EWS #145 On Learning and Expressing – IV + Q&A

January 7, 2023

Alina (0:00:30):
Namaste. Welcome to our continuing series, Evenings with Sraddhalu. Namaste Sraddhalu.

Sraddhalu (0:00:37):

Namaste. Happy to be with you all.

Alina (0:00:41):

We are continuing today the theme of developing our capacities for learning and expressing ourselves. Today is the fourth session on this topic and we will begin again with some questions that we received from our viewers in the chat box last time.

As usually you may freely ask questions in the chat box during our conversations. I will read the first question of Blue Lotus: “When does sensorial development fully happen in kids? At what age?”

Sraddhalu (0:01:26):
Yes, it's a tricky question because the answer which I would give may not fit-in with what was expected but I think it will be satisfying finally.

The question was: When does it fully happen, sensorial development?

My answer would be simply it never fully happens. And that is unfortunately the condition of our present educational system that even the most basic foundation of a sensorial development is never taken to its full development, its full potential.

You may say potentials vary from children to children. Yes, be that as it may, what we actually develop in typically the average educational framework is less than half of what is possible. I am being very generous in saying that.

Because actually we have five senses. We do not develop anything consciously of the touch or smell or taste. Okay? So that's already three-fifth of it not developed. What's left is hearing and sight. Of that, hearing nominally is developed and that too only if you take up some musical instrument for learning, playing, listening music. A little bit will happen but never consciously developed, only used, and by usage whatever automatic development happens. And sight and observation of sight is being our primary vehicle in the educational system, some of it gets developed but again incidentally, not actively.

So actually if you look at the totality of what is possible, we are taking one-fifth and that too doing about half of what it could do. So it's really-really bad.

But to understand the full sense of the question itself, I think Blue Lotus Mom also wants to know: “What would be the natural development or rather the natural sequence of unfolding and the ages during which these developments would take place and by when would that development be completed?”

I suppose that would be the broad sense of her question. So I will address that part also.

Sorry for this, [mic disturbance]. Okay I am going to leave it as it is for now.

So, yes, there is a natural unfolding that takes place because of nature which has a huge investment as Sri Aurobindo points out in the natural unfolding of the educational process itself.

In the extreme case, if a family living in a forest, parents are eaten up by a tiger, and there's a newborn child, the child should be able to grow on his own to full development as far as possible. And so nature has imprinted in the children two primary drives.

(0:05:92):

This Sri Aurobindo lists as: “insatiable curiosity”, and the second one, “hero worship” of the parents. Every child, of course parents is one side, every child, he says, is a natural hero-worshipper. But the “insatiable curiosity” is what drives the first part of the learning.

And so through our senses as children, we try to fulfil that curiosity. And that's how the primary training of senses is taking place. There is a natural sequence within that. You see as a child, a newborn baby in the cradle hardly able to act, the basic motor skills are still crude and the child is watching, listening, keenly smelling. At that age the smell is actually very close to the sensitivity of a dog, let's say, and subsequently from disuse it dulls.

Some children because innately they tend to spend more attention in trying to feel or sense that they may notice, ha yes this smell, and then by pursuing it, they may have more than normal development. But otherwise, there is practically nothing happening there.

We find then a rhythm where, first sensory development opening, and then gradually an emotional component, an expressive component kicks in, and all that happens in the very first few years.

Up to the age of six, a basic framework is already formed and that's the period when the brain's maximal development takes place in size also, the first three years maximally and then through the sixth, the psychological component again at a foundational level is largely taking place and completed.

So among the Jesuits there is a very important statement that they make. They say that: give us your child for the first six years and we will ensure that he is formed for life. And that they actually do that consciously. There is a truth to it. If you do nothing more on your own, that is the framework on which the rest of the growth is going to take place.

But let's assume that we are doing more. And at that point, on that base, you'll find again the senses activating but now with the finer skills, finer motor skills which allow you to draw for example in detail, which you could not do till the age of 6 where it was still crude. So it's as if the whole thing repeats itself after the age of 6, but now on a finer level.

This time though, there's a greater integration with the emotional content. Then around the age of 12, again there's a cycle of another six years where the same thing can happen, but with greater integration with the mental consciousness.

So you will see, let's say from the age of 12 onwards, the intellect, the intelligence kicks in as a strong urge. The child starts thinking and enjoys the play of thoughts. But at that time the senses are still active and with the senses he keenly observes in order to argue back.

