Sense of Wonder and the Scientific Mind
Sri Aurobindo observes:
Vision is the characteristic power of the poet, as is discriminative thought the essential gift of the philosopher and analytic observation the natural genius of the scientist.”
The power of envisioning, the gift of discriminative thought and the capacity for analytical observation are crucial faculties, each an aspect of the mental nature representing a particular but significant side of the being. Each can be awakened best by a specific type of mental activity, and none deserves to be neglected in a growth that aims at a greater wholeness.
So many students as soon as they get a fraction, they try to turn it into decimals, automatically. But there is a particular beauty to fraction — they always refer themselves to the whole.
With decimals, we forget where we came from.
With fractions it’ll always be 3/4ths of… the whole.
Of That.
Jean LeGrand, Teacher
Finally, and most importantly, we find a primary focus on the necessity of bringing forward the soul personality as the true centre of life and action.
Both The Mother and Sri Aurobindo repeatedly place this requirement as the one indispensable thing upon which a new consciousness may be securely constituted.
In his book The Human Cycle, Sri Aurobindo writes:
“…each human being is a self-developing soul and 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 realized what this soul is or that the true secret, whether with child or man, is to help him to find his deeper self, and 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 capacities of the psychological being towards a realization 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 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 the possibilities must lead to the ultimate discovery that man is inwardly a soul and 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.
It would seem that to be given conditions conducive to keeping a conscious awareness of its psychic being ought to be the birthright of every child in Auroville.
This self-finding has been set by The Mother for all who choose Auroville as the first essential in the process of becoming what she called a ‘True Aurovilian’:
“The first necessity is the inner discovery, in order to know what one truly is behind social, moral, cultural, racial and hereditary appearances.
At the center there is a being, free, vast and knowing, who awaits our discovery and who ought to become the effective center of our
being and our life in Auroville.”
Areas of Focus
Areas of Focus