill is the capacity to do something, whereas mental skill is the capacity to
understand something. Act in the
physical is movement. Act in the vital is releasing energy. Act in the mental
is thinking, whereas, act in the Spirit is non-movement, non-thinking. When you
go to the further step of the evolving soul, act is to self-represent with mind
as the basis for the delight of existence.
11. The child prefers learning to eating and playing.
The child or man prefers the greatest area of interest to even areas of
necessity. Learning being a mental process, it releases greater interest than
playing, which is physical, eating which is vital. The truth behind this
statement is if man is interested in anything, he will overlook every other
thing and achieve it. That is what The Gita says. That is also the basis of the
yoga of self-perfection.
12. Bodily movements directly determine mental functions. It is equally true that all educational endowments are determined by physical movements, vital sensations, mental understanding and spiritual peace.
Glenn Doman has experimented in the correlation between crawling and understanding. To exhaust that line of enquiry, about a few hundred experiments need to be done, maybe a few thousand. But if someone develops subtle perceptions of human activities or human existence, especially of one’s own child, better still one’s own inner self, one can develop all the essential knowledge required which would be acquired by a few hundred thousand experiments in a few years. To know is different from practice. In these matters, knowledge itself is power. The very first result will be the shedding of superstitions of all descriptions in massive volumes. That is a tremendous step in psychological education. To convert that knowledge into conducive behaviours requires comprehensive human wisdom. To communicate it to a child requires consummate patience. To reduce it to a system requires social wisdom of a person higher than a genius.
That these things are present is indicated by the absence of outer or inner tension, energies falling quiet, urges dissolving.
13. Mind understands more quickly and
completely when it does not think. As thinking is superior to memorisation,
understanding without thinking is superior to thinking.
A singer or an athlete are in their best form when they don’t plan,
which means, when they don’t think, they perform better. Thinking is a process
in which mind consciously coordinates facts. When a certain coordination does
not work out, meaning, does not bring out the right result, it tries other
coordinations. This is the basis of empiricism. Practically, this is a very
long process not sure of success for a long time. Occasionally by chance, one
hits upon the right answer. When a man learns not to think, sufficiently and
strongly, and sleeps over that silence for a considerable time, the answer
appears in his mind. That is how Einstein got his formula. The phenomenon of
genius understands the world not by external observation but by refusing to
observe the externals. Had Charles Darwin who spent forty years collecting
data, systematising, classifying, resorted to non-thinking, he would have got
the same results or better results in a few years. And the phenomenon that he
is unable to explain now (the gap between two species) would have also revealed
to him. In our own experience, our best ideas come when we are least thinking
about them.
Ordinarily in the process of teaching, this comes out of experience and
maturity at the end of one’s career. It is not easy for the teacher to acquire
this faculty. But it is easier to communicate it to the student. That is one of
the reasons for my saying that at the age of 15 or 20, the child can have the
experience, maturity, wisdom of a man of 60 or 80. In other words, a school run
on these ideal conditions can create products who will become world leaders in
their fields.
Silence understands better than thinking.
Silence communicates better than speaking.
Silence accomplishes better than doing.
Theoretically, there is a silence behind silence.
14. There is no human endowment that
cannot be trained. The higher the endowment, the greater the freedom necessary
for the training. Lower endowments can be trained by others. Higher endowments
must be acquired by self-training.
Discipline imposed from above teaches you not discipline, but
obedience. The obedience may continue as a behaviour. When the circumstances of
obedience are removed, it may turn into disobedience if it was unwillingly
accepted. Any discipline is worth the
name only when it is self-discipline. By self-discipline we mean we accept what
we understand. To elaborate that, the
body accepts what the mind understands. It is generally an imposition. The mind
never tries to educate the body. It tyrannises over it. When the spirit in the
body emerges, it cannot be tyrannised because it is the flowering of the higher
in the lower. So the best discipline we can conceive of is the self-discipline
of the psychic. When you resist self-discipline, it exhibits an enjoyment of
what is, which is the dark crude rigidity of the nerves in the body. Education,
in the best sense, must offer all social, psychological circumstances for the
child to acquire self-discipline. It is for this reason that it is necessary
for the individual to become a spiritually awakened individual. Man matures
by self-discipline. The soul evolves by refusing to be disciplined. The only
discipline the Spirit accepts is total freedom.
There is a widespread conception that in matters of luck, genius, and
intelligence, one has to be born with them. Mother says if one is willing to be
in touch with his psychic, these things can be developed. She cites the example
of a village girl becoming an opera singer. In the last hundred years, this
impression has been largely negatived. The theory of transformation proclaims
that the lower the member is by transformation, the higher he grows.
Training and education are synonymous. The word training is more used
in the physical plane. Education is used in the mental plane. Sri Aurobindo says the present civilisation
itself is a revival of a past civilisation destroyed. Therefore, all the
faculties we need to develop hereafter are there in the subconscious memory of
the earth. So, training is only a process of bringing to the surface what is
there in the subconscious.
