EWS #155: Q&A on Individuality
March 18, 2023
Alina (0:00:27):
Namaste. Good evening everyone. Namaste, Sraddhalu.
Sraddhalu (0:00:31):
Namaste. Happy to be with all of you.
Alina (0:00:35):
We are happy to continue today, this series. Today we will be taking many questions that we have received from our viewers in the chat box, from comments and from emails. And in the second part, we will be answering more exactly the, some questions on the theme that we had last time, developing the true individuality. As usual, you may post your questions in the chat box during our conversation, or you may send an email beforehand with your questions at our email at ID integralstudies.in [at] gmail.com. We have a question we received from Light: “Are we still talking about kids? When are we going to talk about adults? I mean, how many sessions on children do we need?”
Sraddhalu (0:01:39):
Yes, I think this same person made a comment also earlier about: “Why are we continuing to speak about children's education?”
In fact if you observe all of the discussions so far which we have broadly categorised under the theme of education have two dimensions: First, the approach to education is at a level which is essential on the psychological principles and therefore applies to the full spectrum of age from birth through to extreme age into your hundreds if you cross your hundred, because it’s the same principle. And we have to also understand that the Integral Yoga is an ongoing educational process.
This is one of the biggest errors of the modern education system, that it deludes all of its participants by giving them the illusion that ‘Having got my certificate, my education is over’. So you will hear people say, and this is part of, I will now say human dialogue everywhere in the world, people will say, ‘I have completed my education at such and such’, whatever, ‘college, university, school’.
You never complete your education; your education is lifelong.
In fact, the error they think is when they think they have completed, they have learnt it all, at least all that they need for their career, the biggest error is actually the real education is starting now from the time you have finished your formal school education. That's when the real education of your growth and your capacities are really being taken up, and everything that the school could do at best was a preparation for this which is the real education.
And so in our approach to education, being a broad umbrella term, we are taking this big picture approach. I am also giving specific examples as necessary for the school stage of education as well as for the home, parenting stage, and examples of education. But if you observe carefully, I am always pointing to the psychological principles behind and extending to the full spectrum of through-life education. There is also a very important aspect which the questioner is ignoring, perhaps he does not yet have children: When you do have children, the instinct of the mother, the father, and subsequently to the extent you are a teacher, the instinct is to give everything you can to your children and to give the best of everything you can.
Very often it takes this psychological form where you say ‘I could not do all this which I wanted to do when I was young because of financial or other restrictions, I don't want my child to be denied this’ and give it to them even to the extent that it is completely warping your child's preference and need by imposing on them what you think you needed, thinking that it is good for them when their temperament may be completely different. Some parents are, let's say, more aware and may not impose their own preconceptions, but still the idea will be ‘I am ready to spend anything, do anything, give the maximum that I can’.
(0:05:13):
Among the modern parents, especially those who are slaving out to earn a lot of money, the only way they can actually feel that they have done enough for their children because they don't have enough time is to spend a lot of money, which ends up spoiling them even. Again, why is all this important? Of course, for the parents it's important. But for humanity it is important. Because based on what you are able to transmit to the children today is your tomorrow. In one single generation you can lose the entire benefit of the past thousands of years of culture and evolution. Actually it can be lost much more rapidly.
I think there is this line from Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri where he says, “An idiot hour destroys what centuries took to build”, or something like that. One hour is all it needs to destroy everything. With atomic weapons it can be faster. But what we don't realise is: We can lose everything without any wars, without any attacks from any other country. If a nation wants to destroy you, the easiest thing they can do is infiltrate your education system and compromise it there.
I received a very interesting quotation this morning, so I am tempted to share this here, it goes something like this, I don't know where it is from, it is one of those things that people circulate on the Internet, so, the person writes: ‘If I were an evil ruler who wanted to make a society depressed, I would: (1) disincentivise family formation and maintenance; (2) make the food supply toxic; (3) encourage sedentarism; (4) discourage in-person interaction; (5) make the physical environment ugly; (6) confuse people about their identity; (7) bombard the population with negative news 24 × 7; (8) make people feel guilty for things they didn't do, ‘You know your ancestors supposedly did something so you have to pay the price’; (9) stoke distrust between men and women; (10) stoke distrust between races and ethnicities; (11) destroy trust in institutions so you don't trust the government, you don't trust the police, you don’t trust, whatever; (12) promote existential threat, doomsday narratives, ‘sea levels will rise, greenhouse effect will destroy life, asteroids will come and destroy the earth, or sun will explode’ whatever; (13) make people afraid to speak their mind, ‘cancel culture, censorship’; (14) discourage and denigrate belief in God. And then the author writes: (15) Wait, dot-dot-dot, meaning, ‘Wait, that's what's happening right now’.
This is the reality of current modern education. All this is happening.
And when I, when it's pointed out in this way, so explicitly, you realise how damaging it is and how much it is damaging the next generations, plural, because it's been happening for nearly 100 years, well, some of it, at least the first 50, 70 years of it, we can still say, there was not enough awareness globally, especially after the Internet, let's say the last 30 years or even the last 20 years when Internet has become popularised, there is no excuse. If at this point we do not have enough awareness of what is happening and this negative trend of decline, we can lose the entire spiritual benefit of evolution in one single generation or less. And this is why education is so important.
Consider it this way: When Sri Aurobindo was fighting for India's freedom from colonial rule, his thought process was the future. Remember, he was fighting for what? Not just for India to be free, that was a trivial objective. The goal he said was: For the world's future survival, the world needs something which only India can gift, which is the spirituality. And for India to be able to gift that spirituality to the world for the future survival of humanity and evolution, India must first discover her own spirituality, which she has mostly superficially at least lost. And in order to discover her soul, which is essential there, she needs to be free.
So his whole scheme for fighting for India's freedom was not about British being better rulers or bad rulers, it was about India needs to be free to find her soul in order for the spirituality to reawaken as a living force for the rest of humanity and for the survival of humanity, we can even say.
(0:10:44):
And what did he do? The first thing after organising the whole freedom struggle, the first thing he does after that is: Establish a college for the future education of India, and it was called ‘The National College’, for which he began to write these articles On Education. Now you have to understand how important these articles are. He is setting a framework for the future education of humanity to give it a foundation which is spiritual. Upon which then the generation growing up will have a real foundation by which it can, if it so chooses, actually have a meaningful spiritual life.
But if that initial phase of education has been compromised by all the things we have just listed and many more, the spiritual potential of that adult now is severely compromised. We will still discuss in some later session how to undo the damage. But, hence from the spiritual point of view, the extreme importance of this educational phase, which is a formal educational phase today, but involving both parents and teachers, and I will extend that to say, now, all of us, even if we are not parents and teachers, because we are setting the foundation for the society in which the parents and teachers are going to be able to do what they want to do in which the children are growing, and whether you choose it consciously or not you are influencing their values. And that's why this is so important.
So I am not separating it from the spiritual objective and not separating it from the Integral Yoga itself, because the framework of the Integral Yoga and the framework of integral education have a very close correlation. In fact, you can just say, Integral Yoga is a more mature form of integral education, or integral education is a subset and a very specific focus of the larger goals of the Integral Yoga or at least setting a foundation for that. So hence, yes, we will use examples from kids, but equally those examples apply to adults because, in fact, and this is our experience, if you are conscious enough, you realise a mass of humanity is really children. We will come back to this idea later on.
But the mass of humanity are children in adult bodies. But their actual development has been severely stunted, their actual growth of capacities is not too different, growth of faculties is not too different from children at young school level. I don't even mean college children. Today's college children behave like babies almost, in many ways, in many respects, other than using vocabularies and quoting from X, Y, Z sources which sound very adult, the actual thinking process, the actual maturity of emotions and power of thought are of that grade.
Just very simply observe yourself when you are fighting, when you lose your temper, when you are arguing with somebody, you will not be too different from children arguing in kindergarten. And this tells you the emotional immaturity of a typical adult. Unfortunately this is the reality we have to face. I will go so far as to say, and this is again not too much of an exaggeration, I can say this having been to many places across the world also but also all over in India: Something like 95% of our current education is junk, useless. And I'll qualify that by specifying: 95% of what is taught in 95% of the schools in the world is entirely useless from an evolutionary point of view, from an educational point of view, from a spiritual point of view, whichever way you look at it. Or rather it is extremely useful to turn you into automatons, and robots, and dumb workers, dumbed down in intelligence and capacities, in maturity, so that you can be easily controlled.
(015:02):
The rest of it, the 5% of what is taught and 5% of the institutions which may teach much more than 5%, there is a huge difference, and there I am being very generous, it's not even 5%, it's much less, maybe 1% of the institutions which really aim at something meaningful and still they have to struggle to fit into the system which is largely of a junk producing character. Even when you take a very elite institution for technology, purely, let's say, one of the IITs, Indian Institute of Technologies, one can say, literally anybody who passes through an IIT will be supersmart and might be super-successful if they don't commit suicide out of sheer depression or other problems.
