Oct.
28, 2002
Education
v To Sri Aurobindo "All
Life is Yoga".
v I call education the yoga of
the society.
v Sri Aurobindo means by the
word 'yoga' the self-willed progress of the deepest element even in the shallow
layer.
v The whole world is in
movement; the whole universe is so.
v The movement is confined to
Nature, Prakriti; the Purusha is motionless.
v Sri Aurobindo goes to a
third position where the Purusha in the Prakriti is on the move.
v There is nothing in the
world that is not sustained by a SEED of Spirit, the Purusha.
v When Nature moves, She gains
experience.
v The essence of her
experience is spiritual.
v It collects as the evolving
soul, the psychic being.
v This is to contradict the
traditional position that the soul is immutable. In truth, it is an
improvement.
v When all Nature is constantly
gaining experience, all her components too are progressing simultaneously.
v Energy, force, power,
organisation, skill, knowledge, and a host of other things are her parts.
v Our concern is knowledge,
which is in constant progress.
v Education is the social organisation
of knowledge.
v To us the organisation of
education is important in the school.
v At home, education in the
primary sense is of significance.
v How do we approach it?
v One person – the parent –
educates the other – the child.
v We have already arrived at
the position that self-learning is the only significant learning.
v What then is learning?
v The separated ego, coming
into contact with the not-self experiences in all its senses centralised in the
brain.
v Mind is seated in the brain.
v Brain is the instrument Mind
has created in man for it to function.
v Brain is physical, mind is
subtle-spiritual.
v What the Mind learns is
education.
v What the brain learns is
skill.
v We confine ourselves to
education.
v The belief of converting
knowledge into practical utility is the theme of Sri Aurobindo's yoga when the
descent is expressed by the body.
v At the other end, the
practicality of the West infects us Indians.
v Knowledge is of value when
it is untainted by use value, the ideal of a mercenary nature. The West is
material that degenerates into it.
v In the aspect where the West
has discovered Brahman in Matter, it is great.
v Fundamental research is pure
research.
v In gathering knowledge, the
motive should be knowledge for its own sake. When it is so gathered and
formulated, it acquires power when expressed in action. A pupil acquires
knowledge over the years and comes to possess it as a consolidated perfection
before he starts applying it. Earlier attempts to convert it into practical
application either prevent its complete formulation or prompt faulty partial
formation.
v
Nature
has developed emotions in Asia, spirituality in Asia, Science in Europe and
practical organisation in USA while
she left Africa to develop to full physicality. The six components of the
perfected whole are Truth, Unity, Goodness, Knowledge, Power and Love * Our concern is the organisation of
knowledge, viz. education. One interesting observation is that education as
an accomplishment has within it these six parts.
v
Education
is the experience of the mind even as work is the experience of the body. The
experience of the vital is to release energy, especially by the action of the
mind on the body.
v
What
is experience, especially in the Mind?
v
To
observe the surroundings and adjust one's behaviour is experience.
v
Mind
observes the environment by the senses.
v The senses carry sense
impressions of the outside to the mind.
v A vitalised mind accepts the
impressions as facts.
v Mentalised mind separates
these impressions and extracts the pure facts out of it which are organised by
the brain into opinions or decisions.
v Opinion is personal. Idea is
impersonal.
v Pure mind arrives at
impersonal ideas from the external experience of the outgoing mind, going out
through senses.
v It is evident that this
mental experience is entirely one's own, an inner process, exclusively
personal.
v If the above description is
true, it amounts to saying that no one else has any role in one's education
whether it is the teacher or parent.
v The best form of education
provides the child a conducive climate where he can learn on his own.
v There is more.
v The freedom the school
provides unleashes the mental curiosity of the child. The wealth of material
put at his disposal is there for him to draw from. We see faster and better
progress.
v As the mind is located in
the body, energised by the vital, human mind is the last rung of five levels of
Pure Mind, divided into two categories of Supermind and Spiritualised mind.
v The Silence of the Muni, the
drishti of the Rishi, the intuition of the yogi and the knowledge of the gods
form the four grades of the spiritual mind.
v Some silent children do very
well. It is a natural endowment. Nascent learning releases vast energies that are
boisterous. Knowledge in the mind of things learnt long ago falls silent and
exhibits no more energy than to be. Also we see children of wider mental
capacity absorbing knowledge silently. Mind widens by its perspective. The
wider the perspective, the more quiet the mind becomes. Here emerges a method
or a process to be worked out either for one child or a class, while the
principle remains the same. If we widen the perspective, the child will move
into Silence. There are physical perspectives of facts, vital perspectives of
interest, mental perspectives of comprehension.
v Assuming that a child
largely moved into the Silence of the Higher mind, he is meant for tapas. We
retain the child for education which, being a lower plane yields far greater
results. The Silent mind UNDERSTANDS by NOT thinking. To think is to be
in mind. As physical work pushes the comprehension to the body, THINKING retains comprehension in
the mind. Hence the phrase 'sleep over it'. Fullest mental comprehension of
an idea gives rise to the FORM of that idea in the subtle spiritual plane When it moves into the
Illumined Mind of the Rishi who sees the idea as a vision. As mind uses
thinking for understanding, the Muni uses Silence for understanding while the
Rishi uses light.
v These – thinking, Silence,
light – are media for understanding. The yogi dispenses with the media and has
direct perception of the objective which is Intuition. Reliance on the medium
strengthens it. Non-reliance on the medium weans man away from it. This is
achieved by concentration, mantra, Japa.
v Intuition is a vast field,
as vast as the universe and comprises of all the subjects of the world. It
reveals to any faculty in us that is well-developed, to Ramanujam in mathematics,
to Beethoven in music, etc. while it is comprehensive.
v Intuition itself is of
various grades. It has four powers -- suggestion, discrimination, inspiration
and revelation.
v By the suggestion of the
atmosphere personified by the teacher if the pupil develops subtle spiritual discrimination,
he will soon find himself inspired. It can lead to revelation.
v The tradition is religious,
i.e. one man's revelations are adored and followed by the many. Sri Aurobindo
asks for the spiritual, which means each discovering his own spirit. In
this article I speak of a spiritual method for education. Now, how to use the
spiritual force in the field of education?
v The learner is raised from
the human mind to the intuitive mind.
v Methods
can be in grades. There is a highest method available for us.
v Supermind lies above the Overmind.
v Chit – Consciousness – is
the next higher layer.
v Chit gives out Shakti –
Consciousness – Force – to create the world.
v The Divine Mother is born
here, known as Lokamatha.
v The lokamatha we know of is
the one of Mind; Sri Aurobindo's is of the Supermind, the difference being the
chief of a part and that of the whole.
v 'The Mother' describes HER who was with us until 1973.
v To KNOW Her as Sri Aurobindo has
described is to fully know Her.
v After all, one knows a thing
in terms of what he already knows to depict the new in terms of the old.
v To give up what we know and
what we are, is to decondition ourselves into a second childhood.
v To know HER brings us into Her
atmosphere.
v Devotees have their prayers
answered.
v It means She is effective in
the material physical plane.
v She can be effective in the
mental plane and we can raise it gradually till we reach Intuition.
v To act here is a labour of
love.
v One's own swabhava and the
swabhava of the child are the greatest barriers.
v Mother, when let in, breaks
all icons.