Beauty as
a Medium & Condition
Beauty
as a
Medium & Condition
On Beauty
The quest for beauty has been a dominant thread guiding Last School’s journey in its seeking to embody an integral educational approach. A beauty both in its physical school environment as well as a formative condition of consciousness.
The Last School team has had the sense that its search for integrality cannot be found in formed or fixed systems and programmes of education, but rather it is something generated by a constant seeking, and a living response to life – a life that wants to grow and perfect itself. Thus, Last School has stayed committed to a free progress approach which seems the most plastic for this openness of consciousness.
As The Mother remarks:
“It should be known and we should not hesitate to proclaim it—that the whole purpose of our school is to discover and encourage those in whom the need for progress has become conscious enough to direct their lives.”
The Pursuit of Beauty
Auroville is an experiment that “wants to be a new creation expressing a new consciousness in a new way and according to new methods”. One of its essential concerns has been the development of educational processes befitting a learning society aspiring to “an unending education”. As the collectivity has grown in complexity of material expression, this area, crucial to the evolution of a new consciousness, has become the key to its next steps.
The idea that education should be child-centred has broad acceptance in today’s world. The question is rather of converting this truth into suitable forms that comprehend the complexity of a child’s psychological nature. Each aspect, each instrument of the developing individual whether child or adult must be given its true weight to create a wholeness of being. This calls for a spherical rather than linear movement, with contents that are rich and vast; an approach that is both multi-pronged and inclusive of a variety of methodologies. Such a vast experiential progression is rather impossible to encapsulate in a single defined system.
“The space itself—the openness, the art, the plants, the feeling that learning wasn’t boxed into a classroom—shaped me as much as any subject.
Last School didn’t just teach me; it allowed me to become myself without fear, without pressure, and without losing the joy of learning along the way.“
~ Jasmine, Student
A Clear Vision
To be practical you must first have a very clear vision of your goal, of where you are going …
But there is a long way to go between what we are and what must be. And for that we must be very flexible, never losing sight of the goal, but knowing we cannot reach it at one bound and that we must find the way.
That is how one should come, eager to find out at every minute the progress to be made. To have a life that wants to grow and perfect itself, that is what the collective ideal of Auroville should be:
“A life that wants to grow and perfect itself”
And above all, not in the same way for everyone – each one in his own way.
For there is a starting point: when you have found within yourself the light that never wavers, the presence which can guide you with certitude, then you become aware that constantly, in everything that happens, there is something to be learnt, and that in the present state of matter there is always a progress to be made.
Through years of experimenting with different forms, there has been one common seeking which has united the diversity of individual approaches within the team of Last School.
This has been the search for conditions that would bring forward the true individuality, the soul or psychic personality, to assume its role of unifying and organizing the psychological nature. It has necessitated that the school be structured around a highly individualized model, – one that has demanded a sort of alert, listening stillness, vigilant for signs of such an emergence, – rather than a single, fixed and imposed pattern or programme.
Yet, there have been key elements, the pursuit of Beauty, for instance.
It is no coincidence that the message
The Mother gave to Last School in 1971 was:
“In the physical, the Divine manifests as Beauty”
The awakening of the aesthetic being leavened by the ethical is an essential basis on which to build the powers of reason; a reason that seeks to reach beyond itself towards the harmony of a supra-rational beauty and good
“In the world of forms a violation of Beauty is as great a fault as a violation of Truth in the world of ideas. For Beauty is the worship Nature offers to the supreme Master of the universe; Beauty is the divine language in forms. And a consciousness of the Divine which is not translated externally by an understanding and expression of Beauty would be an incomplete consciousness. But true Beauty is as difficult to discover, to understand and above all to live as any other expression of the Divine; this discovery and expression exacts as much impersonality and renunciation of egoism as that of Truth or Bliss. Pure Beauty is universal and one must be universal to see and recognize it.”
~ Sri Aurobindo
“Supreme art expresses the Beauty which puts you in contact with the Divine Harmony.”
~ The Mother
Towards Free Progress
Towards Free Progress