But if they survive that whole mind-numbing effect, if they enter any field, they will be super-successful because of their very high intelligence capabilities, and by successful we mean they'll make a lot of money, but will they be effective? Not always! But, why? And it has nothing to do with IIT education. It has to do with the entrance exam which is so designed that you eliminate everybody who cannot pass a certain very high standard of performance of intelligence of a very narrow specific kind.
So this is what they say in the outside the domain of public discourse in the educational sphere, they speak about it as ‘input-output effect’. You put very tight restrictions on the entrance exams, you get high performers for the exit exams and you get a very fine reputation for your institution, you can charge a lot of money. What did you do? Practically nothing. It was just the input-selection which gave you a certain output. That's it.
And so when you think about the reality of education, even in some of these elite institutions, it's pointless, spiritually damaging. If one of these very high IQ performers actually ends up committing suicide while still studying or soon after, what does that tell you about the educational environment for these supposedly leaders of technology or any kind of development? And these are questions which are not being directly debated in public. They need to be debated. The problem of debating is that: The can of worms gets exposed. The entire system is flawed, fundamentally flawed. Is there a solution?
And the only meaningful solution you can find is Sri Aurobindo's writings of that period, more than a hundred years ago. The closest matching to that you will find in Maria Montessori in the Montessori system as it is taught today and in Rudolf Steiner's which parallel this. But they fall short significantly in the scope and depth of what Sri Aurobindo provides. And yet to this day, even today, the government of India does not give full attention to this framework that Sri Aurobindo developed. Why?
That shows the insufficiency of the training itself. It becomes a self-sustaining loop. You degrade society sufficiently that they don't even know something wonderful exists, they don't even then refer to it and are lost in a little bubble what we will call an ‘echo chamber’ which is continuously declining in values.
The head of, or the chairman of the board which defined the new national education policy of 2020 or ‘20 to ‘21, I think 2020, the head of that, all he did in his meetings was ‘Give me statistics’, and he was trying to emulate Google standard, ‘Give me statistics and data and what can we do to improve the data and statistics of school pass percentage and numbers passing’. That's all he could think of.
He came from a technological background utterly incompetent for the purpose of education, knowing nothing about it. The people who were in the board who knew better had no say. And this shows you how damaged the society itself is. And so all this is to highlight the tremendous importance of what we have to discuss and quite openly and very practically about the education for the future of humanity.
So these series of talks not only I hope will be useful for those who are now watching but perhaps 20 years down if they survive, but much more so for those of us who are in spiritual practice, especially followers of the Integral Yoga, you look at these principles and you say ‘How am I going to apply it today in my continuing education as a full-grown baby’. Sorry! We are babies in terms of internal maturity, full-grown, mature biology, that's about it, and that also not always fully.
(0:20:07):
But from an evolutionary point of view, how do we apply this for our own journey and irrespective of our biological age because we must continue to grow and remain young therefore all the way through as far as we can with whatever this biology can support? So, this is just to put in context the great importance, and even if we refer to examples from children and growth of children, remember, all this is going to be extremely important for everybody. We can go to the next question.
Alina (0:20:42):
Rahil is addressing three questions, I will start the first one: “I regularly visit Sri Aurobindo's Ashram situated at Baroda. How do I experience the place more richly? What rituals one should do when one visits such consecrated places?”
Sraddhalu (0:21:07):
So for Rahil I would suggest, because there are many questions which are coming from him, which we have actually covered in this series, particularly this series called ‘Evenings with Sraddhalu’, we have covered many of these and quite in-depth. I would suggest for you to view all of them from the beginning if you can make the time. I know there is a lot, but I think you will enjoy it.
But coming to your specific first question: ‘How do you experience a spiritual place such as the Sri Aurobindo Centre in Baroda more richly? What rituals should you do?’
I would suggest, precisely, don't engage with rituals. It is rituals which distract you from what the place has to give. What it has to give you is the spirituality as an atmosphere, as a living presence, and a force. And depending on how alive, since you made a general question, depending on how alive the presence is which presides over there, to tune-in to the presence and receive will give you far more than if you engage in rituals and get lost in the superficiality that the rituals demand from you.
I would give an example of even going to a temple, this was in the Himalayas in the temple of Badrinath. Going inside, of course, there was a Presence inside the sanctum-sanctorum. But what was interesting is, there were crowds and all that, we did our Pradakshina going around. Coming just outside it, there was a space to sit, parapet, I found sitting there, one could receive much more from the Presence in the temple than actually being inside. Interesting! That is the presiding deity was not limited to that little space but was actually wider than the physical space of the temple in its influence. But also as an environment it was less confused and mixed being just outside that space where the tourists were going in and pilgrims. And it could still give you that.
There are other temples where there is nothing. It is just limited to the sanctum- sanctorum. You pass through, you get what you want, you come out. The extent of the influence is just limited to that.
But when you go to the Sri Aurobindo Centre in Vadodara, it is very different, there is an extraordinary Presence. Sri Aurobindo lived there for nearly 13 years. And upstairs is the place where he lived particularly, and there is a Presence there, there is even the swing where he sat when he was doing his early stages of Yoga when he had the nirvanic experience and all that. So there is a certain imprint of the Presence which is very strong. And I think, it extends quite a bit into that environment. It's also one of the early, very early Centres where the Mother gave the relics of Sri Aurobindo with instructions of how the Samadhi was to be constructed. So there is a Presence there which is very special.
And I would say, simply concentrate on the Presence, open yourself, receive what the Presence has to give you. I would not say to do this everywhere. When you go to certain temples, sometimes the consciousness can be of a lower grade also. If you feel uncomfortable, do not open yourself. Don't go blindly by the name of whatever the deity is supposed to be. But where you do feel that it is of a higher grade or you feel something benevolent, you may open to the degree that you feel comfortable. But no, don't get stuck with rituals. They don't help you, they only distract you.
Second question of Rahil: The second question you have asked is: “I am a bit confused regarding the current yugas. Some traditions say we are entering Dwapara and other scriptures say Kali Yuga is beginning. What is Sri Aurobindo's view?”
Again this is something we have discussed in great detail before. So very quickly I will point out that Sri Aurobindo explains that the yuga system as it is traditionally. Remember, we are not bound to any numbers astrologically, the Self is free, these at best record rhythms of cycles of let's say lower forces, physical, vital, not even mental, typically influencing the vital through, influencing the mind through the vital, but physical and vital that's about it. That's the range that astronomy, astrology, and those alignments influence primarily.
(0:25:39):
What Sri Aurobindo points out is that in the larger yuga-cycle which is Kali which is some million years, there are sub-cycles. And the first sub-cycle of Kali within the larger Kali is completed, and I think he wrote this in 1909 and he says, we are in the transition into the first Satya Yuga within the major Kali.
The major Kali is about the physical consciousness, the first Satya in the major Kali is therefore the spirituality entering matter. And I don't know in the way it can be calculated, another 5 or 10,000 years that would be. So to me the numbers are not important, even the specifics of the calculation are not important. What is important is in spite or with those calculations or in spite of them, doesn't matter, we are entering the new age, a new age where things and values of the old have finished their sufficiency, cannot survive, and if you force them through, they break down.
And in the requirement of the new consciousness and the changes, completely new forms have to be found, created, inspired. And we are in that transition where the old is breaking down and the new has not yet formed and therefore the chaos and confusion. Maybe another 50 years down people will be sufficiently clear of this transitional period. Looking back they will say, ‘Oh that period of confusion’ when they did such crazy and stupid things that they're absolutely unacceptable to any higher values of humanity: ‘Oh they were still barbaric’, they will say like that.
That's the phase we are at now. So, we are passing through a difficult passage because of this. That's all we need to recognise. The rest, technicalities of what name you give to it is utterly irrelevant. Catch this moment, it has a practical value. Use this occasion to make the maximum progress you can because the whole of nature is attempting to make a leap, and everything around you is pushing hard for rapid change. Catch the wave and you will grow rapidly. The name is not important of what the cycles could be named.
And so we can look at Rahil's third question: Ah Alina is back. Third question of Rahil!
Alina (0:27:59):
Sorry! “Where can I get the absolute definitions of words like ‘supramental’ mind, the ‘psychic being’, etc., in the exact context of Sri Aurobindo? It would be great if you can explain those.”
Sraddhalu (0:28:15):
Yes, you will find these exact explanations from Sri Aurobindo's own writings. All you need to do today with search engines, you go to a website which has the text with a good search engine.
- You have motherandsriaurobindo.in by Narad.
- You have Narendra Gehlot's incarnateword.in which has also a good search engine.
