Education and the Aim of human life

Two Cardinal Points of Education

A Collective Memorandum presented in 1965 to the Education Commission, Government of India, by P.B. Saint Hilaire (Pavitra), Director, Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Pondicherry, on behalf of the Teachers of this Institution.*

""This Memorandum is an official document stating the position of the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education. It is in fact a summary of the thesis expounded in the previous pans of this book. The reader will excuse the unavoidable repetitions.

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In the right view of things the true purpose of education is not only to bring out of the child the best and the noblest that he is capable of, but also to endow him with an understanding of the true aim and significance of human life so as to provide him with a lasting source of inspiration when he enters and faces the world at the end of his academic training.

This second point needs all the more attention nowadays because of the uncertainty that surrounds even the most immediate future. We have reached a phase of accelerated scientific and technological progress that may lead to the liberation of man from want and to a considerable amount of well-being and security - what has been called an affluent society; but it may lead also to self-annihilation. What is then coming next? Is mankind to be led blindly to wanton destruction or to a still worse soulless fate? Are there no truer and more deeply inspiring words of guidance for our young people than subtleties on the absurdity of life? How shall we counteract the effect of such lack of genuine guidance and help them to surmount the confusion in which so many flounder?

In this connection two points are of cardinal importance. The first springs from a true insight into human nature and constitution, and this will determine the attitude that the teacher should take towards the growing child. The second concerns the future of man, of man the individual and humanity the collective man.

Modern education, on the whole, takes the child as an undeveloped body endowed with a young life, untrained sensibilities, acute but often unrestrained emotions, an immature mind and, as he grows, a nascent and groping reason. Reason is the highest recognized faculty, and to make of the full-grown child a being governed by reason and capable of discrimination and rational thinking, with a healthy and strong body, a sensitive but chastened emotional

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and aesthetic being, well trained in the conventional morality and customs of the present day social life, will appear to many educationists an ideal achievement so far as the individual child is concerned. But society has its word to say; it requires a regular supply of young men and women, immediately serviceable for its complicated economic, administrative and industrial machinery and therefore demands that they should be classified according to ability and capacity. In the process of training, the child is submitted to the powerful (for his delicate and impressionable nature) influence of parents, teachers and school-mates. Moreover the requirements of society to some extent run counter to the innate urge of the child. Thus the best of which the child would have been capable does not realize itself fully - far from it.

The defects of modern education are well known. They have often been described and analysed. But the remedies that have been proposed are mere palliatives. They counter the effects and not the cause. If we want to find a genuine solution to the present difficulties, we have to discover the cause of the evil and for that to re-examine the whole foundation on which education rests.

As early as 1910 when he was a political leader in Bengal, Sri Aurobindo propounded certain principles of education. At that time they were truly revolutionary as they broke away deliberately from the conventional notions on education that were then prevalent under the foreign domination. These principles, of which I quote here below the first one, most important and sufficient for my present purpose, did not seem to have attracted the attention they deserve and they remain even today practically unknown to the educational world.

The first principle of true teaching is that nothing can be taught. The teacher is not an instructor or task-master, he is a helper and a guide. His business is to suggest and not to impose. He does not actually train the pupil's mind, he only

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shows him how to perfect his instruments of knowledge and helps and encourages him in the process. He does not impart knowledge to him, he shows him how to acquire knowledge for himself. He does not call forth the knowledge that is within; he only shows him where it lies and how it can be habituated to rise to the surface. The distinction that reserves this principle for the teaching of adolescent and adult minds and denies its application to the child, is a conservative and unintelligent doctrine. Child or man, boy or girl, there is only one sound principle of good teaching. Difference of age only serves to diminish or increase the amount of help and guidance necessary; it does not change its nature.¹

Since the beginning of the century the educationists have been devoting themselves especially in the West to initiating and carrying out a considerable amount of theoretical and experimental research work in the field of education and child psychology and have come to conclusions similar to those expressed so forcefully by Sri Aurobindo. For them the child is foremost a developing being who has its own needs, different from an adult's and for that reason easily misunderstood by the adult. The first task of the educator is to make sure that the child's needs are satisfied and that the child is happy.