You see. So there is an integration taking place with the mind to the physical senses. So all this is still happening. It is not yet completed.

After the age of 18, there's still a few more years where the individualisation gets as if hardened, till the age of 21 where the biology crosses a critical threshold. After which you have as if a fixed knot, somewhat rigid. If you do nothing, it tends to stay fixed.

But then nature also breaks it, soon after, by making you fall in love, or feel the need for social engagements, and you tend to break out, and you realise, there is more joy in helping others than in just taking care of yourself. All these things are happening. But with all that, you find in subsequent years, the senses are still potentially capable of growing more. Which we do not consciously do. It's only if in your workspace or from a personal interest, you find yourself compelled to listen more keenly, smell more keenly, taste, touch, or see, or develop special skills, then it grows.

So if you start, for example, learning to play an instrument, keyboard, sitar, guitar, violin, you have to pay attention to fine nuances, and at that point there is a huge training that's taking place and growth taking place which we could have actually done far more easily earlier. And we missed that chance. But you can still do it now. And you'll be surprised how much you're able to do.

(0:10:00):

I would just share one example which is barely two years ago, and at my age which is now whatever you may call it: I was sitting with Narad, and I still had not got the, the key to western music. I could enjoy pieces and all that, but I still did not get the thing, the thing about the whole orchestral unity and the key-role played by the conductor.

And I told him this. So he showed me certain pieces, and there were certain interviews, and then we watched the conductor doing. And watching them doing- that was the key. And I could suddenly click into the experience of how the conductor infuses himself into the orchestra, lifts the orchestra with him and guides it into this orchestral expression. I suddenly could see, feel, know that, in a way that it clicked. And after that when I listen to an orchestral piece, I am listening in a completely different way. I'm picking up nuances which earlier I would have heard but not felt, known, as it is now.

And, and it's just a beginning, it's a first entry, there's so much more that could still happen. I have to give it time, and I've not done that. But this is just to tell you that this is still a sensory development. But we should not think of sensory development purely in terms of biology. This is the big mistake that modern education makes, because of the very strong roots in, shall we say, the European origins of the current model or rather the European basis, the origins are still more ancient.

But that is hugely reductionist. So when you say, training of the senses, you only think of, ‘okay, your biology’. Like I said, there's an emotional integration, and there's a mental integration, and there are other finer, higher, deeper grades, which also can be integrated into these physical senses, that's when you will say, they are fully developed.

Now there's a group in India which does this very strange kind of training, where with little children they teach them to read people's minds. And you can go to them, and enunciate a thought in words in your head and the child tells you what you just enunciated.

So it's not quite thought-reading, and there are certain mechanisms they use which are not perhaps, little occult, and I'm not sure if they're safe for the children. But here is a hearing of a kind. Isn't it?

Or there is a training which is found in Indonesia which used to belong to the royal dynasty, and some 30, 40 years ago, the royalty decided, the king decided to share this with the public, till then it used to be a secret in the royal lineage, where they were taught to be completely blindfolded and wield the sword or the arrow or the gun, literally with physical eyes closed and covered to be able to see and sense as if you're looking with your physical sight, and at a distance you take your bow and arrow and at a distance aim at something and hit straight, or today as they do it, they shoot with a gun and hit straight with eyes closed blindfolded, or they go through a obstacle race with swords with sharp things, it's not a joke, and you're jumping around, dodging obstacles all the time, eyes blindfolded. And it's trained. The royalty trained people who then now train others and now you will see things about this on the video. It's quite fascinating.

But again it represents a power of sight which is literally physical, you have to look at physical objects, physical people, physical tools that you are using and yet at the same time you are tapping into a higher grade of perception which is infused into the physical. So this also is part of your sight training. Isn't it?

So coming back to the question, we never really do the full development of the senses. But there is a natural rhythm which I have already summarised. If we caught that rhythm and brought into it these dimensions early on, then as we grow into general adulthood, we would have our senses really fully developed and even integrated.

That's another aspect of sense development which is ignored, that perceiving one sense you should be able to slide into the other and across senses. So as you listen to the music, it should also emerge in visuals. Or as you see a beautiful image, you should be able to catch the tonal rhythms of it and either feel it or be able to articulate it. And this is not, it's not difficult, but it's one of the fulfillments of the sensory development. So I suppose I have answered the question. I hope that is satisfying also.

