EDUCATION in AUROVILLE
THE MOTHER’S DREAM of Auroville is the Dream of the Divine, and all those who participate in it and its continuum find themselves involved in the midst of cosmic forces manifesting through the representatives of human consciousness.
If Auroville is a symbol of change as well as divine conception then its success can only core about through all who take part in the conception doing the will of God.
What then is the will of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother with regard to education in Auroville?
It is of interest to go back to the time when Sri Aurobindo came out of Alipore Jail and made reference, in his Uttapara Speech, to the Sanatana Dharma, the eternal law which should be India’s contribution to a world aspiring even then, for Truth through liberty, peace and human unity.
The same law obtains in each individual through his swadharma, and true education can only come about if this self-law this truth of an inner potential, is educed, made manifest as the individual’s highest and best contribution to the community, the nation, the world.
Only one who had the educational experience of Sri Aurobindo would be qualified to see fully the urgent need to re-structure and re-shape education for the future. Such experience as attending the best schools and universityin England during the whole of his formative years, andthen on his return to India to work as a professor in collegelife, and go on to become principal of the National College in Calcutta; to compare this experience with Vedic studiesof ancient India, its language, culture and history and tosee the immediate need, the imperative need if India was totake her true place in the world,to contribute that true1aw of her being to the community of nations.
During all this outer preparation, more important still was the inner evolving realisation of his own true role inthe changing destiny of India, together with his own changefrom political leadership to spiritual leadership; significantindeed of what will eventually come about in everyindividual, leading to a great national and internationalchange for all humanity.
It is almost obvious that the Dream of Auroville isalso destined toplay a significant part in this worldchange.
As far back as 1910 Sri Aurobindo was intimating thedirection of such a revolutionary change in education withsuch statements as, “The first principle in education isthat nothing can be taught.” And again, “I abhor theteaching by snippets.”
It was the beginning of manyexperiments in educationcarried out at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre ofEducation in Pondicherry, some of which were taken up bythe University Grants Commissionto be incorporated inthe “Central Schools” throughout the country.
It was not until a much bolder suggestion was made in 1969 for a complete break from all formalised teaching to meet a widely growing need for a student activated environment to replace the teacher dominated classroom that the Mother felt this could be attempted in “an open school” in Auroville. This would be an attempt to allow all in the Auroville Project to participate in education, so deeming Auroville a “Univercity” in the making.
The “open school” was started in Aspiration with the intention of having no classrooms as such but “Areas of Work” to which the children could go to discover the wor1d in which they lived, and go on to prepare themselves for the Great Change that is upon us.
It was seen, even then, that the accepted methods and systems of education would not be able to cope with the fast growing demands on man in his rapidly changing universe.
New concepts of educing the deeper inner potential of the student at an early age, new respect for his inner possibilities of intuition, insight, and the ability to project his faculties for assessment of the future, new values of the physical, vital, mental, psychic and spiritual consciousness, would have to be considered in a very practical field of manifestation. He must be educated for the Great Change.
But what was the significanceof this change to those who came to participate in the Great Dream of Auroville?
Who were these aspirants to a new order?
They camefrom every cornerof the globe; perhaps some on the wave of the great exodus from schools and collegesin every land. Some were qualified young men and womenfrustrated with the “rat-race” of an over-industrialisedsociety, which might satisfy their parents but which gavethem no hope for a wider vision of consciousness. Otherswere already dissatisfied with the formalised academicteaching – itbeing increasingly thrust upon then thattoday’s schooling was only a method of collecting informationto pass examinations. –Forwhat?
Young people, in revolt against a dying society, though they had yet to experience consciousness when they would find it in life experience, sought a wider circumstanceof being than that to which they were born, a “truth” to which they could not give a name, but which the Dream ofAuroville held for them as a promise, a promise to realisethat truth for which they yearned with so much ardour.
This was not really new, the young in heart havesought adventure in life from time immemorial, but thiswas something more than just adventurer this was an inneras well as an outer promise; there was an intuition which urged a leap into the“unknown”, that only the young would dare.
There was also a stimulus towards change which wouldnot be denied. And an impetus such as had never beforebeen experienced by thegrowing awareness of man.