Look for these keywords, you will find many things, you can filter through, find out what works for you. There are also two very good compilations of, one which is called Dictionary of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga by my teacher M.P. Pandit. There is another one, similarly, terms of, Yogic Terms in Sri Aurobindo's Writings, or something like that, which are available. Look those up, and you will get exact definitions. The exact definitions are not going to be helpful because they are supposed by: very nature they are short.
What is more useful is when Sri Aurobindo explains the experience of it. So, yes, “psychic being” is a projection of the Self entering evolution. Okay. “Supermind” as the creative power of the Self. Okay. That's a good definition. But what does it mean actually? And those descriptions you will find in Sri Aurobindo's writings in The Life Divine, in The Synthesis of Yoga, in his letters extensively, because there have been so many people who have asked the exact same question. So if you just go to Sri Aurobindo's letters of yoga and the section called “Planes and Parts of the Being”, you will find all these terms defined and with elaborations, questions, someone comparing this with someone else's terms which are similar, all those things you will find there.
(0:30:00):
For me to explain all these is pointless because any explanation will be academic. For our purpose here, what is much more important is entering the experiences of these things. And for me describing the process by which we enter the experience, the practices, the way to do it, is far more important than just understanding the theory of it. Yes, that also we can do. But for this purpose.
Otherwise an academic understanding: ‘Oh Sri Aurobindo claims this, somebody else claims that, a third person claims that, what do you believe?’. These things are not about beliefs. They are about experiences to be realised by practice. And so, that sets our base for the next question.
Alina (0:30:49):
[Alina’s voice is not clear]
Sraddhalu (0:30:54):
Okay. So, Alina's audio is not very good, I will repeat the question. Yuvan has asked: “Do you know Teilhard de Chardin and The Theology of the Cosmic Christ? He wrote that his work is similar to Sri Aurobindo's teachings.” And I think just now we also have Yuvan writing in the chat box: “The French priest Teilhard de Chardin said that Sri Aurobindo's teachings are very close to The Theology of the Cosmic Christ, which increase both individuality and collectively. Do you know it?”
–Yes, I do know about it. I cannot say that I have studied it, because it, I don't find it too interesting, but I'll explain why. And I'll describe what are the elements which are similar and what is different.
So, Teilhard de Chardin, for those who may not know, he was a priest in the christian tradition, particularly he is in that Jesuit priest. In the Jesuit tradition, there is a lot of importance given to studying especially other cultures, other traditions, with the objective of infiltrating them. So there have been many Jesuits which have with genuine interest entered into various, Zen, Buddhist and Hindu, and other traditions, but initially to acquire whatever they can and then finally to bring in the church objectives into those systems and create some kind of bridge. But the goal of the bridge is for the church to infiltrate and get inside it and christianise it.
So that being the case generally in the Jesuit traditions, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was exceptional in that he was already temperamentally a mystic which is probably why he took to the Jesuit tradition and as well at the same time a scientist, as a palaeontologist. So these are scientists who study the early prehistoric human types which are supposed to be the intermediate species before the modern human. And he went actually on these digs including he came to India in the mid-30s to go into these digs, went to China, Africa, various places.
So he was strongly influenced by the idea of evolution, biological evolution, which the church was clearly against, but on his part he was trying to bridge the two because he, instead of going the other way, infiltrating science to bust it internally, he actually ended up doing the reverse trying to bring the science values into the church but also for that purpose to show that it did not contradict the church.
So he had to build a whole structure, a whole belief system, in which the two things could be, the two belief systems could be welded. Problem with that of course is the church radically opposed evolution, but he had to show that evolution was possible. The good thing about all his efforts was that finally the church did cave-in and said: Yes evolution is not against the church theology. That's about at best they could go during his lifetime.
They banned his books, they banned him from publishing his books. His books, major ones were published after his passing, and 40 years after his passing, that would be around 1990s, that the church finally came to acknowledge that not only evolution was acceptable, but evolution of consciousness was acceptable, it was not contrary.
So it was as if literally a generation or two of the priests had to die before, elements of what [Teilhard de Chardin] then tried to bring into the church actually were accepted. Now, what was it that he brought? What are the parallels to Sri Aurobindo? And in what way it is different? This is very important for us to understand. What did he bring?
First he accepted the biological evolution, which was too radical for the church already at that time. Then he brought in this principle of what in the west is called ‘the vitalism’ which basically states that lifeforce is different from matter and is not a product of matter but a thing in itself. Not a big deal.
(0:35:05):
You see, all this is a big deal if you are brought up in the church mentality which is a very small box so anything outside that box is either untrue or devil's creation or radical. This is so common in the eastern traditions generally, China, India, both equally, but especially in the yoga-tradition, we speak of the prana, lifeforce, chi in the Chinese tradition. It's known that it is something totally different. Not a big deal at all. But for the European mentality which had been so heavily brainwashed with the church, it was radical. Okay. So, again, for us nothing new.
Second, he brought into it one more dimension which again is supposed to be shared with one Russian thinker, the concept of what they call the “noosphere” which is the mind-world. No big deal! Manomaya! We have a mental body. Okay. What's the big deal there? Well, for them it was radical, because it is breaking out of the shell of reductionist, materialistic science.
And christianity had nothing equivalent. They didn't even have the concepts of these subtler bodies, and so on. It's just your soul, body, body dies, soul goes eternally condemned or rewarded. That's it. Very simplistic.
So he's built up these two layers of vital body, mental body concepts, as well as implied with it, a vital world or a mental world. Now not so explicitly developed, it's still a very immature formation. Noosphere is just like all the human minds, which are individual, linking together to form a collective. Okay. Great. But it misses the whole idea: there's actually a world which is a mental world, which has beings which are mental beings, which don't necessarily incarnate biologically. It has its own properties and laws and qualities.
All this is so detailed in the development, in the knowledge, in the yoga tradition, in the theosophical tradition which takes a lot of the yoga tradition and tries to blend it with the scientific framework. So in that sense, whatever Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was developing was at best a replication of the knowledge which was already existent in the theosophy tradition. Except that now he was infusing it into the church and putting it in the framework of the church teaching and at the same time straddling the materialistic science.
So in that sense he was revolutionary for them. But in terms of what the thought came, it is a diluted version. Even in theosophy, the detailed descriptions of the mental worlds and vital worlds is so much more complete. So again, nothing dramatic, but revolutionary within those two boxes. Now we must understand, even the materialistic science is a little box; church mentality, teaching, dogma, creed, say, another little box. He's straddling both and pushing the boundaries of both. Both rebel against him.
So he faced severe reaction from the church for this reason. They even withdrew certain prize, prizes. He was honoured by, for the scientific work, he went to receive the honour, and at the last minute they withdrew the prize. All kinds of crazy things. Yet he had the sense that all his knowledge was coming from this greater consciousness.
Now he would refer to it as cosmic consciousness. He believed that when he was working early on as a, during the First World War as a stretcher bearer in service to humanity, he was living in some kind of cosmic consciousness. The problem with that term of course is that anything which is outside the individual, people want to call it ‘cosmic consciousness’. No. It is not necessarily cosmic, but he had a mystical opening. This is all we can say.
Now the critical thing, which he also brought subsequently after the vital body, mental body, mental world at best, a glimpse of mental world, he conceived of something much more, so he brought in this idea that there is this spiritual evolution, which again in the Abrahamic traditions generally, because it does not exist in Islam also, this is completely unacceptable, because we're human beings, we live, we serve God's ideas or not, we're condemned or rewarded. That's it. There's no concept of a spiritual evolution, because that would completely break the whole basic fundamentals of church teaching.
In fact this was one of the big problems that the church had with him. They kept asking: If we accept his belief we have to throw away this whole idea that man is born in sin, from sin, and Christ is the only redeemer of your sin. So, that somehow goes away if you accept this evolutionary concept. So, that was the main point of resistance. But eventually they found a way, a lot of jugglery of words and ideas to make it fit, which was his contribution to the church, let's say, and it stops with that. He brought in this concept of an evolution then which can go beyond mind to something higher still. And this is where people get excited, and they say, they draw parallels between Sri Aurobindo and him. But I want to point out the very important difference.
(0:40:10):
So this higher stage he called the “Omega Point”. If you really study what he means by the “Omega Point”, it is completely different from the supramental consciousness or any such concept. What he means by “Omega Point” is that everything is moving towards, and this is, he takes the idea of Big Bang versus Big Crunch: the universe is born out of a Big Bang.
So the church was happy with that, because they can say, ‘ah yes, it matches the Old Testament Genesis, God said, let there be light, the world was born’, basically. That idea science had. And this is the reason why science is, or rather the evolution is acceptable partly to the church, it fits into those boxes. The moment you say a universe which is not born by a Big Bang, they have, everybody has a problem: the scientists and the church. But this is the reality. Okay.