(0:15:18):

But it also brings to mind an email we got from Neminem, which I did not put in the, in the questions at this point, but it comes up naturally at this point. He gives a link to an interesting article in The Guardian, which is called the, which says, the brains of post-pandemic teens show signs of faster ageing, according to some study.

So he writes in his question or note uh: It looks like the brain of these teens has been modified by stress in such a way that there is a “thinning of the cortex”, quoting from the article, “thinning of the cortex and growth of the hippocampus and the amygdala”.

Then Neminem comments: A cortex should be linked to the mind while hippocampus and amygdala should be linked to the reptilian brain. That's the part which is at the back more to subconscious. And then he says: I read somewhere that the Mother once said that humanity that was not able to evolve would regress to an animal stage. Please find the exact words and elaborate because it looks like we have some kind of scientific evidence of her words.

Yes, I did not look up the exact words now because it would be too far from our discussion. But what this shows is during the period of lockdown, little children who were newborn had zero exposure to humanity and/or to nature. Most of them grew up locked up in little rooms of flats. Very few had any exposure outside.

The result was the natural sense perceptions and the curiosity drive by which it would have grown was stunted because there was nothing to be curious about. There was a monotony which made the senses shrivel, which reflects in the brain development in a shrivelling.

This study though is of teenagers who similarly locked up have also had a shrivelling of the brain from lack of exposure or they spend their time looking at television screens or mobile screens and so on which is not a rich sensory development. It's a passive state of some kind of a very superficial excitation of the emotions and ideas. That's about it. It's not sense development. So the result was the shrinking and shrivelling of these parts.

You can of course apply it generally to a humanity that refuses to progress will therefore similarly regress. That's the point. If you do not utilise, there is a regression. If you do utilise, then there is also progression; in other words, the same parts of the brain would grow in number of cells.

And so this gives us a key which takes us to the next question:

Alina (0:18:16):
Revati is addressing this question: “Would it be possible for a middle-aged person to grasp new skills as efficiently as a growing child can? I and my child are learning to play the guitar, my child excels while I struggle.”

Sraddhalu (0:18:37):
So Revati's question is of middle-aged person to grasp new skills. Can it be as efficiently as a growing child can?

Normally not, as her own experience shows. But, and here's the interesting, important, point: What's the difference between this growing child and us normal middle-aged in this case?

Growing child is growing, you are not growing. Isn't it? That's the only big difference. If you could grow as your growing child grows, then you could as efficiently learn.

Why are we not growing? Because we have stopped learning new things. By learning I mean not informational learning. You see, you can learn by heart every day something new, some factual information perhaps, some new verses or some song.

If there is no effort required to do that, and I don't mean merely memory effort, but you're learning a new song, there's a new nuance of the notes, which you never had before that you have to learn, if there's no effort of skill required or growth of skill required, then there is no growth of brain cells.

You learnt information, you read the newspaper, perhaps got a few more facts which are very superficial, zero brain growth.

(0:20:04)

But the moment you make an effort that requires you to push the boundary of a skill, of a capacity, first you have a resistance because your fixed brain unit is being pushed to its boundary, so you hit the boundary of resistance, you feel, aah I'm not able to. This is where most adults give up. And that's the mistake. You have to persist. When you persist, now the biology brain says, hey this requires more cells, this requires growth, and it starts the growth process. And this is the amazing part.

And this is the big mistake of science: So for all the textbooks you will see up to about 20 years ago, all the medical books you will see, they all say that after the age of, whatever,  21, the brain stops growing. At best it replaces dying cells, that's about it. But there's no growth of new cells, brain stays static.

Mother in the 1950s said, when you read Sri Aurobindo, your brain cells grow. It was completely contrary to medical science’s declaration at that point. This has changed. The textbooks haven't changed, they're still old. But this has changed about 15 years ago, I believe. There were some researches which showed: No, the brain does continue to grow irrespective of age even into late 80s or 90s. If it is challenged to grow in skill, when it is challenged to grow in skill, it starts growing new brain cells.

So depending on what you are learning, and it is, like I said, it is not persisting in an existing skill with new information, that's not considered new learning for the brain, it has to be a new dimension of skill that's something you could not do which now you're pushing to do. At that point, the brain produces new brain cells and it does not matter what the age.

Except it doesn't happen as spontaneously as a growing child where the growth is already happening even if you do nothing because the biology is growing. So that's the only difference now.

If in our biological growth, the body was programmed to grow only to that height, and it stopped growing, where with that your learning potential also would become difficult. If we were to become double our size or if we were to grow more slowly instead of completing your growth by 21, you complete your growth at 60, let's say, and that growing tendency was there, then you would have this relatively similar ease as the child.