New education... is really a new attitude towards the child. An attitude of understanding and love, and above all an attitude of respect. An attitude of expectation, of patience; the restraint of a delicate hand that dare not open a flower- bud nor disturb a baby in the midst of his first experiments, a student in the course of his early work....

The child has within himself everything that is necessary for a true education, and particularly a ceaseless activity, incessantly revived, in which he is totally engrossed, the activity of a growing being who is continuously developing and to whom for that very reason, our help may be useful, but our direction is not necessary.2

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Speaking of this new trend in western education, Sri Aurobindo regards it as a healthy step. It shows the beginning of

... the realisation that each human being is a self-developing soul and that the business of both parent and teacher is to enable and to help the child to educate himself, to develop his own intellectual, moral, aesthetic and practical capacities and to grow freely as an organic being, not to be kneaded and pressured into form like an inert plastic material. It is not yet realised what this soul is or that the true secret, whether with child or man, is to help him to find his deeper self, the real psychic entity within. That, if we ever give it a chance to come forward, and still more if we call it into the foreground as 'the leader of the march set in our front', will itself take up most of the business of education out of our hands and develop the capacity of the psychological being towards a realisation of its potentialities of which our present mechanical view of life and man and external routine methods of dealing with them prevent us from having any experience or forming any conception. These new educational methods are on the straight way to this truer dealing The closer touch attempted with the psychical entity behind the vital and physical mentality and an increasing reliance on its possibilities must lead to the ultimate discovery that man is inwardly a soul and a conscious power of the Divine and that the evocation of this real man within is the right object of education and indeed of all human life if it would find and live according to the hidden Truth and deepest law of its own being.³

How this is to be brought about is mainly a matter of tactful dealing with the child. Of course, there must be a great freedom in the choice of the subjects, in the time allotted to each subject, so that the child can progress at his own pace. This last result calls for individual handling and a sufficient knowledge of the language by the child so as to be

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able to read and comprehend. Text-books are usually too condensed, therefore work on files or work-sheets is preferable, but their preparation imposes a heavy burden on the teacher. Anyhow a real Free Progress Class - as these classes may be called - can only begin when the child is able to read and write fairly well, i.e., in Class IV or V.

Before that level, the teacher has to use his own discretion. But the right attitude towards the child must be adopted from the very beginning, in the Kindergarten. A child's soul is usually very close to the surface and, if a proper environment is maintained, it will continue to be so for several years.

Ordinary education and the influence of adult society usually act to muffle and distort this happy and healthy spontaneity, and replace it by an automatism based on the more or less arbitrary conventions of family and society and no less arbitrary rules of moral or religious education.

In order to awaken the child to the understanding of the relations existing between the two worlds which almost simultaneously - the inner and the outer - he should be told how to observe carefully what happens in himself. He has to be shown that he is the playground, sometimes the battlefield of different forces and inner movements: sensations, impulses, emotions, ideas. And he must be taught how to distinguish between them practically and find out their nature and origin. For this discovery intellectual explanations are insufficient, it is no use lecturing and moralizing. It is with concrete instances, from the day to day school life, taking advantage of apparently insignificant incidents, that the discrimination can be slowly developed.

The child will then be shown that it is possible to rise above the fleeting inner movements that he has now learnt to discriminate and not to be frightened by the inner silence in which he may enter - this silence that will later reveal itself as a plenitude.

As an illustration, I shall give the case when a tense situation has somehow arisen and a decision has to be taken,

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or when an obstacle hampers all progress. At a suitable time, the teacher may call the child when alone, present to him impartially, in a few kind and simple words, the consequences of the possible alternatives, then ask him to consider quietly the whole matter and, after a moment of silence, to aspire for light and truth. Not by the mind and the reason, because truth does not depend on arguments, nor by the emotions, although restrained and purified emotions will greatly contribute to reaching a solution by their quietness, but in the freedom, impartiality and equality of the spirit, the teacher may succeed in imparting the little touch which, by its repetition, will awaken the still receptive young being to the presence of the inner divinity. What the child then decides must not be questioned, he should be allowed to proceed; he knows the consequences and will remember them. Thus only will the child acquire the sense of responsibility which is aimed at.

