Contents Page
(A) Understanding the
Vital 1
(B) What is meant by
Vital Education and why is it so important? 1
(C) Why have our
current education systems failed to ‘tame’ the Vital? 3
(D) The ‘rational’
method of education as enunciated by The Mother 3
(E) How India lost her
vitality 5
(F) The ‘fruits’ of
freedom! 5
(G) The way ahead 6
Vital Education
an imperative for a
globalizing
At one of the previous sessions of the Foundation Course for Facilitators, held at the Gnostic Centre, I volunteered to join the group that was required to make a presentation on the education of the vital, as the subject has immense significance for me. For years, if I go back through my self-reflective journals I find that my Vital is the one area which I can identify as having made the largest contribution to all the repeat patterns and problems that I have been encountering. Also, it is in this very part of my being that the necessary change of attitude and progress of consciousness has resulted in the cessation of those problems and repeat patterns in my daily life. It was this observation of my own self, as well as the shared experiences of others in the course that led me to wonder, that was the ‘Vital’ that we all love to blame, the real villain of the piece or was it our lack of understanding of it and the inability to harness it correctly that formed the core of our problem? In order to come to a decision on this issue it was first necessary to understand the nature of the Vital itself and this has been very lucidly explained by Sri Aurobindo in the passage reproduced below:
“Vitality
means life-force – wherever there is life, in plant or animal or man, there is
life-force – without the vital there can be no life in matter and no living
action. The vital is a necessary force and nothing can be done or created in
the bodily existence, if the vital is not there as an instrument. Even the
sadhana needs the vital force. But if the vital is unregenerate and enslaved to
desire, passion and ego, then it is as harmful as it can otherwise be helpful.
Even in ordinary life the vital has to be controlled by the mind and mental
will, otherwise it brings disorder or disaster. When people speak of a vital
man, they mean one under the domination of vital force not controlled by the
mind or the spirit. The vital can be a good instrument, but it is a bad master.
The vital has not to be killed or destroyed, but purified and transformed by the
psychic and spiritual control.”[1]
From the above passage it is clear that the Vital itself is simply put the life-force, the presence and action of which is a pre-requisite for any living form. The Vital is neutral in its essence, but in its conditioning and usage it becomes capable of causing both immense benefit and great harm.
B) What
is meant by Vital Education and why is it so important?
The cultivation of the ability to use this life force correctly constitutes the education of the Vital. The Mother herself has pointed out both the necessity of such an education and the lack of clarity regarding it, in the following passage:
“Of
all education, the education of the vital is perhaps the most important and the
most indispensable. Yet it is rarely taken up and followed with understanding
and method. There are several reasons for this: first, human thinking is in
great confusion over what concerns this particular subject; secondly, the
enterprise is very difficult and to be successful in it one must have
endurance, endless persistence and an inflexible will.”[2]
If one were to examine the standards of behaviour that have governed various social groupings that have existed in recorded history, one comes across a vast disparity ranging from the bacchanalia and hedonism of the west to the nihilistic ascetism of the east. Rare was the interlude when a civilization could maintain the balance between civility and vitality. Even today, despite all the material advances, all the mental attainments, humanity in general is still a prisoner of an unregenerate vital as all the continuing wars, terrorism and sectarianism would testify, the growth of technology serving only to enhance the scope and spread of man’s ability to destroy. Why is it that the education systems that have been able to accelerate exponentially Man’s mental abilities have failed miserably to remove him very far from his animality? It is simply because humanity in general has never learnt to correctly deal with the Vital but has only sought to either indulge it or suppress it. The Vital, far from being a willing instrument of Man’s growth has remained a tyrannous master of his other faculties!