So really the key is, the child has the benefit of the automatic biology growth which you do not have. But when you hit this boundary where you say, I'm not able to learn, instead of stopping, you say, ha, I need brain growth, mind growth, body growth, whatever it is, and you push the boundary. And the moment you push and persist, it starts a chain reaction which reflects in the biology as an actual growth of brain cells, muscle cells, tissue cells, skin cells, whatever it is.

So you can say, oh look I don't have any muscle, no strong muscle. You take weights and start pumping, the first three days you have pain. Once you cross the boundary of the pain, that's when the body starts, kickstarts the growth of the muscular cells, and a week down you say, oh I can feel the brain, the muscles have grown. Isn't it?

So first you have this boundary you hit, and it's exactly the same in mind power, sensory development. There's actually an experience where your mind can disengage sufficiently from the biology of the brain, that you can grow freely in pure mind. There you don't feel the resistance of the brain at all. But then when you try to integrate it with the body capacity and push the boundary of the body, you hit that. The boundary is only in the physical brain. And to the extent your mind is interwoven in the physical brain, you feel the resistance. The part which is free, you don't feel the resistance.

So you can train your mind to free itself and rejoin, but when you come back you will have a slight dulling effect, you will say, my body is not giving the support of my real capacity of mind. You will still have to push finally for the integration, and this is what we’ll, we will call a transformative, let’s say, direction.

In this case, it's not transforming fundamentally, it's only forcing growth. But if you come with a higher grade of consciousness, the same process of growth will be built on the basis of this higher consciousness, and that will be a transforming influence.

(0:25:03):

So you see why this question is so important. If you have stopped at a mundane growth of skills and capacities, good, you should do it anyway.

If you combine it with the yogic dimension and invoke a higher and deeper influence, then in the process of learning and growing you are actually pushing the transforming activity in your physical consciousness. Combine the spiritual with the physical aspect or basis for the learning and growth, and you have a transforming impact.

One of the implications of a transformation,  you need not do it only by learning, you could do it purely by a spiritual action on these tissues. But one of the implications of a transformative action would be that the learning potential would amplify and grow rapidly.

So for example, if you receive in your mind a deeper, wider consciousness, automatically the faculties of the brain itself to handle knowledge are as if lifted up and widened. With it there may be growth of neurons, I don't know, it should be an experiment to do, but certainly the capacity of the existing neurons will be amplified, whether there is a number growth or not.

You see in the way the mind works in relation to the brain, the number of neurons is not key. You will see in human beings there are people who have slightly smaller heads, slightly larger heads. It doesn't reflect on the intelligence. The whale has a much bigger brain than the human, it doesn't reflect on the intelligence. Because the human brain evolutionarily has come to a sufficient level of development that the key is not number of cells.

The only thing we see biologically is, increased number of connections between cells. So what happens when you start learning, the number of cells may be same, but they put out more tendrils, neuronal connections, that go in linkage with other neurons. And this is happening all the time. And if you don't use those neuronal connections, they tend to shrivel out or retract or weaken, stop being activated.

The more they are activated, the more they grow and the more they remain young. The less they are used, the more they tend to shrivel and age, and to the extent your mind is embedded in the brain, we will say, your mind is becoming old. That's when you have the true ageing. You see, when the mind becomes young or stays young, it carries the body biology with it and keeps it young.

And we've seen this in people. You see this all the time. I don't want to take names, but we have some very good examples of this in the Ashram. You see them, they are 80, 90 and you would say they are 40, 50. Except for the grey hair and perhaps a little bit of the skin texture. But in spirit, in consciousness, in their interactions, other than the fact that the body moves more slowly, they are so young.

The Mother herself as you know used to play tennis with young people till the age of 80 and she had to stop because she didn't have time.

But the consciousness youth actually reflects in the biology youth. And how do you get consciousness youth? By continuing to grow. And that was the Mother's observation. You start ageing when you stop growing.

So I have taken this question of Revati and broadened the scope quite a bit. So coming back to the question: “Would it be possible for a middle-aged person to grasp new skills as efficiently as a growing child can?”

And my answer is: Normally not. But if you take up the Yoga, then you can approach very close to that capacity of the growing child.