There is a difference between education and training. In education, we give
the idea to the mind. Mind on its own internalises the idea. Then we say mind
is educated. In the training, we compel a man to repeat a thing until it
settles down as a fixed habit. Training is the education of the body; education
is the training of the mind.
15. In the path of progress, at every
step there are several bypaths. Once you enter the bypath, you level off.
Progress is defined as health in the physical, energy in the vital,
understanding in the mind, silence in the Spirit. When the embodied being is considered,
progress is graded as social accomplishment, psychological achievement,
spiritual attainment and spiritual evolution. A parent takes care of the
child’s health. Suppose the parent does not take care of the child’s health,
one can imagine what the child would eat and what its health would be. Imagine
a child completely left to itself with respect to eating, hygiene, and sanitary
conditions, and a child taken care of by the parent. The first child may not
survive for a long time, or if it survives, it will survive like half an
animal. Our field of enquiry is
education. Progress in education is understanding and mental accomplishment. If
you take two people of comparable mental abilities, or two hundred people of
comparable mental abilities, and see their progress over a period of fifty
years, you see one rising in the scale of human values and others at all
grades, the last man being an efficient daily worker. What really happened is
endowment being real, employment of the endowment is exercised by human choice.
This is an obvious fact. That is what is meant by
this statement. That which chooses is the temperament, psychological, social
environment. Family, school and society can make a man who could have ended
up as a loafer into a nationally known citizen. The choice is a combination
of the circumstances, family guidance, personal preference, religious beliefs
and any other thing that may intrude. So in specialised educational training
which our school attempts, or which is attempted in Nirupama, the entire
character of the progress described here remains.
In any field of education, however sophisticated it is, there is a
range of a thousand levels. When we achieve more than others, we have a way
of being satisfied because we don’t know what is the maximum possibility. The
maximum possibility is not known by the mind. The maximum possibility is
presented to you when the mind falls silent and withdraws. Even when that
happens, the tendency of insisting on what we know consciously or subconsciously
is irresistible. That requires a knowledge and power of deconditioning. One
gets conditioned and one conditions himself. The capacity for deconditioning is
not in the plane of time or mind or ego. Time is a plane of conditioning. Mind
is an instrument of conditioning. Ego gives the direction to conditioning. All
of this keeps the man finite on the surface mind. The capacity not to exercise
the mind, the capacity to concentrate fully in the present, and the capacity to
be totally unegoistic takes one out of the field of conditioning. All this is
summarised as an attitude of the being which is called humility. Humility is
described as the self-awareness of the smallness of the being before the
immense universe. That gives birth to a capacity to understand our total
incapacity. Sri Aurobindo calls it
surrender. Surrender takes us to the
subliminal mind, universalises us, gives us the benefit of the superconscient
working on the subconscient, and allows us to reach the psychic being which is
unassertive.
Obviously, according to this
definition of progress, there are innumerable bypaths, such as circumstance,
opinion, guidance, preference, belief. They decide the maximum to which a man
can rise. Once you enter into any of these paths, like a habit, you cannot come
out of it. That we see in food, dress, language, behaviour and in every other
thing. A complete theoretical knowledge
of this situation is demanded of the teacher for him to be effective. He combines
in himself the parent, the teacher, the mentor, the leader and the entire
social circumstance. That’s why we say only a student who passed out of the
school, which is really a community can be a meaningful teacher in our school.
16. Accomplishment is social,
psychological, personal, spiritual.
By accomplishment we mean achieving the results that we aim at. A
successful, happy, affluent home is a social accomplishment. A healthy,
cheerful, carefree man of excellent character is a psychological
accomplishment. If a man has a personal preference like games or art,
accomplishment is in that field. Spiritually, accomplishment is to reach
heaven. Sri Aurobindo has given a
further dimension to that goal which is God’s taking birth in our life and
body, called the Advent of the Supramental Being. In the society we see a
million types of accomplishment. Most of them are reached by an unconscious
interest and preference. For some of them or many of them, there is a partial
training available. There is no accomplishment for which complete training has
been devised. Even the age-old habit of
child rearing still remains in these modern days in the unconscious realm. No
parent can know the child unless he knows himself. At the bottom of
accomplishment lies self-awareness.
In a school like ours, maybe for the first time in the world, we can
devise a training programme by which the child will consciously acquire all
that is necessary to accomplish what he chooses. For instance, the method of
reading that we employ is superior to the other methods. But we don’t know
everything about reading. We have not been taught that. We have not studied it.
We take something that appears to be modern or latest in the field and follow
it. To study the process of reading, one needs to observe what goes on in the
mind when one reads, how the senses contribute. That is not what we are aware
of or do. The world is not aware of the fact that such a study exists. It
means, to know an outer thing first inside and then practise it in the outer.
It is for these reasons above I call education the yoga of the society.
The process of reading is the same process for any act. And we don’t
know that process. The world does not know that such a process exists. The
world concentrates on the physical process which has given us tremendous progress.
