Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7

Mother's Playground

ON the last occasion I spoke to you of a phenomenon that used to happen in the playground, a phenomenon remarkable and extraordinary. This time I am going to speak to you of the playground itself as a great phenomenon created by the Mother.

You may remember, we once saw a play in our Theatre staged by our students. It was about the adventure of a few young people leaving their home and going out wandering. In the end they came to a house and one of them casually opened a side-door in the building and all entered and found themselves in a fairyland. They were surprised, astonished: they found they had left the old world and come to a new unfamiliar enchanting fairyland.

The same experience one has when one opens the gate of the playground and enters it. At least we used to experience in that way in the early days. As soon as we stepped into the playground, a new atmosphere enveloped us, a new life full of joy, happiness and delight and freedom. When we used to put on our group uniform, we felt quite different from what we were normally. Old people with their blue shorts in our group, really old people – they felt very young, youthful and trotting about as if they had left their age behind with all their cares. And the younger people, the youngest ones, they were so eager to join the group, to put on the green uniform. So many among them after putting on their green shorts rushed to me and said enthusiastically: "Today I have got my uniform and I will join the group": so

happy, so free, so full of delight and delightful they were.

Now a word about the organisation or grouping in the playground. Naturally some attention had to be paid in view of the difference of age and sex and capacity; but the principle, the general principle that lay behind the organisation and on which the Mother insisted was: no difference of age, specially no difference of sex; all human beings are fundamentally of the same nature: Particularly in the competitions of physical education that were arranged from time to time, the groups were more or less all mixed up, the green and the red and the blue and all the other colours made a blend as it were. Now-a-days it is somewhat different, but in those early days it was otherwise; only capacity was the chief consideration for distinction and difference, and that too in it general and very superficial way. I also, an aged person, I do not say old, I ran and did the exercises with young people, very young people and girls also – not for any fun and joke but very seriously. It was to show by example that in your mind, in your consciousness there should be no feeling of difference, no sense of inferiority or superiority from the point of view of age and sex – and even capacity, to an extent.

In the very early days when .we were rather very few in number, somewhere about fifty, we used to address each other by our names, mere names, there was no dādā or didi tagged on: Nolini, Pavitra, Sahana, Lalita, that was all, pure and simple. So when people from outside came they found it a little queer: "They have no respect here for age, no' respect for elderly people, no consideration for the women, they call each, other merely by the name." But in reality, whatever it seemed like from outside, the consciousness, the attitude behind was different. And yet there were some people who felt it and appreciated it. Thus when some one in the Ashram called me by my name or an elderly woman by hers, evidently the feeling behind was full of respect and consideration, even love. Only the form of address

was like that, bare and without qualification. Even someone from outside saw the thing and judged it correctly. He wrote an article on the Ashram and mentioned this custom in the Ashram: it is very strange that youngsters called old people by their mere names but it sounds so nice and appropriate when the thing comes from their lips.

Thus the principles that guided the organisation of physical education are as you know now: there is to be, first, no difference between boys and girls, all should undergo the same exercises and the same programme. This was and is even now, I think, compulsory for the younger groups – the green and the red and even little beyond. But it has been often asked, the bodies are different specially with regard to sex, is it not natural to provide different programmes? But in reality the bodies have become different because of the consciousness that insisted on the difference during milleniums of growth and evolution. It is only now, in this age, that things have begun to change a little. Some of you may remember, the elderly ones, how difficult it was for the Mother to make the girls put on shorts and shirts for the playground exercises. She had to begin gently and gradually. In the beginning the girls learnt to put on trousers, with trousers they used to do marching and exercises. Even today in the outside world, in many places in India specially, we see women, girls marching and doing the parade in saree. Our women-police even today are on duty with saree. The tradition was very strong and in this respect, we here claim to be the pioneers of this new development of physical freedom of women to be equal to that of men. This was the lesson taught by the Mother.

Long ago, some twenty-five years ago, a well-known leader of India, a great educationist came and saw our playground activities and made the remark: "I have travelled all over India, visited various educational institutions, seen women doing gymnastics but it is the first time that I see here in the Ashram girls doing vaulting, especially on parallel bars, I

have never seen it anywhere else." Of course, it goes without saying, circus-girls are different. In other words people used to consider vaulting as a specially masculine virtue and along with it many other physical games and exercises. Today it is being gradually found that this is a superstition and the judgment is wrong. The Wimbledon women champions will bear witness. The most important thing is that you have to change the attitude, you have to change consciousness. Of course, there are difficulties on the way, the force of habit, the force of atavism, all that means an extra dose of your consciousnes's or a new consciousness. What is done here and what is done elsewhere, in this respect of freedom being given to women and freedom being given to the younger generation, there is a difference. I will come to it. Mother was repeating so often: the freedom, the liberty you enjoy here is extraordinary, exceptional, there is almost no limit to your freedom. That is to say, it is dangerous, because the unlimited use of freedom means also misuse of freedom. But the Mother took the risk, for that is the only way towards a radical solution, not merely a half-way compromise. Only when you are free, when you are completely, absolutely free, you choose between the good and the bad, and you choose the good of your own will, then the good has a real importance for you, for your consciousness and for your development. Otherwise when you accept and follow the good through compulsion, through fear or social decency or for your own sake in order to be good, through vanity – that is to say, in order to be good you observe certain rules, and you feel you are virtuous, you are dutiful, then it is not the true way, not the true attitude and consciousness. The true consciousness is that you do the right thing not because it is your duty to do it, not because it is worthy to do it and it is expected of you to do it, but because your nature impels you towards it. The flower blooms spontaneously without any sense of duty. It possesses no sense of duty because its nature is to do so, to be beautiful. Human

