On The Mother

CHAPTER 37

Mother on Education

I

In her series of essays on education, the Mother discourses on its divers aspects - physical, vital, mental, psychic and spiritual - which together constitute the unified spectrum. Integral education is the inclusive white ray which, when seen through a prism, reveals the rainbow-colours. The Mother's book On Education thus embodies a complete vision, but it is also a step by step presentation.

The first of the six essays, "The Science of Living: To Know Oneself is to Control Oneself",¹ is rather more than a mere introduction to the series. Surely the science (or art) of living is much more than what passes for education. Nor could this science be anything at all so rigid or stereotyped - a thing of dogma, ritual or fashionable observance - as to be applicable to all people in all contexts. All life is Yoga, all life is Education; but how exactly this Yoga, this Education, is to be pursued will depend upon the aim that one has set before one's life. Hence the Mother's classic opening: "An aimless life is always a miserable life." But, then, there are aims and aims, and the higher the aim, the more noble and disinterested, the more integral and universal, the more will it enhance the quality of one's life. "The first step," says the Mother, "is to become conscious of yourself, of the different parts of your being and their respective activities." This will demand endless sincerity and perseverance. Our faculties are many and varied, and may often pull in different directions; and unless they are firmly linked to the "psychic centre", as the spokes are to the hub of the wheel, the human personality will crack and disintegrate. On the other hand, the discovery of the psychic centre - the soul, the real truth of our being - can defy easy accomplishment. One must first purify the instruments, and one must learn to harmonise and unify them.

While the Mother devotes separate chapters to the different disciplines - psychic, mental, vital, physical - here she sees them really as a single integrated discipline. But it often becomes necessary to stress, now this and now another aspect. With children, and at school generally, physical, mental and vital education may have to take precedence, but psychic discipline is truly the heart of the matter. The journey to the soul may be long and difficult, yet the goal is not impossible of attainment. Once the way is open to the psychic centre, the other disciplines will be easy of mastery. Rightly tempered and sensitized, the mind or the reasoning intellect can be a great helper when subordinated to the soul. The vital, which is "the seat of impulses and desires, of enthusiasm and violence, of dynamic energy and desperate depressions, of passions and revolts,"

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can be a giant-power tapped when necessary but also held in leash at other times by the mind and soul. The body too, can become strong and supple and beautiful, when it is scrupulously held in check and not allowed to have things its own way. The mind and the vital - the former with its dogmas, the latter with its passions and aberrations - tend to pull the body in wrong directions damaging or exhausting it or dissipating its energies. The cure lies in everything — body, vital, mind - submitting readily and wholly to the soul's plenary governance. And so the Mother concludes with a peroration matching the great opening:

When we reach this degree of perfection which is our goal, we shall perceive that the truth we seek is made up of four major aspects: Love, Knowledge, Power and Beauty. These four attributes of the Truth will express themselves spontaneously in our being. The psychic will be the vehicle of true and pure love, the mind will be the vehicle of infallible knowledge, the vital will manifest an invincible power and strength and the body will be the expression of a perfect beauty and a harmony.

II

While "The Science of Living" has a general appeal to all and includes far more than formal education, the remaining essays are concerned mainly with the education of children in their homes and the school. Education, a life-long process, begins in fact even before birth. As the Mother had said in her talk to the Women of Japan, a great deal depends on the aspirant mother's own tapasya during the long months of pregnancy. She now reiterates that any aspirant mother should see that "her thoughts are always beautiful and pure, her feelings always noble and fine, her material surroundings as harmonious as possible and full of a great simplicity".² Above all, the whole endeavour should be sustained by a will to form a child pure and noble and high-souled.

The responsibility of the parents is great indeed. As in the old adage "Physician, heal thyself!" the Mother would say: "Parents, educate yourselves!" An ounce of example is always better than a ton of preaching. Qualities like "sincerity, honesty, straightforwardness, courage, disinterestedness, unselfishness, patience, endurance, perseverance, peace, calm, self-control" are assimilated with unobtrusive ease if they are pervasive in the home atmosphere. Hence the Mother's exhortation:

Parents, have a high ideal and always act in accordance with it and you will see that little by little your child will reflect this ideal in himself and spontaneously manifest the qualities you would like to see expressed in his nature.³

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Since the home is the first school and will never cease to be the residuary school, the parents should always be at their best behaviour, leading their children gently on, never shirking the truth and illustrating precepts by simple tales, fables or parables (as in Panchatantra, Hitopadesha or the Mother's own Tales of All Times), - and equally parents should refrain from scolding children, or being despotic, impatient or ill-tempered with them.

Physical education⁴ should be methodical because the human body is "the most completely governed by method, order, discipline, procedure," and is strictly subservient to the laws of the universe. The needed categories of movements, the rhythm of waking and sleep, work and relaxation, first imposed in the name of personal or communal discipline, presently become the habits of a lifetime done with unconscious ease and even with a quiet sense of joy.

The Mother differentiates between three aspects of physical education: (1) control and discipline of functions; (2) harmonious development of the several parts of the body and the body itself; and (3) rectification of defects and deformities. A basic knowledge of the human anatomy, of food and exercise, of health and hygiene, is certainly necessary, but there are always individual variations which must also be borne in mind. In the matter of food, tastes could differ, and what is appetising to one may be repulsive to another. It would be unwise therefore to force children to eat the kind of food which they intensely dislike. In all things, an avoidance of extremes and a reliance on Nature are to be preferred to arbitrary parental or pedagogic impositions and tyrannies. Also, the only too common tendency to exploit the child's fear or to dole out frightening Don'ts! is to be shunned in the interests of the normal growth of the child.