What exactly is this impetus for change? Can it bemeasured? A growing body of reputable opinion assertsthat the present movement of great change is nothing less than thesecond great divide in human history – thefirst was the great break in historic continuity, theshift from barbarism to civilisation.
The significance of the supra-industrialism openingbefore us is not the automation it represents but the speedwhich is taking us through a mere century or two of scienceand technology against the time it has taken man from theinvention of agriculture in theNeolithic age. Sir HerbertBead, the philosopher of art, tells us that we are livingthrough “a revolution so fundamental that we must searchmany past centuries for a parallel. Possibly the onlycomparable change is the one that took place between the Old and the New Stone Age.”
“It has been observed.” says Alvin Toffler in Future Shock[1] “that if the last 50,000 years of man’s existence were divided into lifetimes of approximately sixty twoyears each, there have been about 800 such lifetimes. Ofthese, fully 650 were spent in caves.
Only during the last seventy lifetimes has it beenpossible to communicate effectively from one lifetime toanother – as writing made it possible to do.
Only during the last six lifetimesdid masses ofmen ever see a printed word.
Only in thelast two has anyoneanywhere usedelectricmotor.
And the overwhelming majority of all material goods we use in daily life today have been developed within the present, the 800th lifetime.”
But themost important of all is the qualitativechange that has come about in humanlife. We no longersubscribe withreverenceto the values by which we livedonly fifty years ago. The family, the society, the religion, education, politics.– allhave suffered a“sea change” – andman looks to wider horizons of inner and outer life in consonance with the pressure of time, the impetus of change and thebeckoning finger of Truth.
What was the first attraction thatdrew people to Auroville? What was the inner call that answered and recognised an authority beyond the mind of man?
To answer these questions wehave to turn to Sri Aurobindoand The Mother. In 1950, when Sri Aurobindo was hurrying tocomplete his great epic Savitri, he remarked: “The Korean Waris about to develop into a world conflagration. This mustnot be as it will put my Work back 2,000 years.” On December 5thhe entered into his Mahasamadhi and his body was seen to befilled with Golden Light, until the 9th, when it was placedin the Ashram courtyard, with a simple ceremony of flowers. Two days later The Mother announced, “Sri Aurobindo haspromised to remain in the earth-consciousness until the Work is finished.”
What was the Work?
It was the Work of the completetransformation of thehuman consciousness.
How has that workprogressed to the present day?
Apart from an abundance of“evidence” to be found inthe writings of The Mother, essentially in the Bulletin ofPhysical Education[2], and the growingnumber of disciples anddevotees all over the world, we can cite numerous experiencesfrom individuals in every country. Perhaps one example significantof the time will suffice. There was in the playground Meditation in 1956 a descent ofLight and Ananda of suchmagnitude that The Mother, on opening her eyes quite expectedto see all the sadhak flat on thefloor from the pressure. There was, for these in the Ashram,a protection in the Lightitself, she said later. Therewereresponses to this in manycountries throughout the world.
One young man walking through the streets of Sydney inAustralia had the experience that he alone was alive and all the others passing by were dead. He remained in this stateof consciousness for several days. He sought the meaning withmany so-called enlightened people, includingBuddhist monks, who directed him to Burma where he did find an old teachersufficiently enlightened to tell him, “This is a cosmicexperience quite new to this earth-consciousness. You will be guided to its truth on your return to Australia.”
Disembarking at Sydney he went to a bookstall where hepicked up a small book entitled The Mother by Sri Aurobindo. Immediately he felt himself again entering into the samestate of consciousness. He wrote to the Ashram and The Motherreplied to his letter simply stating that his experience wasa true spiritual experience of higher consciousness.
With that he immediately flew to India. The Mother hadnot really given permission, but she asked me to look after him and give him some work in the school. It soon becameapparent that he could not bear the constant pressure inthe Ashram of this new consciousness and became so unbalancedthat he himself asked to leave. He tried to adjust to otherAshrams in India but had to beflown back to Australia whenhis health started to fail.
On his return there he recovered fully and is now engagedin teaching as a Minister in a Christian School.
l give this example to some length because it is representativeof many similar cases of “unknown” individuals indifferent parts of the world, and itwas a very special occasionin which I was personally involved.
Sri Aurobindo and The Mother’s Work was to bring down theSupramental, the Truth-Consciousness into the earth-atmosphereand into the aspiring human nature for transformation and forman to take the next step in his evolution.