How much? Well, depends on what you do with the Yoga, and the degree of the youth-influence that comes from the consciousness infusing, and the push that you make on the barrier. And at first you will struggle with the barriers that you push like the muscle pain when you lift weights, ha it hurts. But after a point, suddenly the body gets it, okay you're going to keep doing this every day, now there's no pain, and you can continue every day to learn, to push, to grow. And no pain.

Observe this, work on it, depending on what you feel. I will touch another angle then: If you don't feel yourself young enough, if you don't feel that you have the drive to want to learn, to grow and to push this boundary, it's because your surface personality is too covered up in relation to your true personality which is the psychic being, your true soul.

(0:30:08):

Because in the psychic influence, you are eternally young, you know yourself eternal, you know yourself a child of the Divine Mother, and you have all eternity and all infinity before you as your playground of learning and of discovery. Isn't it?

So, the more you align to the psychic influence, the more you feel yourself young, and naturally, those two impulses: curiosity of the child, because that comes from the psychic, that awakens and the other, which is the hero-worship, takes a different form in adult life, where you say, oh someone does that, I should be able to do that, I also would like to learn this, I can also do this; and that growth happens.

So again, coming back to the answer: Normally not. Depending on the Yoga and the degree of your immersion and your pursuit, you can approach very close. And the more you align to the psychic presence, the more these qualities of spontaneous and rapid and easy growth will tend to infuse in your personality. And the more the psychic influence infuses all the way to the physical grade of your personality, that is the body tissue itself, you will find this plasticity of the child infused with it. And this we saw in the Mother. She actually had that.

And Narad narrates how for a certain period, she was interested to hear what were the new forms of music that were coming up. And Narad had sent I think about 50 LP tapes including the Beatles and various pop music styles. And remember, this is in the late 60s when Mother had very little time. And she said to him that, I will listen to one every day, one hour each. And she listened to all that. It's interesting.

Why would she do that? She was looking for what were the trends, what needed nudge, and of course working on a higher level when she found something, she would push. When she found something lacking, she would put a push in the universal consciousness to bring that forward or to guide things. But she enjoyed it just as well. Isn't it?

In the playground, this was narrated to us by Vasanthi-ji, in the playground, once the children, young children, were, wanted to sing, and then Mother said, okay, I'll teach you a song. And then she sang with them. She sang a song, French song, it, which goes in French, it is: Au près de ma mère qu'il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon, au près de ma mère qu'il fait bon dormir.

 

Auprès de ma mère,

Qu’il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon

Auprès de ma mère,

Qu’il fait bon dormir.

 

This is a song which is normally sung by the men who are going to war, saying, no it's not “mère”, “blonde”:

Auprès de ma blonde

Qu’il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon

That is: Close to my beloved how wonderful it is and it's so nice to sleep. She sang this song and taught the children this song, playing with them. And it's such an unusual song, why did she pick that? It's interesting.

But this to say that this kind of curiosity as well as ability to play as well as learn irrespective of age is innate to the psychic being. And it's only when our personality is layered to cover it, that we lose. When we layer to reveal rather than conceal, then it fills us, and that is the prime driver of all learning within us.

So I hope I have responded to Revati in a way that will inspire her to make that effort and breakthrough. And perhaps in a few months I hope to receive an email from Revati saying, yes I am able to do the same as my child.

It's doable. Trust that. Do it.

We go to the next question.

Alina (0:34:26):
Ritu is writing, “How to accelerate, facilitate evolution in the context of learning in present time when the vessel has no time to evolve taking many births without neglecting the benefits of horizontal development?”

Sraddhalu (0:34:46):
Mmhm. So the question really is about how to have the many lives worth of learning and growth in this single lifetime. Isn't it?

‘Conscious’-’accelerated’-’evolution’, which is yoga, and especially the Integral Yoga. So your answer, the answer for Ritu is, put into practice the Integral Yoga.

Okay, the answer is too broad. You want more specifics. But that's what it will come back to finally. And I will just touch upon the rationale of it.

(0:35:23):

Recall what we discussed last time particularly, and of course the two times before, especially the discussion on being able to put yourself into this receptivity, which is utterly conscious, and utterly still, in which not only you can receive knowledge, you can receive intuitions, you can receive the Shakti-Path, but also which removes the distortions that prevent you from expressing or from knowing. Okay?

This in the Integral Yoga becomes the first basis of purification combined with the equality. Into this now, you infuse the Shakti, amplify the energies, especially the divine energy, and Shakti-Path would be what we discussed last time, you infuse and amplify all the capacities of your nature, increasingly taking on the character of a divine nature.