The justification of this attitude is given by Sri Aurobindo in these terms:

All experience shows that man must be given a certain freedom to stumble in action as well as to err in knowledge so long as he does not get from within himself his freedom from wrong movement and error; otherwise he cannot grow.4

Thus the child will be shown by experience that there is in him, above the movements of the ordinary nature - likes and dislikes, impulses and fancies, ideas, etc. - a region of deep peace and silence. If he listens carefully he will discover that in this silence, there is also the feeling of a Presence, a conscious Presence. And after some time, when he turns back to his problems, he will be found one day to say: "Oh! I know now what to do!" The quality of such decisions is very different from the ordinary movements. The child will recognize gradually that this inner guidance is the only valid and most satisfying one, it alone gives a peace

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and joy that surpass pleasures and enjoyments, but it is difficult to discover and listen to, because emotions and thoughts are too active and noisy - an inner silence has to be established first. If the teacher succeeds in establishing with his pupil a soul to soul contact, a kind of helpful link is created.

The Mother has shown how a proper relation between teacher and pupil can be established and maintained.

When a child has made a mistake, see that he confesses it to you spontaneously and frankly; and when he has confessed, make him understand with kindness and affection what was wrong in his movement and that he should not repeat it. In any case, never scold him; a fault confessed must be forgiven. You should not allow any fear to slip in between you and your child; fear is a disastrous way to education: invariably it gives birth to dissimulation and falsehood. An affection that sees clear, that is firm yet gentle and a sufficiently practical knowledge will create bonds of trust that are indispensable for you to make the education of your child effective.5

Threat and punishment should be completely avoided. An untimely outburst from the teacher is all that is needed to wipe out all the confidence that the child has in him; the way will be blocked for a long time and often irreparably. Love and sympathy, desire to help, devotion to an ideal, the satisfaction of being at peace with oneself, are in the end more potent constructive forces than fear of punishment, whether by the headmaster, the police or a god. "Coercion", says Sri Aurobindo, "only chains up the devil and alters at best his form of action into more mitigated and civilised movements; it does not and cannot eliminate him."6

But this should not lead one to believe that we advocate a freedom which allows the child to indulge indiscriminately his desires and caprices. The freedom we vindicate for the child is the freedom to establish the conditions of his own

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progress - hence the name Free Progress Classes, as we like to call the classes of our method. Being, so to say, his own master, the child is obliged to refer constantly to the inner guidance, if he wants to avoid pitfalls, because experience will have taught him the price he has to pay in the shape of loss of inner harmony and peace, clouding of the mind and dissipation of his time and energy. This necessity of perpetual choice is the creative element in this education; its aim is to inculcate in the student a spirit of self-reliance and responsibility. Nothing can be a better gift to a growing child. And we allow him the freedom to err or stumble, because we know that by his errors and stumblings he will be able to walk straight.

Regarding the inner guidance Sri Aurobindo writes:

If one keeps the true will and true attitude, then the intuitions or intimations from within will begin to grow, become clear, precise, unmistakable and the strength to follow them will grow also. . . .7

On the other hand we do not expect the child to be at once the master of the inner movements; it requires many years of patient work, even a whole lifetime. But he can observe them in a calm and detached manner, study and identify them. This is an indispensable first step, preliminary to mastery. The gaining of mastery is an important subject, which we cannot even touch here.

Well, it is certainly good that the old coercive methods of education have gone or are going, but on the condition that something higher replaces them; otherwise the results will be disastrous. And if we judge from the direction taken by some of the most advanced nations in matter of education, they are rapidly reaching a state in which the child will give a free rein to his impulses and caprices, without any higher guidance, inner or outer, to help him towards self-knowledge and self-mastery. This is indeed a dismal prospect, of which we can see a few forebodings in the growing lawlessness

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among the students and in the ever-increasing number of juvenile delinquents.