But coming to this: So there must be a Big Crunch, universe has to end, which fits very well with the apocalyptic vision of the church. And again I am saying church, not Christ's teaching. Because church teaching is a whole different game. It's not necessarily Christ teaching. So there is an apocalyptic end, everything ends in a Big Crunch, and that's when you get either rewarded or punished forever, for eternity.
So the idea of a Big Crunch was, everything collapses into a singularity. And so Teilhard de Chardin takes this and calls it the “Omega Point”, except now he mixes in church teaching, that merging into a point is through Christ, necessarily, and into God. So, that is his concept of an evolution beyond mind.
So his beyond-mind evolution, first step, is a joining of the minds into noosphere which becomes a kind of a common collective mind, let's say. This is not defined. He himself has only glimpses of it. So his ideas are not very developed when it comes to that, except, ‘Oh there will be some kind of joining and we will all be able to somehow be linked to each other, so the collective and the individual join’, but the sense of it is a blurring of individuality.
Because if you see what he conceives beyond is a merging into this oneness where all these things merge eventually to be absorbed into God, into Christ, etc. So that becomes his idea of the cosmic Christ, towards which everything is moving and which is pulling everything to itself, but into a merging which amounts to an end of time.
So in his conception, reaching that point of evolution's peak is an end of time and a withdrawal completely of the whole creation. So, that satisfies physical science. It satisfies the church belief. But it completely disconnects from the reality. Now because he was himself a very genuine man and looking always for evidence, he himself had limitations, but he had to work within these boxes, so he accepts this as the way of compromising these teachings. But there is no real concept of what Sri Aurobindo speaks of: that is, here in the body, you have still higher states of consciousness and higher states of consciousness not merely a blending and merging of individuals into a collective mind.
There is by the way another, Andrew Cohen who uses the word ‘supermind’ by which he means this collective mind. But still mind. It's not a higher grade of consciousness. So none of these people have this concept of a higher stage in consciousness itself, in which a whole different way of knowing and being exists, and many gradations like this. And even the idea that these higher gradations exist is not there. And then from there to have all those gradations incarnated that you can become literally a new being because you live by a new consciousness as radically different as the human is from the monkey, at least. None of that exists.
And the supramental consciousness for Sri Aurobindo is not only the incarnation of the Divine in the human but it is, well, divinising of humanity itself. And it's not an end of time, it's not a collapse into a singularity and then a getting out of the whole evolutionary system, rather it's the beginning of a new dimension in evolution. None of this exists in either Teilhard de Chardin or any of the other existing teachings.
So, I'm sorry to highlight this huge shortfall. But it's not even fair to say that there are strong parallels because to me this is not even a parallel. There are similarities of vocabulary or at a very superficial level a similarity of an idea of an exceeding of the human mind, but what that means for him is completely different.
(0:45:07):
The only good thing about him which links it to Sri Aurobindo is that he himself, Teilhard de Chardin, says that, his ideas were not his own, that he was receiving them from this higher consciousness which he glimpses from below, conceives of, and somehow tries to fit into the box of current understanding of his religion and science. And he says, I received it from there, it's not even my own creation, I'm just trying to be an instrument for this.
So to that extent, yes, he was an extraordinary person. What he achieved, within those two boxes of science and church and attempt to bridge them, was revolutionary for those boxes, for humanity maybe indirectly because it allowed people with living within those boxes to open to something larger, but it brought nothing really fundamentally new to the human knowledge or experience.
And so we have to valuate for what it is, but no point in giving it an exaggerated place either. And the parallels drawn to Sri Aurobindo are very superficial. And to me they seem even wrong. Okay. I think, that’s, this, this should be enough for this particular question.
I don't think even Teilhard de Chardin wrote that he was similar, his teaching was similar to Sri Aurobindo's teachings. I don't know if in his lifetime he ever spoke of Sri Aurobindo directly. But he was definitely familiar with the theosophical literature. He must have been exposed to Sri Aurobindo's writings somewhere or the other. But for him to have even mentioned them would have drawn such a strong reaction from the church that he had to be very careful of what he spoke. And he seemed to have quite a wide base of access to knowledge, must have definitely known of these things but had to stay within the safe boundaries.
I think we can go to the next set of questions.
Alina (0:47:20):
Now we have some discussions from last time. Nikhil is asking: “What is the meaning of a more evolved psychic being?”
Sraddhalu (0:47:32):
Okay. So we are now entering a series of questions which all derive from the discussion we had last time, which was what we had titled “Developing Individuality”, but more truly it was about the psychic education and the development of the true individuality, which is the psychic being. And there I made a reference to this phrase, I said, those who are more, more evolved, more mature as a psychic being.
And so the question from Nikhil: “What does that mean really?”- It's a very important question. What is the measure of psychic evolution? You see, in the domain of intelligence at least, we are able to say, ‘Ha this intelligence is more developed than another intelligence’. Look at yourself, as you were 12 years old, and as you were 18 years old, definitely your intelligence was more developed. What characterised it? And you will say, the power of your mind to comprehend: you read something, you understand and the depth of the understanding. Maybe at the age of 12 you read the same text and you understood but your depth was very different, very shallow rather, became much deeper later. So that's a good example of that.
Second, when you exercise your intelligence, what you could do as a 12 year old and what you could do as an 18 year old, you see a different power to be able to exercise.
So generally speaking, any evolution of any part of consciousness would involve these two facets: One is the ability to perceive reality on that level, more deeply, more richly, more completely. And the other is to be able to exercise your influence more richly, more completely and, I will say, more deeply, meaning with a deeper impact.
These would be typically the sense of a greater evolution or maturity. Well, exactly the same thing happens in the psychic being. We discussed last time this: psychic personality which is formed as if like a fine mesh of the psychic influence filling the personality of the outer layers with its influence and built of the experiences gathered and developed across lifetimes by which this personality forms itself.
So the psychic being as a consciousness could be smaller, less, less full in its, in the qualities that it expresses and in its ability to engage with the world: that grows, now it is able to engage with the world more directly, more completely, more deeply, more richly, both to perceive as well as to exercise.
(0:50:33):
So there is this consciousness-growth, and then there is the personality of the psychic personality becoming more rich, more diverse, more varied in its skills, capacities, perceptions, its ability to infuse and influence the outer layers, and so on.
So I would say, in the psychic evolution, both of these content, the consciousness as well as the personality, would have to be sufficiently mature. One could have one and not the other also. A less evolved psychic being, but more richly skilled in through its experiences being more diverse, but the consciousness not having sufficiently evolved. But the consciousness could be more evolved, but less, more narrow, less richly diverse in its capacities and skills.
So, in the consciousness evolution, you can even say, in a way, it's a way of saying: the psychic being has sufficiently evolved up to a certain level in the vertical ascension of consciousness of mind-grades that it can for example have opened up to higher mind, and then that capacity of operating, acting upon the higher mind would be carried by it into the next lives, and the intuitive, and so on. So in a sense, the true evolution in the true person is in this vertical dimension of the consciousness awakening, although it is still held inherent in the psychic being because it is projection of the Self, in the deployment, in the development, it has developing the capacities, skill, drawing out of itself this, these ranges and organising itself there and building a personality corresponding to its skills and capacities on those levels. Such would be the sense of the evolution of the psychic being.
I wanted to give another analogy. And remember, these are analogies but uh the advantage of a metaphor sometimes, sometimes poetic, or an analogy is, if it is perceived rightly, it can even give you a touch of the experience. So I am going to give this as an analogy.
You must have all seen sketches or cartoons which are done with dots. So you can take a face or draw a face by just putting dots. More dots to create a darker patch, less dots to create a lighter patch, and you can build a whole face. Today it is easy to do with computers, but when you see an artist doing it by hand, it is quite extraordinary. You can do an entire picture just with tiny tiny dots. In a sense, the psychic personality, which I described last time as this infused, fine, mesh-like, filling the personality, is something like this.
To give, take the analogy full, each time you have an experience where the psychic consciousness is participating and therefore links the psychic consciousness with that experience, it's as if the imprint of that experience remains on the psychic consciousness as something familiar and like a dot of the artist's painting: ‘this’. And now today you have an experience with music, and in the music suddenly a dimension opens to you, ‘Oh wow’, and it's aligned to the psychic presence: ‘dot’, ‘something new acquired’, ‘dot’, ‘dot’, ‘dot’, ‘dot’-‘dot’-‘dot’-‘dot’-‘dot’-‘dot’. And in this way you are building the psychic personality.
If you catch the image, you get a sense of what it means to have this fine mesh of the psychic influence, filling the whole consciousness. And then, you can catch sometimes these patterns: ‘Oh this psychic being is very richly experienced and developed in this range, in this kind of activity, in the exercise of these qualities or these powers of consciousness, but there, there are gaps, it needs to fill that’. And this is very different from the outer personality. It is in the psychic which I am speaking of.