being also could be like that, spontaneous and natural in its action and behaviour. When you do a great thing, you do not feel that you are doing something marvellous or that you are exercising or stretching your power. You do not do a thing because it is your duty to do it but because it is your nature to do so, you cannot but do it. I give an example here. You are students of English and English grammar. Now, tell me, what is the difference between these two statements? "I have to do the thing" and "I am to do the thing"... "I have to do the thing" means 'I am obliged to, I am compelled to, I cannot do otherwise.' "I am to do" means I am doing it, it is for me to do it, I will do it, that is to say it is my nature to do it.' Something of that kind is taught in the Gita – the ideal of kartavyam karma and niskāma karma or one's Swadharma. Kartavya is usually translated as duty but it is not correct. Kartavya is one's Dharma or the spontaneous expression of one's nature, what one is to do, not what one has to do. Mother gave this infinite freedom to her children because that was the only way of creating a new nature and she showed also the difference between the right use of freedom and its wrong use. The wrong use is found in all the movements of freedom outside in the normal life, either in the student movement or the women's emancipation movement. Now when women are fighting for freedom for themselves they consider themselves as women fighting for freedom against men. "We are women, you are men, you enjoy privileges, rights, we are denied them, we want them, we claim them." In the youth movement also the young people say: all the powers the old people enjoy, positions and emoluments, that will not do, we want to share these also along with the old. Mother said, "No, it is not the right attitude." You must change your position, your point of view. Going out for a quarrel, for a fight means that you consider yourselves different beings, with different powers, capacities, constitutions etc., etc. First of all you must consider yourselves, all, both the parties,

as human beings, not two different species. This is being acknowledged to some extent now-a-days but it is not sufficient, Mother says. If you are content to be human beings, just human beings, differences will arise again and again and not only differences but serious differences. Human nature is composed of these differences, and culture and civilisation meant nothing more than a reconciliation, a compromise among these differences. And the result has been that we have not gone very far for the solution. A deeper truth is to be found, a higher truth and a more powerful truth. We must rise to a new state, Mother spoke always of the truth - the truth of your soul. To the truth of your soul, in the truth of your soul you are neither man nor woman, neither young nor old – tvam kumāra uta vā kumāri, tvam jīrna... you are all that in appearance, for you are something more or something else.

You are to take your stand on your soul, that was the lesson that the Mother was trying to impart in the playground education. So long as you are in the normal consciousness imbedded in your body-consciousness and view things from there, your life also will be built in the pattern created by the body-consciousness. Life in that pattern can proceed only through difference and distinction, contrast and contradiction, conflict and battle. So long as you stick to your habitual position it will be so; the remedy is a radical remedy; it is to reverse your position. You have to stand not on your legs but on your head, then you will find the way to march through not confrontation but co-operation, not through separation but union, not through difference but identity. So long as you are mere human beings this supreme soul-identity cannot come. You have to forget the differences... some one asked the Mother in one of the playground talks of the Mother: how is it possible for one to forget this fundamental difference that one is a man and another a woman. Mother answered: "How do you say so? Look here, when I talk to Tara, do you think I am

always considering her as a woman and talking accordingly." And she could have added: "And when I answer you do you think I am speaking to a masculine person?" I may narrate here a little incident concerning me personally. It was with regard to the question of age. When someone informed Mother that they wanted to celebrate, perhaps it was my eightieth birthday, in a magnificent manner, a gala celebration, Mother roared out: "No, no, you are spoiling my work. All the while I was trying to make him forget his age and you are trying to insist on his age." Age also is a thing to be forgotten. The birthday-celebration is not for recording the progress in our age, how we are progressing year by year in our age, that is, how we are getting old – No, it is to note the progress made in the inner being and consciousness. Each birthday is to be a landmark of the forward march of your consciousness, not the greyness of your head. The touch of your soul will inspire you not merely to do the right inner movement, the enlightening of your consciousness but also it will inspire you to do the right physical movement, even lead you to the choice of the right kind of physical exercises and do them in the right manner. The lesson to learn then is to get back to your soul inside you, you will find there everything that is worth having: freedom, joy, harmony and even untold capacity.

People coming from outside asked very often and ask even now what the Ashram is doing for the country, for the world. It is confined to a few people only, is it worth doing? Mother answered simply: I am doing something which is not done anywhere else in the world, that is awakening the soul in my children, the soul that only can save and nothing else. To the outsider we say, if you come here, come then with eyes to see, look at, rather look into the soul of the people who are here. Do not look at what they learn or what they do or what they speak but look inside them, look what is there deep within. Even now I say: She is there within you, her work is not arrested. The tempo of her work is as

vigorous and as living as it could be and the impact will be more and more clear and manifest.

So I repeat: The soul is neither boy nor girl nor old person; it has not the characteristics of the body natural to man or rather to the animal. But this does not mean that it has no body, it is something airy, nebulous, smoky etc. Not at all, the soul has a body, its own as concrete and definite as the physical body, even it has a material body although the matter is of a different kind. Have not the western sages begun to speak of immaterial matter, that is to say, anti-matter? That soul-body even now you are carrying within this material body of yours. You can see it, sense it as definite and living as the external body. The Mother is holding it in you, you come in contact with it through your contact with the Mother. Love the Mother, be one with her, you will find and be this living soul of yours.

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