Such a mistake could not have been committed if there had been a full grasp of the meaning and function assigned to education by Sri Aurobindo. The western educationists, and after them the entire world, have seized only half the truth, and this deficiency may be the source of the ominous trend in education evinced the world over.

No human collective life is possible without discipline, but it ought to be a discipline taking into account as much the diversity of human nature as the unity of the soul, the deeper consciousness in man. Only a discipline of this kind is freely acceptable as it does not interfere with the subtle action of the soul. Once such a discipline is freely accepted - and under these conditions - it should be carefully observed, without consideration for passing caprices. Unity does not entail uniformity; the latter is nothing but a deformation and a caricature of the former. It is the confusion between unity and uniformity which is so harmful in political ideologies.

It may be argued that the guidance of the soul we recognize is nothing more than the "voice of conscience", the moral sense of right and wrong that every human being has more or less developed within himself; and the action, usefulness and limitations of the conscience have been well studied by moralists and psychologists. It is perfectly true that the soul - the psychic entity which enshrines the divine spark in man - is the origin of the conscience. In some cases the conscience may be so developed that it will fit the description we have given. But in most cases the action of the soul is covered up and smothered by desires, ambitions and passions, hardened by the bare facts of life and mixed up hopelessly with family, national, social and religious conventions and prejudices, so as to have lost almost all of its purity and reliability. What we present is precisely a method aiming at disengaging it from these distorting influences by an action undertaken at an early age, when the "small voice" is not yet completely muffled, restoring it to

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its pristine purity and making it available as an impartial and trustworthy witness and guide.

In his search for a reliable way of discriminating among the various inner movements, and still more in his quest for his soul, the child can receive a genuine help only from someone who has undergone the same patient efforts at inner discrimination, who has gone through the same persistent search. Now in India this is effectively a part of the training in Yoga. It is in this sense that The Mother, speaking to teachers, has said:

One must be a great Yogi to be a good teacher.

One must have the perfect attitude to be able to exact from one's pupils a perfect attitude.8

And a little further:

Those who are successful as teachers here... , i.e., who become truly good teachers, that would signify that they are capable of making an inner progress of impersonalisation, of eliminating their egoism, and mastering their movements and that they have a clear sight, an understanding of others and a patience that never fails.9

To be a teacher in a Free Progress Class is certainly a heavy onus, but it offers also an ample reward by watching and helping the blossoming of young souls, fully engaged in their effort of self-discovery and self-mastery.

Thus the main task of the secondary education (inclusive of higher secondary) is to make the child soul-conscious, in the sense we have explained, and bring him to the correlative freedom and sense of responsibility. The adolescent will have by now understood how his soul guides his destiny. In the meanwhile, he will have learnt - at least to some extent how to work and how to learn.

Now, during the three college years, some time is given regularly to the study of human evolution, social and

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political, but mainly spiritual, with a special reference to the present day world situation, so that the young people may understand the nature of the world in which they are going to enter and work, its significance and its promises. To explain what we mean, we have to outline Sri Aurobindo's
conception of man's future upon earth. This we shall do by following up the birth and development of the notion of progress.

II

It can be shown'" that the advent of progress has cut the course of history in two parts:

1. A period when society was almost static in its vision of things. There was little change from one generation to another. Civilisations and empires grew, bloomed and decayed, without affecting the ways of living and the outlook of the masses. Surprisingly little attention was given to alleviating the conditions of life and work of the common labourer and the tiller of the soil; consequently the productivity of labour remained almost constant for hundreds and even thousands of years and, as the main source of wealth was human labour, a general enrichment could hardly be envisaged. What men perceived in the contemporary events was their intensity, their violence, not their evolutionary trend, which was invisible to them.

2. And a period when the human mind turned to the mastery of physical nature and applied its discoveries and inventions in a deliberate and concerted effort to the economic and social betterment of the whole society. This possibility dawned upon man with the seventeenth century and within two centuries Europe had become the scene of a great intellectual activity in the cause of general education and culture, in an effort at emancipation from tradition, convention and prejudice and with a keen interest in the theoretical and applied sciences.

