(contd. from the September and October 2013 issues)
“In their early years, children do have intimations of a higher
consciousness which may puzzle or even startle their parents and elders.”
As Wordsworth reminiscentially
sang:
There was a time
when meadow, grove and stream,
The earth and every
common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in
celestial light,
The glory and the
freshness of a dream...
Heaven lies about us
in our infancy!
Shades of the
prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing
Boy...
Yet the Boy beholds the Light
however fitfully, and even the Youth is by the “vision splendid” attended on his way. “Every human being carries hidden within him the possibility of a
greater consciousness” wrote the Mother; “a good many children are under its influence”. The crux of the
educational problem is therefore to safeguard this light of consciousness, and
make it illumine all thoughts, all actions, all feelings and give a new
direction and a new tone to our entire life. Hence the paramount need for
psychic education:
“With psychic education we come to the problem of the true motive of
existence, the purpose of life on earth, the discovery to which this life must
lead and the result of that discovery: the consecration of the individual to
his eternal principle.”
Whether this awakening comes as
the result of a mystic break-through, or of a spurt of intense religious
feeling, or yet as the culmination of a course of philosophical inquiry, “the important thing is to live the
experience”.
On the one hand, unlike the body,
the vital and the mind, of which we are almost constantly aware, the psychic
being or soul seems generally to elude us. On the other hand, sooner or later
we are driven to realise that this elusive thing is verily the deeper reality
about ourselves, and it profits us little to have gained the many mansions of apara vidya or phenomenal knowledge if
we have not also won the key to the psychic presence or the soul within. But,
then, how does one set upon this adventure of consciousness, this pursuit of
the psychic being? The Mother talks to us directly, and the winged words go
home:
“The starting-point is to seek in yourself that which is independent of
the body and the circumstances of life, which is not born of the mental
formation that you have been given, the language you speak, the habits and
customs of the environment in which you live, the country where you are born or
the age to which you belong. You must find, in the depths of your being, that
which carries in it a sense of universality, limitless expansion, unbroken
continuity. Then you decentralise, extend and widen yourself; you begin to live
in all things and in all beings; the barriers separating individuals from each
other break down. You think in their thoughts, vibrate in their sensations,
feel in their feelings, live in the life of all. What seemed inert suddenly
becomes full of life, stones quicken, plants feel and will and suffer, animals
speak in a language more or less inarticulate, but clear and expressive;
everything is animated by a marvellous consciousness without time or limit. And
this is only one aspect of the psychic realisation; there are others, many
others. All help you to go beyond the barriers of your egoism, the walls of
your external personality, the impotence of your reactions and the incapacity
of your will.”
In another essay also, ‘Transformation’, the Mother seems to
refer to the awakening of the psychic consciousness. Though the preparation may
have been long and slow there is “a
revolution in the basic poise... like turning a ball inside out... the ordinary
consciousness... ignorant of what things are in reality... sees only their
shell. But the true consciousness is at the centre, at the heart of reality and
has the direct vision of the origin of all movements.... Something opens within
you and all at once you find yourself in a new world.” But, she cautions, “what is needed is to express it gradually
in the details of practical life”.
Wonders are many, there have been
great discoveries, but nothing is more wonderful, or is a greater discovery,
than the soul. It is not the super-subtle or marvelously resilient mind that
can run the quarry of the psychic being to its lair, it is not vital
determination or physical agility that can encompass the desired catch; “the supreme value of the discovery lies in
its spontaneity, its ingeniousness and that escapes all ordinary mental laws.”
But one ceaselessly hankers after, and one waits with infinite patience; one
avoids all fever and fret, all anxiety and apprehension; one tries to find joy
in all things, one tries to cultivate equality in the face of life's
phantasmagoria; one shuns the criteria of the market weights and measures, one
walks on the steep and narrow path without sense of time or assurance of
success; and one longs and waits - waits on the Invisible - hearkening to steps
unheard, turning to the unstruck melodies till at last “an inner door will suddenly open and you will emerge into a dazzling
splendour that will bring you the certitude of immortality.... Then you will
stand erect, freed from all chains... you will be able to walk on straight and
firm, conscious of your destiny, master of your life.”