The defect of the physical process is it travels in the opposite direction.
Even when the physical process is in the right direction, there are a dozen
levels above it. It is possible for us to attempt the highest possible level.
Today the very best school in the world fits the description of the blind
leading the blind.
To subdivide the four accomplishments into four areas and explain each
fully requires the length of a full book.
So what is the very best thing we can do? The highest knowledge we
have we must be aware of is no knowledge. The real knowledge comes from the
evolving Spirit. To aspire for the evolving Spirit and to evoke it in the
child in whatever crude manner we can do, is the best we can do. The
knowledge of our ignorance is our greatest instrument. To know that I am
ignorant is the greatest wisdom I can have.
17. The higher endowments express in the lower
planes, thus raising the performance of the lower planes.
The endowments of the lower and higher planes are the same, expressing
themselves as they are circumscribed.
Force in the body tempts the possessor to beat the weak. The force in
the mind similarly tempts the intelligence of the mind to teach the dull.
Suppose instead of that, the intelligence which is the force of the mind
informs the force in the physical, namely the strength, the result will be the
strong man would like to help the weak man. In other words, destruction is
transformed into construction.
The higher the man grows, the more he discovers how low he is. To be
aware of the higher endowments and make them express themselves in raising the
lower endowments is the maximum one can do in the given circumstances. It can
be called self-discipline. Socially, this process can raise a day labourer into
a substantial size of entrepreneur. Vitally, a coward can become a courageous
person. Mentally, a dull man can become an intelligent man. The greater the
dullness, the greater is the possibility of his raising himself above
intelligence. It has no end. Self-aware intelligence is a bar to rising above
the mind. Any endowment that is aware of itself is a bar to progress.
34. Growth
is ascent. Development is descent.
Man’s starts with the physical. When the
physical is saturated with learning, he moves to the vital and then to the
mental and spiritual. This growth is called the ascent. The vital, when
developed, gives its benefit to the physical. It is the first level of descent.
The mental, when it is developed gives its knowledge to the vital and through
the vital to the physical. That is the descent. These descents can be partial
because the mind does not know the entire structure and constitution of the
body it is dominating. The mind does not
try to understand the whole of the body. It relates to the understanding part
of the body and through that compels the body to obey which becomes domination.
Mother says it has resulted in a tyranny over the millennia. Mother also says
that the body is so docile and unprotesting that it only expects to be
maltreated by the mind. When the development rises to the spirit, it rises in
two different ways. One is, the tyranny becomes greater. The other is, the
tyranny becomes an understanding. When the Spirit is at its own level and deals
with the body or other members, it imposes itself with violence. But when the
Spirit by its purity tries to release the Spirit in the other members, there is
no tyranny or violence. There is only blossoming of every member. That doesn’t happen
at the spiritual plane because the highest level of the spiritual plane, the
Overmind, still has ignorance and ego and it is a partial plane. Only when one
rises to the Supramental plane, the ignorance disappears, ego dissolves, the
human plane becomes universal, intuition from outside is shifted inside,
oneness is realised, in the sense all is in each and each is in all. All is in
God and God is in all. Only in that condition this descent can take place. Till
then, descents are partially useful, powerful, but will always contain an
element of tyranny and violence. That is the basis of all superstition and
fanaticism.
19. Body has mind and intelligence. It
first emerges as physical intelligence and subsequently as vital, mental and
spiritual intelligences. In this rise, accomplishment is limited by the
physical environment, physical effort, vital attitudes, mental opinions, and
the motive of the being.
20. In the society, all this is going
on unconsciously and in an unorganised fashion.
21. Great souls have the capacity for
self-organisation that is conscious.
A great soul is one who is not dominated by the lower members of his
being. Organisation means to make the person function automatically at the
highest level of his existence. Smaller men are compelled to organise
themselves, by the external circumstances of the society. Higher members do so
without that external compulsion or suggestion.
That is self-organisation. It can
be done only when one is conscious. By conscious, I mean his evolutionary
structure, and his evolutionary destiny.
Only he who is so conscious can organise himself on his own. That is
what we have to create in a child. Presently the child imitates the parents or
the teacher. That is a biological response. Between the biological response and
the spiritual response, there are several intervening layers. He who can give
the spiritual response can do it.
22. That self-organisation can also be
unconscious.
That is a basic rule. Anything small or great can be done either
consciously or unconsciously. It is necessary for one to understand the
difference between consciousness and unconsciousness. Sri Aurobindo prefers to
call it subconscious, not unconscious. The examples of education and trade,
transport can easily explain to us that they are consciously organised by the
society. Imagine that these aspects are there in the society without being
organised which means, we won’t know when a bus will come and where it
goes. We won’t know when there is school
or what subject it will teach. In an
unconscious atmosphere of trade, no one knows when a certain product will be
available in the market or whether it will be available continuously. That
takes us about a few hundred years back. That is the difference between an
organised field and an unorganised field. The same distance exists between
conscious organisation and unconscious organisation.