So obviously you must have had some sensitivity to feel the psychic vibration, but once you have that, you can actually glimpse these things. And it's very different from the surface personality. And you can also see where the surface personality's experiences are linked to the psychic, where they are not. And you can feel or sense also the push from the psychic on the external personality, how it nudges-nudges to guide, to push.
And sometimes it's like the brief glimpse or the psychic light briefly reflects in the outer, ‘flash’, and momentarily the person ‘oohh’ and then as if goes back to sleep in the somnambulism of activity of life: momentarily ‘hha-yes’, before you have woken up, you are again lost. And one sees this happening in people sometimes.
(0:55:45):
Again as an analogy, we have all had perhaps these glimpses in the sleep state, in a dream state, you are as if half wake up to the fact that you are dreaming and momentarily you are aware and then as if the dullness of the dream state comes back and covers and you slip back into the dream.
But something similar happens in the psychic influence in people's lives. And then there are those in whom that influence is strong, sometimes even sustained, but dim light, but sustained. And for others, it is intense within, but covered up in layers. And all this one begins to perceive, and this is where one realises how harmful and limiting the modern educational training and social values are, how much they have harmed and covered up or turned away from the psychic influence, prevented its influence, prevented this joining, and that's why you again say, I wish it would be possible for the education to be different.
Which is why after Sri Aurobindo made that initial effort, he was himself Principal of this National College. He had to resign when he took a more active role in the freedom struggle because otherwise that would, the work would have been compromised. It very quickly was lost, and later it became a different college, but the inspiration which he tried to bring in could not sustain there.
At the Sri Aurobindo Ashram again, there is an Ashram going, of course there is no school at that point, but when the refugees came, children came, the Mother took it as an occasion to put into practice the same educational framework in a new space where it would be protected by the Ashram. And again there, because the teachers came from the old system, they were opposing, there was a whole group of teachers opposing the Mother's effort to put in practice this integral education. And then there were others who were for it but were kind of lost, they didn't know how to put it into practice. And there was this two groups and the struggle which came with them. And the Mother had to face so many frustrations, so many oppositions regarding this.
And from the point which she withdrew her body and the sustained, the support she gave to those who were trying to bring about change, the other group took over and completely ruined. There were a few patches, only pockets, where the real form was being done and they had to push back hard, and then there's been a very rapid degradation in the last 10, 15 years with people who have no idea of the integral education, no interest in it, being taken in and put as teachers simply because somebody liked them or thought it convenient to have them there.
So I am, why am I highlighting all this? Because finally it all comes back to this evolution of the psychic being and the support you can provide, especially in the early years. And well, something is still happening in spite of these dilutions, there are a few individuals, a few pockets, and I will still say, something very important is happening here.
But all of us within our lives must begin to put these into practice. All of us must give the necessary value and importance to realigning our entire life and our personality to the psychic centre within us. And especially if you are an aspirant or a practitioner of the Integral Yoga, this is the centre, of everything, of your whole spiritual journey, because this is the person making the journey, but this is also where you have all the key, all the tools, all the discriminating, protecting knowledge, even power, to lead you through.
So we can go to the next question.
Alina (0:59:56):
‘Densification of psychic substance’, writing V-Truth, ‘could you please help to understand this?’
Sraddhalu (1:00:13):
Yes. So V-Truth has asked, what is this term? I used again this phrase last time, “of the densification” of this, and the “psychic substance”, I said: when this infuses, when it becomes more dense, it materialises to become the supramental substance literally, supramental body. And so what does it mean?
First of all, what is psychic substance? And second, what does it mean for it to become more dense? Very important questions. But again, unless one experiences it directly, one has to draw analogies. So I will use certain analogies first. What do we mean by substance? We can say: there is an object, this is substantial because I can touch it and I feel a resistance.
Ideas, thoughts, emotions, I can't touch them, I don't feel anything, so they are not substantial. This is only true as long as your contact is in the biology. To the biology, emotion and thought are unsubstantial. But when you step out of the gross body in your subtle body, let's say, you are in your emotional-vital body, at that point you literally see, feel, touch vital energies, even emotions. Emotions can come like a wave, like a solid wave of a tsunami, whack, hit you, except the hit is not like in the gross physical where it can break, but it breaks you in a different way. It passes right through you, but with an intensity that can literally shatter psychologically, not form, because those are not worlds of form, they are worlds of energy.
But you experience contact of energy with energy, and you experience the intermissions, the passage of one energy wave passing through another, passing right through you. But when it passes, you are fully overwhelmed in, with the intensity of it. And because free of form, these waves and powers of energies can be enormous, even infinite. And they pass right to you, whack you, lift you, throw you, and they are tangible, substantial, to that level. But to that consciousness, your physical body, gross physical body, insubstantial because you can pass right through it. Isn't it?
In the same way, when you enter the mental world in the mental body, literally a thought-form is substantial, thought meets thought, mind meets mind as substance, because it is of the same vibrational grade, let's say. Again that's an analogy.
You shift out below or above and that is no more substantial but the next becomes substantial. So what does substance mean finally? And Sri Aurobindo defines it in terms which are something like this, I don't have the exact quote: consciousness when it meets consciousness and represents to itself the contact. So your consciousness met something and how it represented to itself the contact, that's your sense of ‘ha substance’ or even form.
Colour is one way in which you represent a certain quality of vibration. Isn't it? But that way of representation has also universal character, therefore all of us would tend to find: a red as a colour, as a quality, intense, exciting; blue, cooling, calming. Quality. But we are describing a quality, except it corresponds to a vibration, and the colour corresponds to that vibration, and therefore the link.
So, any time consciousness meets consciousness, it will experience a certain contact of consciousness, which it represents to itself in a certain way, registers in a certain way, and that's your substantiality. Therefore, the conclusion from this, and Sri Aurobindo affirms this: All consciousness is substantial. There is no such thing as consciousness without substance. It is only a question of how it is registered.
So, not only all consciousness and therefore all planes are substantial in themselves, even their quality one finds as you go higher up, they are more real because they exist by themselves. Whereas as you come down, here, you don't really touch matter, you never really experience matter directly, you only experience matter indirectly. How? Your finger approached, atom met atom, but never touched. Electric field of electron pushed against electric field of electron. You never really touched, you only felt field against field. But you didn't even feel the field of the electric, of the electron. You felt its effect rippling on molecules, which led to ripples, which activated ripples in the nerves, which led to a chain of ripples in the nerves, which again is passing on. This triggers that, which triggers that, all the way up to your brain, which again rippled and moved around, which at some point got translated into your mind which is your sixth sense, and into the mind now this perception emerged, ‘ah this feels soft, this feels hard’.
(1:05:33)
You see, you never really knew the thing itself. You knew it by translation of translation of translation. Therefore, with your eyes closed, we can wire up, now what is called ‘haptic feedback gloves’, basically what it does is, it connects little gadgets to your fingertip, which pulses your skin surface in a certain way at a certain frequency to give you the illusion as if your finger is passing across, let's say, velvet or iron or whatever substance, surface, sensations, and so if at that time in your eyes we project the picture of the velvet or iron or stone or whatever, and your finger is moving across it, you will be convinced you are looking at a sheet of velvet and your finger is moving across it.
‘Virtual reality’ we call it. Another word, your mind cannot distinguish between the computer generated virtual reality and your world, real world, virtual reality. So the same scientist will say, your real world is a virtual reality of some kind. Because to this mind which is embodied, you can never know really.
But this is not true in the higher worlds. This is only true in the biology because form limits, the nature of the material world is world of form. You go higher up into the vital world, already you're directly meeting energy, quality of emotion, directly. See this is the reason why in the physical world, somebody can come to you and smile and be very nice and inside they may be hating you, and you would not know. But you go into the vital world, somebody approaches you with hate, you will feel the hate, you cannot hide it.
Yes you can, you can still, but it's very difficult. You can create a layer of some appearance with a very strong imprint and hide the hate behind, but on the other side, receiving side, if you don't get distracted by the appearance you will inevitably touch the hate. So the way to hide on those levels is “covering truth with truth”. This is a phrase Sri Aurobindo uses in Savitri by the way. You have to cover something which is real, which will be felt, but which is so compelling it will distract you from sensing the other things. That's how it works. But as you go higher up, even this becomes impossible.
So the higher up you go, the more directly you experience the other thing, but also the more intimately you experience it, to the point where, already in the mental world, all, knowledge, thought, form, is just bared, you can at, at best hide a complex construction inside a larger complex construction, but that's rather your inability to register the full complexity of it on the receiving side. But if you go above that, still here there's a representation, okay?, there is a gap between seeing and seen, when you go into the intuitive consciousness, you know in direct identity, at that point you cannot hide, you can only be incomplete.
After that, as you go higher up, all the gradations are direct experience of the thing in itself.
