Work as an Offering
Attitude
The Spirit of Our Works
The Spirit of Our Works
Last School, being part of the Auroville experiment, is necessarily permeated by its ideals.
Most of us who work here have come out of a need to serve, which changes what we call “work” into something different, a field of progress and growth through our offering, where the flame is allowed to become a more living reality in our life and work.
One cannot but feel privileged to be given such conditions.
This brings about a subtle change, where work becomes something of a different nature, where one has the sense of being carried towards unknown yet promising destinations. Everything looks the same as anywhere else—the type of work, the activities—yet everything seems different, as if another script were being written upon the ordinary, moved by another law, like the breath of the open sea amid the banalities of the day, as if a new air were trying to find its place in our life and work, without displacing anything.
“I like Last School also because of the teachers as well. Because they respect me in the way this school has been designed. I don’t know what I would be like. I know that I would be ME.”
~ Age 15
Free Progress and offering in Integral Education
A school that aspires to be a place of free progress must give the students freedom to grow along their own lines of development, which they have to discover. But what keeps this freedom progress-oriented?
One could argue that it is mainly the presence of a flame of aspiration and progress being a living reality in the teacher team and, therefore, in the very atmosphere of the school. This would mean that we cannot consider the school a place where teachers find a job in exchange for remuneration, the job consisting of training faculties in the students that will enable them to find a job in the labour market later on. This is totally insufficient.
An aspiring collective
Being a school becomes then just a pretext to have a field of aspiration and progress at our disposal, it becomes a place where our activities are offered to a higher consciousness so that it can become subtly and almost surreptitiously part of our reality, and it is in this kind of atmosphere that freedom can find its place and right orientation.
Ideally and ultimately, it is consciousness that must govern. Living Presence must replace mechanical rules. That is what would make the difference. And be effectively creative of a new reality.
Every workplace in Auroville should first be a place of offering to a higher principle and of mutual giving. Then the reality of a new economy would emerge.
In this place, titles and positions would be replaced by opportunities to serve
and organise; the bodily needs of each one would be equally provided for,
and intellectual, moral and spiritual superiority would be expressed in the general organisation not by an increase in the pleasures and powers of life but
by increased duties and responsibilities.”
~ The Mother
A time of renewal
The school holidays are a time of renewal: of cleaning, of clearing and sorting, of preparation and changing the old to bring in some new. In Last School the attempt is — as much as possible — for all the work to be done by the team themselves
Why is doing the work ourselves (especially manual work) important?
It gives value and importance to the work and space, a respect for the environment around us and the material used, an equality between all members of the team and working staff as well. As teachers, it is an example for the students: to bring awareness, consciousness and beauty to matter in our day to day.There is also a different kind of bonding that happens working together as a team at a practical hands-on level, outside of teaching individual classes.
“Work, even manual work, is something indispensable for inner discovery.”
~ The Mother
“In Last School, I learned how to meet a challenge not because someone told me to,
but because something in me wanted to grow.
That shift — from being pushed to choosing —
is the most precious thing I carry with me.”
~ Teacher, Age 34 years
Willing Servitors?
The school has to be a place of growth for the teacher as well as for the student; it has to be a place of self-becoming. This is possible only if we introduce the dimension of yajna, offering, into our activities.
In Auroville, each of us is meant to be a “willing servitor of the divine consciousness” and it is the main reason for our being here, doing what we are doing. It is also important that the dimension of mutual giving, dànam, is alive, for it creates the fabric of the collective reality. These are intangible elements that would be difficult to measure and assess although they are the most essential dimensions of the service.
“I’ve seen it again and again. A physics diagram becomes teleportation because a student dares to think differently; the Mahabharata suddenly becomes quantum physics because someone makes an intuitive leap.
These are not things I plan — they happen when learning is alive.
Nothing can be taught
— everything can only be awakened.”
~ Teacher, Age 31 years
Towards Free Progress
Towards Free Progress