“The
natural vital element in us, in so far as it is unchecked or untrained or
retains its primitive character, is not concerned with truth or right
consciousness or right action; it is concerned with self-affirmation, with life
growth, with possession, with satisfaction of impulse, with all satisfactions
of desire. This main need and demand of the life-self seems all important to
it; it would readily carry it out without any regard to truth or right or good
or any other consideration … the life individual needs place, expansion,
possession of its world, dominance and control of things and beings; it needs
life-room, a space in the sun, self-assertion, survival. It needs these things
for itself and for those with whom it associates itself, for its own ego and
for the collective ego; it needs them for its ideas, creeds, ideals, interests,
imaginations: for it has to assert these forms of I-ness and my-ness and impose
them on the world around it or, if it is not strong enough to do that, it has
at least to defend and maintain them against others to the best of its power
and contrivance. It may try to do it by methods it thinks or chooses to think
or represent as right; it may try to do it by the naked use of violence, ruse,
false hood, destructive aggression, crushing other life-formations: the
principle is the same whatever the means or the moral attitude. It is not only
in the realm of interests, but in the realm of ideas and the realm of religion
that the vital being of man has introduced this spirit and attitude of
self-affirmation and struggle and the use of violence, oppression and
suppression, intolerance, aggression; it has imposed the principle of life
egoism on the domain of intellectual truth and the domain of the spirit. Into
its self-affirmation the self-asserting life brings in hatred and dislike
towards all that stands in the way of its expansion or hurts its ego; it
develops as a means or as a passion or reaction of the life-nature cruelty,
treachery and all kinds of evil: its satisfaction of desire and impulse takes
no account of right and wrong, but only of the fulfillment of desire and
impulse … It does not follow that this is all that the vital personality is in
its native composition or that evil is its very nature. It is not primarily
concerned with truth and good, but it can have a passion for truth and good as
it has more spontaneously, the passion for joy and beauty … For the force of
life-affirmation affirms alike the good and the evil: it has its impulses of
help and association, of generosity, affection, loyalty, self-giving; it takes
up altruism as it takes up egoism, sacrifices itself as well as it destroys
others; and in all its acts there is the same passion for life-affirmation, the
same force of action and fulfillment.”[3]
Externally the world has shrunk, the communications revolution has created a global village, national boundaries are becoming irrelevant, demarcations of individuality like dress, language and food preferences are fast vanishing signifying the emergence of the universal human and yet internally we continue to be isolated, with each individual or social group seeking hegemony over the other leading to higher incidences of sectarianism and discord in all inter human relationships. This stems from the basic fact that the vital or emotional being in Man has remained in a primitive mode. All culture or education seems to have sidestepped it, choosing instead to focus mainly on the physical, mental and spiritual dimensions of man’s development. From the above passage it becomes clear that if the external universalisation and harmony has to be accompanied by an inner universalisation and harmony, society and the individual need to re-assess their goals, standards of behaviour and tenets of education to include reasoned and comprehensive training of the Vital such that the very forces that have propelled humanity towards conflict and destruction can be channelised towards the creation of a new world order based on higher principle than satisfaction of the limited ego self of the individual or the collective.
C) Why have our current
education systems failed to ‘tame’ the Vital?
Unfortunately, the old education systems, which were based on the
principles of initiation and self-perfection like the Guru-shishya traditions
of
“The
conviction that makes one believe that one has the right to be happy leads, as
a matter of course, towards the will to live one’s life at any cost. This
attitude in its obscure and aggressive egoism brings about every conflict and
misery, deception and discouragement, ending often in a catastrophe. In the
world as it actually is, the goal of life is not to secure personal happiness,
but to awaken the individual progressively towards the Truth-consciousness.”[4]
Here one needs to mark
the paradigm shift that would be required in how the individual as well as
social groupings need to re-assess their aims, vis-à-vis themselves and each
other. An incomplete or skewed development of the individual will only yield a
society that is a composite of this skewed-ness and thus prone to conflict,
disharmony and strife. In
D) The ‘rational’
method of education as enunciated by The Mother
Is there an alternative to the present methods of education that can help Mankind to re-orient its vitality, away from this compulsion to conquer and oppress whatever comes in the way of the individual or collective ego? How can we ensure that the life-force and its limitless powers are harnessed instead to accelerate Human progress towards a greater harmony and universalisation? The Mother provides the clue in the chapter on ‘The Education of The Vital’:
“It
is that everyone posses in a large measure, and the exceptional individual in
an increasing degree of precision, two opposite tendencies in the character,
almost in equal proportions, which are like the light and shadow of the same
thing … Life seems to endow every one, along with the possibility of expressing
an ideal, with contrary elements representing in a concrete manner the battle
he has to wage and the victory he has to win so that the realization may be
possible. In this way, all life is an education carried on more or less
consciously, more or less deliberately. In certain cases this education helps
the movements expressing the light, in others the opposite movements i.e. those
that express the shadow. If the circumstances and the environment are favourable,
the light will grow at the expense of the shadow otherwise the contrary will
happen. Hence the individual’s character will crystallize according to the
caprice of nature and the determinism of a material and vital life, unless
there is a luminous intervention of a higher element, a conscious will which
will not let nature follow its whimsical procedure but replace it by a logical
and clear-seeing discipline. This conscious will is what we mean by the rational
method of education.”[5]
However, if I look back at the way I was educated and brought up, I can’t think of any conscious effort in this direction by either my teachers or my family. Sure enough, there were classes devoted to moral sciences and tales of heroism and valour at school and indoctrination into religion and morality at home, but that was obviously neither effective nor enough. That the psychological health and emotional well-being of a young individual would require a conscious intervention of both the parents and the educators is a more modern realization and even now its implementation is restricted to very few ‘elite’ private schools in this country and even there one sees a tendency towards abdication of control in the name of promoting individual freedom, rather than a conscious cultivation of self-mastery and discipline! For those of my generation, any education of the vital seems to have been effected through life-experiences; self correction enforced after much pain and tribulation. Now in hind-sight, I can see that a correct and conscious training of the vital, imparted at an early age, would have spared me much of the pain that I have had to face. It is extremely necessary that such training should be incorporated into the education given to our children, both at school and at home. However it is imperative that we first ascertain the criterion which should form the basis of such an education, especially in the Indian context.