So the higher up you go, the more direct the identity and contact and experience and therefore the more real, the more true in the perception and in the experience. The lower down, the less true, more appearance, more deceptive, more false, although it's real, but your perception is false or indirect. You see.
So in reality what happens, once we begin to experience these levels, we say, the physical world is almost as if entirely falsely constructed, the higher worlds are more true, more real, more fulfilling, more substantial, more concrete, more dense even. So, all this is to give you the sense of what is meant by ‘substance’ and the true sense of substantiality. Finally, the only substance and the only dense real substance is Sachchidananda, original substance. All else is, well, diluted, reduced versions of it.
Now coming to the psychic being, because the psychic being is as if a portion of That, of the divine consciousness, in itself, a limited portion though, it has the quality of That but not the fullness, not the intensity, not the size, not the power, of That.
(1:10:07):
And therefore, at first, its influence is felt as a soft perfume like, ‘veil’, we use this phrase, it permeates you, something feels, ‘Haa I feel deep satisfaction in this space’.
So coming to the example of Rahil going to the Sri Aurobindo Centre in Baroda, or you go to the Samadhi or the Meditation Hall or certain sacred spaces, and I don't say all but certain sacred spaces around the world, you come into that space and you feel ‘Ha-yes, this is like coming home’, you feel somehow deep satisfaction, and generally that represents something of the psychic influence present there, and it feels familiar, it resonates deeply, but it can be fine influence.
So you feel it substantial; If you are already familiar with that grade, you can almost feel the contact. So I used to observe this walking from the Ashram, from the seashore to the Ashram, when the tourists are less, now it's too much chaos, but when you walk there, and you could walk, you could feel the gradations of substance becoming more dense until you approach close to the centre of the Ashram where the Samadhi is present, almost as if that was a focal point of density of that substance.
And now this is a question of experience. You feel the substantiality, you come into a space you feel it more dense, and then you move away and you feel it again becoming finer-finer-finer until it seems to fade out or it's lost under the noise of other influences. But when you come, you recognise. When it is more dense, you recognise it as more dense. May not always be in the gradual change, but it's there. And that's it.
So the psychic substance or the psychic influence now as it grows more dense, more concrete, you feel its influence more densely but it's almost as if it is acquiring a density close to the materiality because now it is acquiring a vibrational quality similar to this matter and so to the physical body itself one can feel it almost like a dense substance. Or it can acquire a quality of vibration similar to the mind or the emotional grades and you will feel it like a density there.
Eventually though when this psychic being and its personality become more mature, more complete, its influence of the personality is less and less fine, more and more dense on all these levels or at least levels where it is more mature and there you feel the substantiality, the density of it. That dense grade can also come into the physical body and of its grade of substance, vibration. That densifying, becoming then entirely of a material substantiality that you can almost touch and see would become the supramental body and that's what the Mother saw. So I hope this somewhat detailed elaborate description would satisfy V-Truth, Truth's question.
We can go to the next.
Alina (1:13:26):
Ritu is asking: “Would you please explain the secret of individuality behind the likes, tendencies, attractions and spontaneous, like, instinctive flow of life, the ones which can be the true and natural basis of outer learning where being-ness is natural and not Becoming?”
Sraddhalu (1:13:51):
Yes. I don't know if everyone catches the sense of the question! Ritu's asking, what she's implying of course is: There is the true individuality behind, which is secret, and there you just are, Being is natural. Becoming, having to do something, to act, to express yourself, is not even needed. Just the fact that you are everything tends to flow, and you simply are true. And that's it. And it’s spontaneous, almost instinctive, so, “the secret of individuality”, she says.
This is in fact what we have been discussing the last time in great depth. This true person is the psychic being, and that's why it's “Being” also. But it has a Becoming. But the Becoming for the psychic consciousness is spontaneous, it is effortless. It's not something you do.
You see the moment there is something which you say ‘I am’, and then ‘I do’, there is a gap, and the two can be misaligned. You see there is this famous, I think, it is a biblical phrase which goes like this: the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak, meaning, inside me in the consciousness I am willing to do but my machinery, particularly the biology, is unable to. And this is a common experience we all have. ‘I want to, well, reduce my certain habits, certain tendencies, certain addictions, certain greeds, likes, dislikes, but I can't help it, I'm compelled by my nature.’ So there's this difference between what you are and what you act, what you express.
(1:15:36):
But as you approach closer to the thing which is true, in the psychic being inward but also upward in the higher ranges of consciousness, as we have discussed, what you are automatically affects its immediate environment which is coming under its influence. The influence is present, it does not have to do something. The very fact of its presence changes what is in its presence. And that's how it acts. So there is no sense of ‘Now I know, and I will start doing, and then I will stop doing’. There is no difference. ‘Being’ ‘is’ ‘doing’. ‘Knowing’ ‘is’ ‘action’.
So, in the intuitive mind one gets a glimpse of this. But still in intuition, from intuition to action there can be a lag. It's when you have a streaming inspiration, it flows, it becomes an action, but as it passes through the levels, there can be mixtures, dilutions, hiccups, bumps, because it's passing through inferior grade of material. The supramental consciousness is the only one, or rather is the one in the origin finally, and therefore the only one where Knowledge and Will are no more separate, but one. ‘What you know’ ‘is’ ‘what you act’. What you act is a direct expression of knowing, no translation, no reduction, no transmission through inferior substance, it is, and acts. That's it.
In the intuition, which is a ray of the Supermind you can say, something of this is felt but in a limited capacity and potential for mixture. The psychic being, being essentially Divine, experiences this but now within a very fine grade of its influence, according to its maturity and growth. That's about it.
It cannot exercise on all things, unless it has developed those layers of its influence, its personality, etc., and that's why the maturity and evolution of the psychic being. When our consciousness rises to the intuition, this becomes more direct, and for the psychic also, its action more effective, eventually in the supramental, it can become most effective, most complete, flawless, no distortion. So if you want a secret, this is the secret.
But, once you catch the principle, aligning yourself to the inner as much as you can, to the inmost, opening to the higher as much as you can, ideally at least to the intuition, and beyond, whatever, these are the two sources in which Being and Becoming are not separate. And from these two sources when the influence comes in-to-out, up-to-down, we have that’s free flow, spontaneous action, precise, very effective, even if momentary.
And training our other layers of personality to learn to turn up without agitation, to receive, to hold, and to allow the inspiration to act, literally passing through, shaping the material, transparently, working through it: that would be the training we would have to work upon. In a sense, anybody who achieves anything of a radical value, radical breakthrough, in action, in knowledge, in work, is tapping into this, even if momentarily, even if partially, even in a tiny part of you.
An Olympic gymnast is trained for this, to make the body a transparent instrument for an intuitive flow, an inspiration, that acts through the whole body to shape it and make it do perfectly, then only you can hit the 10-out-of-10 perfection. The moment in between something of you as a slightest tremor of expectation, of desire, of attempt to do, it breaks the flow and there is a slight slip.
(1:20:00):
And so the entire training at the most advanced stages of the Olympic gymnastics is: remove that doing, remove desire, remove expectation, for those moments at least.
And you can see the best who have that: they concentrate and literally the ego tends to fade out; they're aligned, before they move a single moment, they're in full alignment; and then
they don't act, the thing flows; it acts. This is the reason why that training can be so precious, spiritually, if so done.
When there was the group of Russian gymnasts, this was I think 1950s, and they were Russian gymnasts which were sent out, for the Russian Soviet Union, it was the propaganda action perhaps, but on the other hand they were some of the best in the world at that time. There was no equivalent anywhere. So some of them had come here to the Ashram and they did certain demonstrations and the Mother was very interested. She was watching keenly. And I was told by one of the coaches later that she commented that she was so impressed with them and she said, if they had just a little bit of the spiritual, they would have been like the gods.
So in a sense, the whole training of that alignment was done for a certain intuition, but the missing thing was the source which would flow through the intuition. And if they had consciously opened to that, obviously they were open to something, but it was within the limits and boundaries, had they consciously opened to that, to the spiritual consciousness, you had an instrument ready and for it to act through that instrument would be so easy. And it would be almost like a divine light revealing.
And she tried that, she tried that with the children here, to use the sports also to build in the body that kind of receptivity and transparency. In my personal opinion, I would say she did succeed with some to a partial degree, and it's easy to validate this.
If you look at some of the photographs of the Ashram bulletin, you see in those years, four times a year, there would be the Bulletin of the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, the Ashram school, which would describe all the activities done, it would have articles by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo and then it would have a photo section where they would show by photograph some of the significant activities and events. And from the sports photographs you will see this sometimes. Young bodies, young children, young adults doing some of these gymnastics and athletics, and you can see on their face this glow, a kind of a deep joy which is not human, you can say it as a light of something deeper or higher, and they had it, and it was done by the Mother's physical presence, even sometimes noting their performance, their score, being on the ground with them, giving them the necessary support, encouragement, infusing into their bodies this consciousness as a substance.