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We need not follow in detail the birth of the great hopes that marked the "Age of Enlightenment" and the successive disillusions that followed. At the beginning of the 20th century, many thinkers were led to the conclusion that, while a marked advance in the economic sphere and an improvement in the conditions of life and labour were noticeable, leading no doubt to an amelioration in the social relations, still human nature had not changed to any appreciable extent. Egoism and greed have always tried to divert any new discovery or improvement for the benefit of a few individuals or for a group - class or nation. Even the goodwill of men and their spirit of sacrifice have been exploited in this way. It is this apparent obduracy of human nature which is the radical obstacle to a wholesome and harmonious progress. The notion of an all-embracing progress of society was therefore questioned. There was no sign that people were really "happier" than in the past. The prospect appeared gloomy.

With the passing years and the tremendous impetus given to scientific and technological progress by the .two world wars, the situation has now changed to some extent. The material and social amelioration in the industrially developed nations can no longer be denied. The disparity between labour and management has considerably diminished and a classless society is near at hand - although achieved differently in the capitalist U.S.A. and the socialist U.S.S.R.

A new conceptions of wealth has emerged. As it has by now gained an implicit and general acceptance, it is difficult to realize its truly revolutionary character. It would certainly have startled the ancient philosophers and historians. As Bertrand de Jouvenel puts it:

The great modern idea is that it is possible to enrich collectively and individually all members of a society through continuous progress in the organization of work, in its processes and instruments, that this enrichment provides by

itself the means of its further development, and that this development can be rapid and indefinite." 11

But new questions arise. Technological progress seems to create more problems than it can solve. It has also many social and political implications, both pleasant and unpleasant. Great dangers are looming in the future and doubts are rising whether mankind will have the foresight, the wisdom and the strength to avert them.

The accelerated pace of scientific and technological achievements has led economists and industrialists to scrutinize more attentively the growth of all private and public undertakings. This concern with the future has caused planning to be resorted to, even in the most liberal economy, on a yet unknown scale. But the rapidity of change in the economic, social and even political spheres is so great that the common man himself begins to look at the future as if hidden by a big question mark.

Looking around us we see that the most developed nations have already achieved a very high standard of material well-being - what really forms the beginning of a civilization of plenty or affluent society - with an abundance of amenities of all description, food, houses, motor cars and aeroplanes, gadgets of all kinds. But there are ominous signs also and the social order does not follow the same forward movement. Crime is rather on the increase, especially juvenile delinquency; the same is true of mental diseases and the use of narcotics is spreading. Again happiness escapes the grasp of man.

The ideal of a welfare society, which had taken possession of the mind and heart of man, was indeed a great historic force in shaping the modern world. But, as it is drawing close to its realization, it is losing much of its inspiring power. It is no longer generating the same enthusiasm, as is evidenced by the decline of the socialist parties in We Europe. Moreover the capitalist society comes in the end to adopt much of what was originally purely-socialist, so that

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both social orders are moving towards each other and seem likely to meet half way.

In former times, man turned to religion to satisfy aspirations which seemed to be denied to him by his surroundings. But religion is gradually losing its hold and the young especially are turning away from it.

The main reason is

... that religions have always laid emphasis on a world beyond, giving to this one only a passing importance. For some religions this world is an illusion from which we have to awaken. For some it is a cosmic snare from which man has painfully to disentangle himself. For others it is a place of trial, in which a divine decree has placed us so that we may gain immortal life elsewhere when our term is finished. All religions have more or less shunned the world and life, and declared them impure, debased and incapable of regeneration. What our young men and women are truly looking for, is to know the aims of their life - of human life in general, of their own life in particular - to find an ideal that can give a meaning to their daily work, to their joys and sorrows, to life in the society in which they are going to enter, and at the same time help them in growing towards the mastery and perfection which vaguely but intimately, they feel waiting in the depths of themselves.12

Another reason is that all religions take their inspiration from the past. Their founders, prophets or heroes were rightly figures who lived centuries ago in a world far different from the one we live in. The problems they had to solve have little in common with the situations that confront us nowadays. We may admire their fortitude, their unflinching devotion, their sovereign detachment, but it becomes increasingly difficult for our young people to believe that their example is applicable to present-day life.

