Areas of Focus

Areas
of Focus

The Instruments of Education

What are the processes of an education whose aim is the bringing forward of the inmost personality – the soul personality?

What constitutes the content of such an attempt?

Already the aim of perfectibility rather than success, with the growth of consciousness as the means, calls for a different basis of action. Consciousness is everywhere but expresses itself in the individual through faculties present in every part of the being. These must be refined and developed.

“It is not by books that Sri Aurobindo ought to be studied but by subjects— what he has said on the divine, on unity, on religion, on evolution, on education, on self perfection, on supermind, etc.”

~ The Mother

Each instrument of nature – mind, life and body – must be encouraged to grow and manifest its unique capacities. For the body, this is a balanced and stable strength, agility, endurance and beauty. The life spirit, the vital nature of the being, and the seat of its enthusiasm, energy, effort and courage is also the source of most of the difficulties that vex human nature. This is an aspect of the instrumental nature which is perilous to ignore.

Yet, few modern systems address it consciously. The awakening and development of both the aesthetic as well as the ethical personality is essential for the fullness of self-expression. The mind in its turn, powered by an awakened and concentrated will, must be capable of wideness and suppleness, expansion and synthesis. And finally, an education aimed at perfection must subtly orient all its impulsions towards the deepest and inmost self as the sun orients the sunflower. …

The body and the life-spirit are the base and pedestal upon which the psychological being rests. Perfectibility begins with concentration in the body and a refinement of the life being. It is never too early to create the conditions for this. The training and purification of the senses, the development of balance and judgment, in action and in expression, are aspects that greatly influence the dynamic and practical side of nature. Knowledge can be sought in all parts of the instrumental nature – the intellectual, psychological, aesthetic and ethical, dynamic and practical – each grows when given conscious time and attention.

When speaking of the training of the mind, The Mother remarked that students should learn to think with ideas rather than with words, this, she said would be simply a small step to a greater progress when one could learn to think with experiences – a stage embodying a decisive progress from the present balance of human nature.

Her suggestion harks back to ancient Upanishadic education where students came to learn from a Rishi, a being of wisdom, and one who could lead through pithy aphoristic teachings such as ‘Tat twam asi’, You are That; an experience regarded as the one true knowledge when it emerged from within in the awakened consciousness of the student’s being. The core question of the Upanishadic quest: ‘Kasmin Vijnate Sarvam Vijnatam’, Is there a knowledge, having which, all can be known, is a radiant light that can yet illumine the pathways to the future. The attempt was an evocation of the inmost entity within. And, if social and collective expression must be revolutionized, such a journey of discovery is essential to create the pathways to the future.

The illumined hero-soul, ready to embark on the quest of self-discovery, must be awakened to its full harmonious self-expression. Yoga is practical psychology, remarked Sri Aurobindo. And the time is ripe to generalize this psychological knowledge if the conditions of human consciousness are to change. It is the psychic being within who is able rightly to be the true guide and inspirer of such a progress; the teacher in a classroom can be merely the medium whose quiet wisdom in action creates the conditions for this alchemy to take place. The first learner of any class room is always the adult instructor.

“Poetry raises the emotions and gives each its separate delight.

Art stills the emotions and teaches them the delight of a restrained and limited satisfaction.

Music deepens the emotions and harmonizes them with each other.

Between them, music, art and poetry are a perfect education of the soul; they make and keep its movements purified, self-controlled, deep and harmonious.

These, therefore, are agents which cannot profitably be neglected by humanity on its outward march or degraded to the mere satisfaction of sensuous pleasure which will disintegrate rather than build the character.

They are, when properly used, great educating, edifying and civilizing forces”.

~ Sri Aurobindo

A new type of school for the contemporary world

A Living Field of Learning

The contemporary world is becoming far too complex and chaotic to be easily understood by man from the level of his present mental status.

When those who are students today reach their full professional capacity, their over-specialized knowledge and their manner of conceiving the world may well be already obsolete.

The world is an intricate totality evolving at a rapid pace while the mind remains trained to long, exhaustive and limited analysis of details quite separate from the whole.

An answer to a need

There is the need to develop newer capacities in our educational systems: a global thinking, a synthesis of knowledge and cultures, a rapidity of intuitive insight and discrimination as well as the rich potential for adaptation.

The harmony to which we aspire for humanity will only become practicable if the power to realize is actually possessed not only in knowledge but also in action. Therefore the need of the present is to develop the ability of combining everything into a complex synthesis both in knowledge as well as in action.

It has then the mission to discover, experiment with and implement what seem as yet only potentialities, not just to dream of them. This could be its most decisive contribution.

“Auroville is a place dedicated to the realisation of ‘an actual human unity’”

~ The Mother

Exploring the unteachable

Since consciousness and matter are at the heart of our work, one could say Mother and Sri Aurobindo should also be at the heart of our teaching. Yet, they are precisely what cannot be taught

Discovering the path

So, how do we approach something that cannot be taught? The answer is that it can be explored; it is something that can be offered for exploration. Because, in truth, even as teachers, we are just as much explorers as the student who is discovering it for the first time.

And so, as we say: the teacher teaches and learns, the student learns and teaches. Both progress together

We are very lucky to have a team that we approach things very differently because we are all from different parts of the world, we have different individualities. Even the way we work on a particular subject domain is unique and different but we are agreed on this purpose that to go inside to grow consciously, deliberately, willfully.

So for us, refining, educating, lifting up the vital is a crucial element, we work psychologically rather than academically and in the mind the Divine manifests knowledge. So we give a lot of importance to developing these faculties. But we look at faculties, we look at capacities, we look at the capacity for inference, deduction, induction, analysis. We’re looking at faculty development. We’re looking at character development. We’re looking at a personality that is much more inward.

So we give a lot of importance to a sense of collectivity– we want our children to be kind. We want our children to take care of each other. We want our children to be kind. It’s a strong collectivity that we give birth to because we also want youth that are not self-centered and self-obsessed. We want youth, youth that are capable of giving themselves.

Learning should be in joy and that is what I would see in the future. So for me, we are a small experiment but we have something to say to India and to the world.

“We are a small experiment.
But we have something to say to India and to the world.”

~ Deepti Tewari,
Teacher