That's why the substantiality is so important. The body itself now can receive in substantiality and density something of the psychic and spiritual substance. And to contain that, to embody that, is of course the way even to transmute and transform the physical consciousness. But the same for the other levels. So yes, what is the secret of this individuality to Ritu's question? Well, it's what we've been talking about, but these are the two dimensions to that secret. And if at all you need a secret of how to manifest or incarnate or align to that, the secret is surrender. The more these outer layers can open, give themselves and become transparent to that influence, the more that which is already it, what you are seeking, can flow, and be, and act in Being. Not needing to make an effort in Becoming, but the Becoming is a flow from the Being, spontaneous, transparent, but through now inferior vehicle which now opens and gives itself in a partial or complete surrender.
So in order to be able to live in that, to be able to put yourself in that state consciously like the gymnast does, at that moment for that purpose, then they lose it. Then they start crying if they have lost, but at that time, there is no idea even of winning or not winning, just total transparency to that.
And you can, we can all train for that, it's not such a big deal. They all use the yogic knowledge, techniques, basically Raja Yoga techniques of mind control, and all that. But all that is still superficial, you have a much more direct method which we have been discussing so often. Become transparent to that again and again during the day in the most ordinary activities, start with the easier, more mechanical activities.
(1:25:07)
Two things needed:
First, concentrate to become conscious of the Presence within you and the higher consciousness within you in attunement to the Mother, don't have to give it a name, you don't have to know by name, you just have to feel her Presence, that's your entry point.
And second part is, becoming transparent, open to her, to allow her to flow. As a practice. Very simple. Start doing it in simple tasks, and bit by bit this will grow until your whole life becomes a vehicle for the divine consciousness to work through as a transparent instrument. That would be the ‘secret of’, perhaps.
We can go to the next question.
Alina (1:25:55):
Karthik is asking: “I am able to interact one-to-one with people but I find it very difficult to interact with and smile at the same set of people when they are in front of me. I find some people don't have this difficulty. Can I say that they are more individualised and better formed psychologically? Also, please tell me some practical ways to overcome this limitation.”
Sraddhalu (1:26:25):
So this is from last time's discussion, but Karthik's question is very specific. He sees people who are able to interact with others while smiling at them, but when Karthik tries to do it he can't be smiling if he is interacting.
And then he is asking: Is it a question of individualisation? I don't think it has to do with individualisation. It has to do with skill, in that part.
So there's a very interesting observation Sri Aurobindo makes. Uh I think it is in his evening talks where he says something like, someone asks about people smiling, and he says, Europeans smile more often, they are more polite with you. And Sri Aurobindo says, yes but their politeness is more a habit, a conditioning. Of course at that time I did not know what to make of that until I experienced this, seeing that travelling within Europe and generally in the west. A lot of it has to do with education. From childhood you are taught to be polite and politeness is as if inculcated in you.
So for example in France where they are very particular about certain things, even the word ‘polite’ comes from the French ‘poli’, polished. And it became a matter of their national value even at a certain stage in their journey. So, in India for example, I go to a shop and I ask a question, I said: ‘Hey, can you help me? Where is this?’
And I am trying to minimise my interaction so I don't disturb their work.
And in France I say: ‘Excuse me, can you help me?’ First thing he will stop, stare at you, and say, ‘Bonjour’, good morning, ‘now ask your question’. So unless you have said ‘good morning’, you have not right to speak anything more, so you have to say ‘good morning’, he will say ‘good morning’, then you ask your question. So it's a kind of a structure of society, politeness, etc. And so it's programmed, so deeply programmed that to not do it is offensive.
So this is something in that direction where you talk, you are smiling, and it's part of that polishing. So there's even something today they call ‘polishing school’ where they take you, with your educational system, you are still raw, unpolished, so then they polish you. But as any polishing, it's just a superficial sheen – You are taught to smile as you speak, you are taught to make direct eye contact with somebody, extend your hand, grip tightly and shake violently, and that's how you communicate your self-confidence and charm. You are taught that.
So, to Karthik's question, I will say that it is purely a training on the most surface part of your nature. It need not reflect at all in the individuality. You can be a completely de-individualised or weakly individualised person and still be able to put up this front because you have been polished, trained, programmed.
Individuality is when the different tendencies within you are aligned to a central poise, idea, value, sense of individuality, whatever, this alignment of different pieces around a centre.
Now a person who is not sufficiently individualised will find ‘When I am pulled to this person, I smile’, maybe in that example I am smiling, I say, ‘Yes-yes-yes, you are right, wonderful’. I meet the next person who gives me a completely different view of things but with great force and vehemence and logic perhaps and I with the same smile I say, ‘Yes-yes-yes you're right’. And I don't realise that they're completely opposite or I realise but I'm helpless, I can't help it.
So you will say, you'll see a lot of people who complain about this: ‘When I'm with them, I'm so convinced about what they say; when I'm in those people, with those people I am convinced, I don't know how to unify, I am lost’.
(1:30:29):
That's lack of individuality, in that part. Here it could be emotional, it could be rational, whatever form, on that level you don't have sufficient, or maybe the whole personality doesn't have a sufficient clear centre against which these, or which stands to unify these disparate experiences or parts of your experience.
If you have that, then the first thing you notice, when this comes, even if you are compelled and convinced, something within you might find parts that you don't accept. Not by habit, but for good reason. You go here again, there may be parts which are convincing, there are parts which are not, and you are able to separate the two. And then if you are sufficiently individualised, you are able to see how these two fit and how they don't fit, which parts fit, which don't. So this obviously for this example you need a individualisation in the mind.
But again you can have a similar problem with emotions or even with, in the physical consciousness. For a gymnast for example, you know people who have very poor coordination.
So when they walk, I'll give you an example, a real person, he was a very senior scientist, let's say, in the Indian machinery, very high up, with very good knowledge of his field, whatever that science field was. And at some point he came into the Ashram and joined the physical training programme. And for his age group, he had to do marching. Now marching coordination means right hand moves with left leg. He couldn't do it. If his left leg moved forward, his left hand would follow. And it took him a few months to bring this coordination. Now in his mind, probably there was sufficiently organised individuality at the level of ideas, perhaps, I don't know enough, but in the body consciousness it was not organised. There was no individuality there, and therefore the different pieces could not coordinate.
I am just showing you this to, so that you can understand what is meant by this individuality. It is not about what you can do, that's skill. Individuality is about coordination, harmonising around a central unit which is not wandering around, not changing moment to moment. And this unit, if it is deep enough, is more permanent, more lasting. If it is not sufficiently deep, it is still a centre, but it can be drifting around. And that generally means again insufficient individualisation.
So true individuality always will come deeper down, but still there can be a temporary focal point for the personality. But that's still an ego individuality and so it doesn't have a stable knot or stable poise. It's rather, it's a knot of many different interests which can pull and push. So practical way to overcome your limitation: First, it’s not a problem of individuality. I don't know what is your individuality, how much is developed. You should work on that irrespective. But practical way to overcome this limitation, practice before a mirror. Smile and speak until that shape of your mouth smiling becomes like a habit while you're talking. Not difficult. But to what end? Gaining this skill is not difficult. But what end?
In my experience at least, when I met somebody who had that finishing-school training, the guy comes with the big smile, sticks out his hand, and I don't like to shake hands, often the vibes are not very comfortable, so I'm avoiding that, but he's insensitive to it. To me such a person is not very helpful, not much that he can do, he is not even sensitive to the fact that the person before you is not comfortable with shaking hands. The lack of sensitivity and the automation of that finishing-school training to me is pointless.
Maybe if your circumstance demands that you smile, okay, smiling will make you better fitting into that environment, but What are you acting for? What is the basis for your action? What is the sensitivity you have of others and the ability to sense, respond to act upon?
(1:35:02):
To me those would be greater skills to develop. And then ‘For what?’ will be the individuality or at least the idealism of the individuality. Why are you doing all this? What is important? What is it you are gaining through it? Or, what is your ‘aiming at’? Even if it is for a business objective, we want to increase profits. ‘Our discussion today is how to increase our profits.’ Great. No problem with that. But to that you will add a dimension ‘For what?’. If you can touch a higher ideal, you will have a greater force.
But ‘For what?’ of profits, while we discuss 20 other things related, we do not lose reference to this. And if you have a higher ideal, you do not lose reference to that, where, this is the advantage of higher ideal, you may momentarily suspend profitability for long-term profit and you are willing to take short-term risks for the long-term gain. The strategies for example for all these ‘big media companies’, I will say, for lack of a better word, Google, Amazon and Facebook, all of them started with heavy losses in the beginning just to build monopolies. Once they got into the monopoly situation, they made humongous profits. It was a strategic move, they were backed by powerful banks and interests, that's why they could do it. Not everyone can do that.