The method enunciated by
the Mother has two aspects:
(i) Development and Utilization of the Sense Organs:
It is through the agency of the sense organs that Man acquires knowledge of the material world. If this world is to be transformed, then a true knowledge of it, through the proper development and utilization of the sense organs, is imperative.
“To
this general education of the senses and their action will be added, as early
as possible, the cultivation of discrimination and the aesthetic sense, the
capacity to choose and take up what is beautiful and harmonious, simple,
healthy and pure. For, there is psychological health even as there is physical
health; there is a beauty and harmony of the sensations, even as there is a
beauty of the body and its movements. … A methodical and enlightened
cultivation of the senses can remove from the child whatever is vulgar,
commonplace and crude in him through contagion: this education will have happy
reactions even on his character. For one who has developed a truly refined
taste, will feel, because of this very refinement, incapable of acting in a
crude, brutal or vulgar manner. This refinement if it is sincere, will bring to
the being nobility and generosity which will spontaneously find expression in
his behavior and will keep him away from many base and perverse movements.”[6]
(ii) Transformation
of Character:
Thus far, it has been an accepted norm that it is impossible to change a man’s character. Western societies regard a man as a captive of his sub-conscient and his environment whilst the East has regarded him as a prisoner of past and future ‘karmas’. Both have regarded a change of character as an impossibility and have instead sought to curb human behaviour through imposition of discipline and control. All methods of discipline, whether for oneself or for those under one’s charge and responsibility, have tended to have elements of coercion and suppression as their cornerstone and have been effective only for the duration of that coercion and control. Rationality and sensitivity have been brushed aside in favour of convention and conformity. For centuries individuals have denied their inner truth for fear of ridicule and rejection by the majority. This suppression was often cloaked in the guise of ascetism and life-denial. An individual who could not be ‘him-self’ would go through life pretending to be something else and the suppressed life force or vitality, dissipated in this conflict between the warring ‘selfs’ would find partial expression of mediocrity instead of the full flowering of an individual’s self-perfection.
The right of the individual to express anything other than the socially accepted norm has only now begun to be recognized and this recognition will in due course bring the necessary shift in the perspective of parents and educators. However recognition of the right of the individual for self-expression should not be confused with an advocacy for social anarchy but an orientation of society towards a greater widening and synthesis amongst its components. Each individual should be able to first identify and then be encouraged to express, as perfectly as possible, the ideal he or she represents in the divine scheme of things and this is only possible if the life force of the individual finds free expression and collaborates with him in the endeavour.
“With
the collaboration of the vital no realization seems impossible, no
transformation impracticable. But the difficulty lies in securing this constant
collaboration. The vital is a good worker, but mostly it seeks its own
satisfaction. If that is refused, totally or even partially, it gets vexed, sulky
and goes on strike; the energy disappears more or less completely and leaves in
its place disgust for people and things, discouragement or revolt, depression
and dissatisfaction.”[7]
E) How
In the East, especially the Indian sub-continent, the teachings of the Buddha and later Shankara have sought to treat the material world with contempt, as either an irredeemable cesspool of misery or an illusion. For the last two millennia or more escape from this miserable or illusory world has formed the cornerstone of all intellectual pursuits and these have invariably emphasized on the denial of all sensory movements, negation of all ‘karma’, as the only antidote to nullify all ‘samskaras’ and thus escape this miserable existence. This life-denying tendency of the Indian populace resulted in a loss of all its vitality and led to centuries of subjugation by the vitally charged hordes that kept descending from the west, with a further wilting away of the vital under the pressure of the foreign yoke. The once proud race forgot its own attainments and self-worth and sought instead to willingly play the role of the eager servitor!