From all this we see that the advent of progress has really cut the course of history in two: one epoch in which men

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were looking at the past, another in which they turn their look to the future.

Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, the past Asiatic civilizations, even the Renaissance, did not look ahead for the ideals and origins, in their ancient glories, their fabled heroes, their pristine virtues real or fancied. Unlike modern man, who dreams of the world he will make, pre-modern man dreamed of the world he had left.13

We are therefore led to two conclusions:

1. Man has definitely turned his face towards the future. Man knows that he can change his lot. He knows that he already has the power to influence his destiny. An elimination of poverty and disease, a life of abundance and leisure are almost within the reach of the most advanced nations and are held forth as a bait to the still suffering, toiling and starving under-developed masses. The latest discoveries of science have put in our hands an immense, almost limitless power which can be turned for the ultimate material liberation of man from the curse of toil or for his own destruction.

2. But we know also - and it becomes evident as soon as the immediate wants are satisfied - that all the material achievements, however much necessary today, will not satisfy us in the end, if they come alone. They will leave us weary, empty and disillusioned. What then is missing?

Sri Aurobindo supplies an answer and gives us at the same time the key to the future evolution of man. He shows that the theory of evolution of which modern science is justly proud and which holds that life evolved out of matter and mind out of life, is susceptible of being extended one step further. May not mind be a veil of a still hidden higher power, which awaits the time of its emergence?

The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking

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and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious co-operation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God?14

This next step would not be a mere amelioration, even a perfecting of man's present faculties, but a radical change of consciousness. This would mean the emergence in him of a new power of consciousness, as different from mind as mind is different from life and life from matter. Sri Aurobindo spent the last forty years of his life - his retirement period in Pondicherry - to the study and realization of this new power of consciousness which he calls simply the Supermind, of the conditions of its emergence and of the consequences of this emergence.15

In Sri Aurobindo's view the present world crisis is nothing but the preparation for the manifestation of an evolutionary mutation which is pressed upon man by the gigantic development of his outer life, out of proportion with his present day limited faculties - mental, ethical and spiritual. The shaking mankind is undergoing in every domain - scientific, social, political, philosophical, ethical and religious - is nothing but the break-up of the past, indispensable to the forward movement.

The word "progress" assumes a new significance. It is not simply an increase in the technological development and material well-being. It is the opening of a new world, the dawning of a New Age, the beginning of a new life. And the faith of man's unlimited perfectibility, the fundamental optimism of man's heart and mind are completely justified.

Biological evolution up to man has proceeded under the pressure of Nature, without the conscious participation of the creatures drawn along this evolution. But man marks the passage from unconscious to conscious evolution. He has attained a position of full spiritual responsibility and is well aware that he has the power to influence, for good or for evil, his destiny, both individual and collective. The next step of evolution can only be conscious and deliberate.

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In this Sri Aurobindo sees an indication that the new being next to man in the evolutionary scale will be evolved in man, rather than out of man. And this is confirmed by the fact that, among all earthly creatures, man is the only dissatisfied one. There is in him some divine urge to aim higher, to transcend himself.

The recognition is spreading that the old remedies are of no avail, that the lights that have so far guided man, are now failing him. A change in the form of Government or even of social system will not help. The change that is needed is of a deeper kind, it is an upheaval. There must grow in a few individuals at first, then in an increasing number, the urge to overpass the old limitations, to find in themselves or above themselves a new light, a New Consciousness, a new guiding principle of knowledge and action, and a decision to abide by it, to let this new consciousness transform their nature and life.

This is possible, says Sri Aurobindo, because by Yoga man has shown that he is able to raise himself to a higher consciousness. There is then nothing irrational or even fundamentally new in the process. The innovation lies in the direction given to the spiritual effort, tapasyā: a liberation from nature, life and world, not to get away from them and leave them unchanged behind, but to turn back to them and transform them. This point is of extreme importance because it explains what is meant by a conscious collaboration with the evolutionary process.