But my point is, as a strategy sometimes you should be able to have that, but you can only do that if you have a long-term vision and a higher sense of purpose. In their case, the long-term vision was world domination, they had to become the point for whole of humanity, and they bent with that goal.
Amazon wants to be the hub for all human sales, they are aiming at that. And what they do is they build large numbers going at heavy losses every year and then push up the price slightly and make huge profits just across the board. Nobody notices. And that's a strategy because there is a larger goal, long-term goal, need not be higher in value, but it's a long-term goal nevertheless.
So my question to Karthik would be this, become conscious of these things: Find the centre within you, your alignment, your aspiration. Why are you committed to this effort in the company where you are working? What is your role in it. Act from there. And whether you smile or not, will not be important, because people feel your sincerity and the effect of that will be far more powerful than the appearance of the smile.
And if you need to fill in the smile, fine. But to me that will still be secondary or even tertiary to the sense of purpose and the general sense of sincerity and higher aim and intent that you bring in, which will actually lift the whole discussion and the interactions and even the success-potential of the company if you are running it.
Okay, so, we have gone well beyond our time. I will, we will end with one question though. The next one, yes.
Alina (1:38:25):
Okay. Shall we end with Nagajothi?
Sraddhalu (1:38:28):
No,… Aditya's question. Aditya's question! Aditya's question!
Alina (1:38:33):
Aditya's question: “How to build self-confidence, faith in one's capacities, faith in the Divine Grace in parentheses, and faith after failure?
Sraddhalu (1:38:51):
So Aditya's question is common to all of us, and that's why this is going to be very important, we will close with this. He says, “After you have experienced failure in life, how to build self-confidence? How to build faith in one's capacities? And, how to build faith in the Divine Grace?”
Because the nature of failure is that you have lost faith after it, during and after, you don't know whether you can trust those things, you don't know if you can trust yourself, you don't know if you can trust your capacities, you don't know if you can trust the Divine Grace, because you failed. Isn't it? That's the problem.
And to this I want to change the perspective or rather bring the perspective of the psychic being, going back to the discussion we had last time. The nature of the psychic consciousness is, it knows its immortality, it knows eternity, it knows it will always be, nothing can destroy it, nothing can extinguish it. And therefore from the value system of the psychic being, from the experience of the psychic, and when that experience begins to fill you, there is no such thing as failure, failure does not exist because it is always the starting point for something more. Isn't it?
(1:40:16):
Success exists, failure doesn't exist. Failure is only a temporary step you took in preparation for another step. So, if you were to look back at life and across lives, everything that you might have called ‘failure’ during a particular lifetime, from that experience you build something more and grew as a result of it.
So was that a failure or a stepping stone? Interesting. Isn't it?
There's one of the scientists who made the statement, I think it was Edison who was asked ‘Why did you take a thousand failures to find the correct combination for the light bulb?’, he said, ‘I found a thousand ways that it does not work until I got to the point where I found a way that it works’. That's another way of looking at it. It's not to me very satisfying. Nikola Tesla was a great critic of Edison and he said, ‘If you used a little bit of theory, you needn't have made those thousand efforts’. Okay. Point taken.
But the point also is this: In spite of theory, in spite of efforts, in spite of, as it seems to you, Grace, something did not work out. Will you say ‘It is a failure’ or will you say, ‘I learnt an important lesson there, based on this lesson now, I will move forward’.
Maybe the moving-forward may require a moving-back first before you can move forward in the corrected direction. Maybe you are going off-track and you needed to pull back and then change direction, change strategy, change tools, change methods, develop certain skills before re-engaging with this, whatever it is.
You learnt an important lesson which is helping you as a stepping stone towards a greater “success”, but part of that may be redefining your goals, redefining the directions and successes and the means to attain those successes. And in that perspective, there is no such thing as a failure in life, and this is the true nature of life, there is no such thing as failure. There are efforts which failed for the goal they intended, but that's not a failure. That's a learning experience for a greater success of whatever form it is.
So, to Aditya I will say: Review your whole perspective of life and that situation that you call ‘failure’. Maybe some of it is, requires you to make a correction to step back from that form of effort or the tools used in that effort or the purpose of the effort. Review. Reorient yourself. The more you are able to step back and the more deeply you are able to settle yourself ideally all the way at least to some influence from the psychic, in that influence you review everything, and you feel, ‘Ah yes, the essence of that was this, this I hold, the rest is fluff, I drop, now with this new essence, what's the form in which it will flow? What is the next action to take?’ It's just as simple as that.
But to get to that point may take you a little while because you're still disturbed, clouded on the surface. One of the things you will have to do in order to be able to come to that poise is remove from yourself consciously all personal preference or likes and dislikes. You can't say, ‘I really need this’. You have to be equal to all outcomes, all requirements. You say: ‘All right, I consciously dissolve the sense of this need, I consciously dissolve the fear of that other thing which I was trying to avoid in doing this, I consciously dissolved that sense of preparation: it should be like this; it should not be like this.’
Become very quiet and still and equal. If you can at that point, you ask for the divine guidance and help, open yourself to the right. While you wait, if you like, you can exercise your mind also. But with this equality your perspective changes, if you have come in deeper alignment to the psychic influence, maybe even opening to a higher intuition, you become very-very-very quiet.
And stay in that stillness, if possible for three full days, maintain that: ‘I will not think about anything else, just wait for the guidance.’ In stillness, no expectation. If you have the luxury of three days. Generally by the end of three days, the state has sufficiently cleared that you will get an insight, and the mind will be taken in a certain direction, from deep within an intimation will come, ‘Okay, this was good, now no more this is required, I take this direction’ or whatever it is, or ‘I need to redo this with a different approach, with a different priority’, whatever it is.
(1:45:06):
But what will come from deeper within will also be quieter, it won't be so compelling, it won't involve attraction and repulsion, likes, dislikes. It will be true and you will do because it's true irrespective of your benefit, personally I mean.
It needs to be done, you do it to the best of your capacity. And it's a tremendous freedom to be free of all those distractions and do the thing for what it needs to be done for. And that's it. So, your sense of self-confidence will come from coming closer to the psychic influence where you know yourself immortal or at least something of that will come into it, and then you are not worried about ‘Can I do?’, ‘Can I not do?’. ‘It needs to be done, I do what I can.’ That’s it.
Your sense of faith in your capacities is a superficial faith. There is a deeper faith not in your capacity but in the higher intuition, higher inspiration and in the divine capacity that can work through you or can work through circumstances bypassing you. And you rely increasingly on that rather than on your capacities, and with the hope, with the prayer, with the aspiration that in the divine working in you, your capacities will grow and will be built up, including through this experience.
But you don't rely on your limited capacity. You aim to develop them. But in the action, you rely on the divine action which will work through you, and through others, and in combination through many sources, and thereby not so much faith in your capacities but faith in the Divine working through you, this has to grow, and with it your real capacity will also grow.
And finally faith in the Divine Grace – Recognise that even in this so-called ‘failure’, the Divine Grace has held you, protected you and is even now helping you to make the course corrections required. The Grace never abandons you. You may have abandoned it by saying, ‘Oh it failed me’. No. It didn't fail you. It did the best it could given that you were so fixated with your expectations and whatever narrow, fixated ideas that you had.
And now through this shock in which you have been thrown back you can perhaps open to it and allow its action more directly. It never abandoned you. Ever. Because where can it go? It is always there. The Divine Mother, her Grace, her Presence, her Love is always within you, centred in your inmost psychic but also around you, above you, everywhere, in all things. It's just you were not conscious of it.
Now in the shock of this so-called ‘failure’ is your deeper attempt to find sense of purpose and hopefully with that comes this opening and reliance on the help, and later you look back and say, ‘Ah that was my turning point, that gave me the necessary boost to change my very method and values of living life’. And maybe it will be the stepping stone needed for you to make a far bigger breakthrough. Isn't it?
So, review this discussion perhaps a few times, introspect, try to internalise these deep truths, make these three corrections in your perspective, and you will find you will have a far deeper true confidence of self, of true self, far more real faith in the capacities of the divine action through you in spite of your limitations and increasing reliance on the Divine Grace which is always with you, never abandons you.
But your call, your opening allows now for her to flow through more directly and act more completely. And that's why the need for you to open. She was helping you anyway, but you were closed. Now you open. That's all. And everything changes just with that.
So this could be a general lesson for all of us, and we can all perhaps concentrate on this, review our lives and our successes, failures in these, from this perspective, from the psychic perspective, and we will find that our life has been an extraordinary journey with so many interesting stepping stones.
And we'll continue this theme of the developing of individuality but with a more specific form of how it happens in our lives as adults as well as, as children, next time. But for the moment let's concentrate in a aspiration and this vision of the psychic experience of the sense of growth.
<silence>
Namaste.
Alina (1:50:28):
Namaste.