And yet the psychic opening or the
seeking and the finding of the soul is but a stage in integral education. The
Mother calls these further stages steps in “spiritual
education”. If the psychic opening makes possible a purified and puissant life
here and now “in the universe of forms”,
a spiritual liberation means “a return to
the unmanifest”, a canter beyond the phenomenal world. For the latter
realisation - that is, the union or the losing of the soul in the Transcendent
- there are the tested paths of Knowledge (Jnana)
and of Love or Devotion (Bhakti),
though “the swiftest method is total
self-giving”. If we must speak in traditional terms, Atma-vicara or inquiry into the nature of the Self can dispel cloud
after cloud of Unknowing, and reveal in the end the higher Knowledge (Para Vidya) of identity of self and Atman. The Love Divine, too, can
obliterate all distance and difference and local adhesions, and bring about the
union of the river with the ocean. But total self-surrender, atma-samarpana, brings cantering to the
baby-cat the mother's protective grasp and the resultant realisation of the
bliss of oneness.
But although many have desired
this supreme liberation into the Transcendent, a total escape from all the
heavy weight of this unintelligible and oppressive world of phenomena, still
the Mother feels strongly that this mere annulment of the self, this flight of
the alone into the Alone, must not be the end of the whole spiritual adventure.
The Mother is certainly not for this implied abandonment of the earth and its
denizens to their present plight of “death,
suffering, ignorance and death”! On the contrary, encouraged by their own
aspirations, ardours and realisations, the Mother and Sri Aurobindo thought of
the possibility of a supramental change and transformation. Thus, the Mother,
in the climactic passage in her sixth essay:
“From beyond the frontiers of form a new force can be evoked, a power of
consciousness which is as yet unexpressed and which, by its emergence, will be
able to change the course of things and give birth to a new world. For the true
solution to the problem of suffering, ignorance and death is not an individual
escape from earthly miseries by self-annihilation into the unmanifest, nor a
problematical collective flight from universal suffering by an integral and
final return of the creation to its creator, thus curing the universe by
abolishing it, but a transformation, a total transfiguration of matter brought
about by the logical continuation of Nature's ascending march in her progress
towards perfection, by the creation of a new species that will be to man what
man is to the animal and that will manifest upon earth a new force, a new
consciousness and a new power. And so will begin a new education which can be
called the supramental education; it will, by its all-powerful action, work not
only upon the consciousness of individual beings, but upon the very substance
of which they are built and upon the environment in which they live.”
It is true that at a time when
psychic and spiritual education are a mystery to most educationists, a mere
will-o'-the-wisp and a thing not to be pinned down in the curriculum, or to
hold on to and semesterise and evaluate in terms of alphabetised grades, it is
perhaps premature to talk of supramental education, which the mere mind cannot
grasp at all. But the dream of today may yet become tomorrow's actuality. Sri
Aurobindo and the Mother felt convinced that the supramental descent was no
mere phantom of hope but an event decreed and inevitable. And it would be
specifically a “descent” of
consciousness, and hence supramental education too will.....
“......progress from above downwards, its influence spreading from one state
of being to another until at last the physical is reached.......the supramental
education will result no longer in a progressive formation of human nature and
an increasing development of its latent faculties, but in a transformation of
the nature itself, a transfiguration of the being in its entirety, a new ascent
of the species above and beyond man towards superman, leading in the end to the
appearance of a divine race upon earth.”
‘On Education’ is but a series of six brief essays, but it is also a vast arc of
comprehension: from Matter to Spirit, from the physical, vital and mental to
the psychic, spiritual and supramental, from animal to man and from man to God!
Education is a movement, an unfolding, a becoming; what is already involved as
a result of the holocaust of the Spirit in inconscient Matter awakens and puts
out its sticky leaves and bud of promise, and must end at last in the full
blossoming of the Divine potentiality.
(concluded)
(K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar in ‘On The Mother’, Chapter 37, “Mother on Education”, Sri Aurobindo
Ashram Trust, Pondicherry)