The Dream of Auroville was to make possible an internationalforum which could receive, house, feed, protect and educate – inshort, deal with the practical application of the concept, ofan evolving society so that the “Dream” could manifest.
To formulate such a society, while it is itself in theprocess of evolution, is surely a divine task of a formidablemagnitude. It requires a tremendous faith and belief that the work can be done. And it does not allow of a blind faith ofdevotion alone, it requires an integral faith growing in theself-knowledge that man is fundamentally “good”, is basicallyaspiring to achieve onenesswith the Source of his becoming. A faith that has been given a glimpse of the Truth-Light to which he aspires.
It is a faith that now looks towards Aurovilleas thepossible hope of a few individualswho can put asidetheir ego-nature of domination for an open nature to receive the Truth-Light wanting to manifest through them for theWork.
This education has to be an education for thewhole ofman,the whole life and for the future.
All must agree tothis education of the future, man, woman and child.
All must bear theresponsibility to be the student as well as the teacher.
All areas of work are the open school of a life-experienceleading to the adventure of transformation.
All must accept “Change”, not only in their daily activities and relationships with others but in their inner awarenessof changing values of consciousness.
This education is finding, through this imperative change,the true potential within each individual, that uniqueness whicheveryone has, and which everyone has entered this life as a contractwith Truth to manifest. And each one must help each other to findthis inner perfection so that it may achieve its ultimate andtruth in concert with the whole orchestration and harmony oflife in evolution.
Such education should initiate an “Academy of Future Man” to become the forum of the future for all aspects oflife. Itsprime objective must be to increase and bring forth the individual’sinner potential in order to cope with the tremendous demand forchange that the future generation will have to deal with according to their growing needs in a rapidly changing environment.
It will no longer be sufficient for a student to know of the past or even to understand the “now”; he must be able toproject himself into an assessment of the future and learn toanticipate the direction of the rate of change.
The old values, the ancient academic lightly-lettered men, posturing to a polite society of prestigewill standincapable of dealing with thepattern of future events. Thehalf-explored psychologies of a Freudian age will be unableto give an answer to the frustration of a “left-behind” humanitystruggling to keep upwith the accelerative thrust of cosmicforces beyond the present mind of man.
Any psychology for future education should be an all-embracing subject investigating the foundation of Indianpsychology, which first began with Kapila about the 7thcenturyB.C. and, through the various disciplines of yoga-sadhana fromPatanjali to Sri Aurobindo. This research gives us indisputableanswers to many aspects of factual, psychological, and spiritualproblem-inquiry into physical, vital and mental life which manhas to encounter.
It has always been an amazing thing to me to see manythinking men of India still hypnotised by the inadequate attemptsof the western psychological schools of Freud, Adler, Jung, etc.to deal with the fundamental problems of man’s inner life when Indian thought is so rich, not in mental speculation but inthousands of years of living experience and realisation throughyoga.
Sri Aurobindo and The Mother have contributed more thanany other living person to this yoga-sadhana of both an innerand outer life-experience.
Their presence is witness to the great changes that aretaking place in the world, as also to the enormous pressure for change of which man is becomingmore and more aware as theimpetus, the thrust andspeed of individual and collective consciousness, increase.
This speed oflife, this pressure for change is feltthroughout all life today. What then is the answer to thisapparent break-down of social, religious, educational and political values?
It isprecisely this work of transformation. The rapidchanges now being forced upon the world-consciousness bear witness to the transformation taking place in all, fields ofhuman endeavour. The most significant isperhaps seen in theareas of education, where the youth of today refuses to continueto listen to the “old men” sitting on a dais mumbling platitudesand outworn ideas form the textbooks of yesterday.
The education proposed by Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, ifboldly implemented, can form the basis of a completely new re-statementof education. It can deal with the most fundamental, issuesof today’s educational problems, an education for the total man,for the whole of his life. Education of the future has to beIntegral Yoga in education, and future education has to be theintegral yoga of life, for which The Synthesis of Yoga and The Life Divine can be a chart to embark upon the Unknown Oceans ofadventure opening to future man.
Norman C. Dowsett
January 1978
1
[1] Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler,Random House, 1970/71.
[2] On 1st January 1959, this Bulletin was renamed “Bulletin of the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education”.