The importance of sports, outdoor games and athletics cannot be overstressed. "An hour's moving about in the sun," says the Mother, "does more to cure weakness or even anaemia than a whole arsenal of tonics." The promiscuous dependence on medicines is another serious danger to the child's - or, indeed, the adult's - health, and the child should be made to feel (as in Samuel Butler's Erewhon) that falling ill is no merit, but rather a sign of inferiority and improvidence. It is only the body's strength, suppleness and health that can build the Body Beautiful.

III

The education of the vital⁵ or the life-impulses is as difficult as it is important. The vital is a veritable despot of contraries, forever demanding, and forever unfulfilled. Our knowledge of the nature and functioning of the vital is vitiated by two notions: the hedonistic and the fatalistic. All is indeed the Delight of Existence - raso vai saḥ - but with man it ordinarily

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takes the form of the pursuit of pleasure, which may sometimes satiate but can never satisfy. As regards the notion that human character is like an unalterable birthmark - Character is Destiny! - it is too crude and definitive a description of reality. In a dynamic changing universe, man too can change, the race as well as the individuals:

The transformation of character has in fact been realised by means of a clear-sighted discipline and a perseverance so obstinate that nothing, not even the most persistent failures, can discourage it.

Human nature, it is known, is a knot of opposing pulls, "like the light and shadow of the same thing". The divine and the asuric are constantly at variance with each other reducing life to a battlefield or an insurrection. This is how "all life is an education pursued more or less consciously, more or less willingly". The problem is to encourage in the vital being "the movements that express the light".

If the education of the vital is begun as soon as the child can use his senses, "many bad habits will be avoided and many harmful influences eliminated". To facilitate and promote movements in the vital expressing light two things have to be done: the proper growth and efficient use of the sense organs, and the self-mastery of one's own nature or character, and the determination to change and transform it nearer one's heart's aspiration. As for the first, the education of the vital is really something akin to the development of psychological health comprising "the cultivation of discrimination and the aesthetic sense", for it is essential that the child "should be shown, led to appreciate, taught to love beautiful, lofty, healthy and noble things, whether in Nature or in human creation". As for self-knowledge and character-transformation, the child should be encouraged by a' gradual process to observe himself, to mark and measure the opposing pulls, to attempt judicious discrimination, to initiate change, and to persevere in spite of set-backs or failures:

One must gain a full knowledge of one's character and then acquire control over one's movements in order to achieve perfect mastery and the transformation of all the elements that have to be transformed.

Now most of what passes for education is really mental education⁶, yet it is both incomplete and quite insufficient. The aim seems to be to load the memory and make it carry a whole rag-bag of odds and ends of facts, dates, names, formulas and other information. At best it is "a system of gymnastics to increase the suppleness of the brain". If anything like a revolutionary change is to be effected, mental education will have to be conceived in five phases promoting respectively

1. the power of attention and concentration;

2. the power of expansion, wideness, complexity and richness;

3. the power of organisation of ideas around a central idea or ideal;

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4. the power of thought-control, involving rejection of the false and selection and fostering of the true; and

5. the power of inner calm and mental silence, facilitating "receptivity to inspirations coming from the higher regions of the being".

This is a consummate analysis of the whole science of mental education. In the life of the growing child, a thousand things distract its attention, and hence to forge intelligent attention and lively reception is the beginning of mental education. The child's curiosity, which often finds expression in continual questioning, should not be frowned upon but used as a means of advancing self-education. Since the enemy of all true education is soulless standardisation, the pupil should be encouraged to view diverse approaches to a subject and to appreciate "the extreme relativity of mental learning", this in its turn awakening in him "an aspiration for a truer source of knowledge". From the capacity to concentrate, it is a natural development to learn to accomplish the expansion of knowledge and its organisation around a central idea; and "the higher and larger the central idea and the more universal it is, rising above time and space, the more numerous and the more complex will be the ideas, notions and thoughts which it will be able to organise and harmonise". After such exercises in expansion and central organisation, the next mental discipline would be self-control and resolved self-limitation - and so on to the casting away of all thoughts and perceptions, and the invocation of mental silence, the meditative calm in which the higher lights may be seen reflected, resulting in an accession of peace:

...all mental vibration can be stilled and an almost total silence secured. In this silence one can gradually open to the higher regions of the mind and learn to record the. inspirations that come from there. ...

...When it is agitated, thought becomes confused and impotent; in an attentive tranquility, the light can manifest itself and open up new horizons to man's capacity.

IV

When the best has been achieved through physical, vital and mental education, there will be a cardinal insufficiency still: for, firstly, they cannot by themselves be integrated, and, secondly, even their sum will only be a frustrating incompleteness. It is psychic education alone that can team the other three purposively together, and also link them to the creative centre. Unfortunately, current educational systems have no idea of psychic education - thus tragi-comically playing Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark.

In their early years, children do have intimations of a higher consciousness which may puzzle or even startle their parents and elders.

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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.⁷

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 apar ā vidyā 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;

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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.⁸

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".⁹

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."¹⁰ 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.&quot¹¹

V

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

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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, Ātma-vicāra 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, ātma-samarpaṇa, 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.¹²

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

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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.

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