“The
more the alien hand took control of active life, the more the domain of life
force became restricted for us and we tried more and more to cling forcefully
to this inner world as though to make good the loss. We could not see any more
with our eyes open, and we tried to see what could be seen with the eyes closed
… But on the whole, the fact is that, looked at from the point of India’s soul,
we find the stamp of the other- world, of the beyond upon it getting deeper and
deeper wiping off all signs of this world, of this mundane existence. It has
belittled this world while working for this world; it has forgotten to partake
of the joy of this worldly existence in a simple and easy manner.”[8]
It was only when religious reformers in the nineteenth century sought to break this stranglehold of the ‘advaitic’ life-denying orthodox Hinduism that the vitality of the collective stirred again and sought its own independence. Once the alien yoke was removed, the Indian populace that was in awe of the supposedly superior ways of the erstwhile rulers, blindly re-adapted and emulated the very systems of administration and education that they had struggled to overthrow. The British needed subservient clerks and ‘babus’ to handle their economic enterprises in the east and the system of education promulgated by Macaulay more than a century back, still forms the basis of our national education system. The Indian education systems still focus primarily on a mental development based on fixed curricula and prescribed texts in a ‘one size fits all’ kind of policy, with no room for anyone possessing either special skills or having special requirements. The only aim of the student in the present system seems to be to get a ‘degree’ that will ensure some kind of an economic security for himself and a utility to society in general, and not necessarily the acquisition of any real knowledge or life skills. The deep-rooted Indian revulsion for the ‘material’ has ensured that there is no respect given to any kind of physical labour and the national systems of education have made no provision for the imparting of any physical life skills. As a result all forms of physical labour are at the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid and we have languished in the manufacturing sectors and are also steadily losing all the artisanship that flourished in this country. I am tempted to re-produce here an excerpt from an article titled aptly “Where the nation has failed” that I read recently in The Times of India, which rightly brings out the huge dilemma that faces modern India due to this contempt for the material world:
“The
nation as an imagined community is expected to promote horizontal and vertical
social mobility to its members, breaking boundaries of community and caste. The
Indian national imagination is characterized by increasing rigidity of internal
boundaries. There is no social mobility, leading to deprivation in the name of
merit, oppression in the name of development and political swindle in the name
of democratic representation.
The imagined community lacks the
national character to overcome these flaws. We have neither the will nor the
skill to affect the world materially hence we are destined to be clerks
forever, fawning over our entrepreneurial geniuses who have brought our clerical
skills global fame. Let us not be fooled by the service industry – the world is
an increasingly material place. We cannot deliver goods, but satisfy ourselves
with second-rate cut-price services.
We fail materially because of our
touch-me-not society … even engineers don’t work with their hands. We make
nothing material worthy of respect because we are culturally incapable of
respecting material and labour. We are a capital scarce economy because we do
not know how to make our own capital. Like frogs in a pond we carp at the
courage of those who take the problems of caste oppression outside, afraid of
what the big bad global world will bring.
If
we have to imagine globalization in a manner that shatters the petty clerical
boundaries of our nationalist imagination, we need the courage to use dangerous
resources, get burned and try again and again.”[9]
There are huge challenges and great opportunities that have come our way in the last fifteen years due to this re-engagement with the material world. We seem to be carried, almost against our will, on a current of globalization that threatens to wash away a lot of our past burden and willy-nilly a lot of our past heritage. We need to be careful about what we accept from the world and equally so about what we reject from our own ethos.
One sphere of the national life, which has definitely been negatively impacted by the spread of the information and audio-visual entertainment media, is the ethical-moral standards of Indian society. Exposure to the hedonistic ways of the west, which has utilized the sensory faculties only for the pursuit of pleasure and happiness, has led to the creation of a society that, starved of vitality for centuries, has blindly sought to ape and adapt all that was thus far morally and ethically repugnant to it … so much so that today one wonders if we are not more ‘westernized’ than the West itself, if only in our pursuit of self-satisfaction and pleasure. In every sphere of life there is an upsurge of the crude, the vulgar and the commonplace. There is an artificiality and emptiness in the population that has forgotten all that was noble and inspiring in its own rich heritage and due to a lack of will to progress as a collective, been equally quick to discard whatever might have been noble and inspiring in other cultures, as being alien to it. It is high time that those in charge of drafting the national education policy and the so called ‘intelligentsia’ take note of the immense harm that this ‘artificiality’ is doing to the nation and rise above their dogmas and political posturing of secular versus saffron, left versus the right, to redefine the way an Indian learns about himself.
We need to learn from the follies of our forefathers without feeling a sense of inferiority as much as we need to learn from their achievements without feeling a sense of superiority in comparison to other cultures and societies. There is much in our ancient traditions that is glorious and noble and without parallel even today, especially when it comes to disciplines for perfecting our being along with its instruments of knowledge … the mind and the senses. We need to incorporate them in our institutions and systems of education and along with this training of our instruments, we need to raise the national consciousness by invoking all that is beautiful, noble and heroic in the Indian ethos so that the youth of this country can be weaned away from the crass barbarism that goes by the name of ‘independence’ and has replaced the civility and deference that were once its hallmarks.
There is also much in the traditions
of other cultures that did not seek to escape Life as we did, that is worth
emulating and incorporating in our curricula … especially where it concerns the
individual’s sense of self-worth, his will to progress and ability to harness
universal forces and material nature to that end.
The true synthesis will occur when
the spiritual wisdom of
Amit
Gujral