The western countries, especially France, are now under the sway of the scientific works - posthumously published of the Jesuit Father and palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin, who has argued very aptly that modern biology, supports the theory of an evolutionary future for man. It would be, after a more or less prolonged period of adjustment, a perfecting of the human faculties, especially the moral and spiritual, leading to an extension of consciousness and ultimately - for those who have chosen the right path - to the union with God.

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There is thus a resemblance with Sri Aurobindo's views, but points of difference also exist. One of them is that the conscious collaboration of man, especially such as Yoga implies, with the evolutionary process has not been fully seized by Father Teilhard, or at least has not been expressed with the same all round emphasis. Another point of divergence is that the Father does not conceive as possible that a complete union with God can be accomplished here upon earth in a material body. There is therefore no alternative at a certain stage but to leave the earth-life. But in India there is no difficulty in that respect, the conceptions of both the jīvanmukta (liberated while living) and videhamukta (liberated without a body) exist in the spiritual tradition.

Sri Aurobindo has outlined his conception of the future evolution of man in the philosophical magazine Arya, published in Pondicherry, during the years 1914-1921. At the same time, he has made a synthesis of the traditional systems of Indian Yoga and welded them into his all embracing "Integral Yoga". Both are thus complementary: Yoga is the individual, evolution the collective, aspect.16

In the last chapter of Sri Aurobindo's The Human Cycle we find a description of a transitional period - what he calls a "spiritualised society". It is a stage when mankind, having accepted the ideal, will be engaged in the process of giving it a shape in all its activities and institutions.

It will reveal to man the divinity in himself as the Light, Strength, Beauty, Good, Delight, Immortality that dwells within and build up in his outer life also the kingdom of God which is first discovered within us. It will show man the way to seek for the Divine in every way of his being, sarvabhāvena,18 and so find it and live in it, that however - even in all kinds of ways - he lives and acts, he shall live and act in that,18 in the Divine, in the Spirit, in the eternal Reality of his being.19

And in the last six chapters of The Life Divine Sri

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Aurobindo has outlined the main stages of the complete supramental transformation of the individual man. This transformation, once generalised, will establish upon earth what

... might fitly be characterised as a divine life; for it would be a life in the Divine, a life of the beginnings of a spiritual divine light and power and joy manifested in material Nature.20

This at least is the highest hope, the possible destiny that opens out before the human view, and it is a possibility which the progress of the human mind seems on the way to redevelop. If the light that is being born increases, if the number of individuals who seek to realise the possibility in themselves and in the world grows large and they get nearer the right way, then the Spirit who is here in man, now a concealed divinity, a developing light and power, will descend more fully as the Avatar of a yet unseen and unguessed Godhead from above into the soul of mankind and into the great individualities in whom the light and power are the strongest. There will then be fulfilled the change that will prepare the transition of human life from its present limits into those larger and purer horizons; the earthly evolution will have taken its great impetus upward and accomplished the revealing step in a divine progression of which the birth of thinking and aspiring man from the animal nature was only an obscure preparation and a far-off promise.21

The unveiling of this evolutionary future before an adolescent at the end of his academic formation is indeed a seal, a kind of consecration to the highest possible ideal. Not only does he understand now the meaning of the long succession of hopes, failures and achievements of human history, but he will perceive, throughout his life, the meaning of his own individual existence. He will know that, in whatever walk of life he is placed, whatever struggles, anguishes and failures

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he has to go through, any effort on his part towards light, truth, beauty and good will be also an effort to lift up humanity towards its goal; in this knowledge he finds the strength to endure. And if he knows how to offer up his struggles, disillusions and failures to his inmost soul, the Divine in him, he will really share in the Great Endeavour.

He will understand that the visions of the seers and prophets of all religions, the words of the sages of all nations, the dreams of the idealists of all times were not mere chimeras; they were promises. And he can see now that the future will realise all the promises of the past.

*

Such is the basis that we, the teachers of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, would wish should be given to education in this country. India is in a unique position in this respect and we believe she has a great future before her, a future which is also a promise of her past.

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