That's the third limb of the Integral Yoga. Isn't it? There you have it. You take these three steps and that's enough to accelerate, facilitate evolution, everything required and equivalent to compression of many births into a single lifetime.

But now the key-factor to her question is: “without neglecting the benefits of horizontal development”.

A lot depends on what you will prioritise. You do not need to neglect the horizontal development. You can in fact have a very rich horizontal development while still having this accelerated pace.

It's possible, especially when the energy within you, the śakti-catusṭaya, the, the limb of energy of Shakti within the Integral Yoga, especially when that is amplified, you have enough energy to do, and also the capacities are amplified.

The reason why we end up compromising one for the other is because we say, we don't have enough time. Actually, it's not a time problem, it's a capacity problem. If you had 48 hours within the day, you would still be exhausted after 12 hours. Isn't it?

So it's a capacity of energy that is lacking. When that energy is amplified within you and with it the faculties are amplified, the thing that you would take one hour to learn can be condensed to 20 minutes. And then you have, well, three times as much time. Isn't it? So effectively you have expanded your day from 24 hours to 72 hours.

All you need to do is amplify the faculties and the capacities through the infusion of the Shakti, and all this can take place.

The same person now with a depleted energy, halved,  after half an hour of work I need to rest and then again I work half an hour and I need to rest. Effectively it takes two hours to do the same one-hour's work. So you see the key is not time. You have enough time. The key is amplification of your capacity, which is the third limb of the Integral Yoga, basing themselves on the first two limbs.

So observe how the third rests on the first two. If you have worked on those, the third becomes much easier. But if you work on all three simultaneously, you will still make an accelerated progress.

We go to the next question.

Alina (0:39:16):
Maya is writing, “Is it through Shakti-Path that Sri Aurobindo influenced the poetry composition of his devotees in the Ashram?”

So we discussed last time the Shakti-Path and especially I give the example of Sri Aurobindo pouring-in the Yoga force into the vessels, and naturally you saw all these capacities bloom without their effort. It was actually the energy that Sri Aurobindo put.

So the question is: Is it through Shakti-Path that he influenced the poetry compositions? I would say, through the pouring of the energy influenced everything. Poetry composition was, perhaps, one of the side effects of, the result of that pouring.

You will find in letters of Nirodbaran, where he has written a poetry that flowed through. He can make out that this is pretty good poetry, but he writes to Sri Aurobindo saying: Guru, I don't understand this poem, please explain to me. He has just written it, because it came through. Of course he has understood it on some level, but some part of his mind is actually stunned by what has come through and is not able to adapt, there is a resistance in the, well, physical level, the brain, and so on.

(0:40:40):

So Sri Aurobindo did not specifically target that, though he could also, and probably did for a few people, but generally the idea was pouring-in the energy and allowing all of the capacities to amplify, which is what the third limb of the Integral Yoga does, to amplify all the capacities, and particularly the four aspects of the Divine Mother, which have to all four bloom and develop.

In later years, even in the early years, the Mother used to have the Darshan from the balcony early in the morning at 6 o'clock, I have mentioned this recently, so I won't repeat too much, in which she would pour that energy, and you would be more than full to do everything required in the whole day and still have more to spend.

The result of course was that you could do so much more. Isn't it? The same one person could do the work of ten people. But the intention was to do that work from a different consciousness. So she was pouring-in a, not a vital energy to push you to work, but a spiritual energy to bring in this deeper dimension into all those parts which were engaged in the work and to integrate that consciousness. This principle is still valid for all of us.

What can happen though, and this is more specific to Maya's question, if you already have an aptitude for poetry, then as the Shakti pours, these are the grooves, the channels in which it flows most easily at first. And so those things get amplified immediately.

Other things where the Shakti has to hew its way, cut a passage, may take a little longer. If you have an aptitude, if you're already paying attention and you make a conscious tuning, very rapidly this amplifies. You are now directing the Shakti to amplify that part.

But for somebody who may not have an aptitude, this is the interesting part, you can still direct the Shakti in that activity. So let's say, I offer this as an exercise for you, all of you: Write a poem and set a time every day, preferably at a fixed time when your mind is most free and somewhat fresh at least, where you will sit down and deliberately consciously write a poem. With the effort to tune in, and you will follow all the indications we have spoken of, make yourself quiet, open, receptive, etc., and allow the intuition to flow, but right anyway with your effort where required.

Very quickly you will feel the flow begin and lift your effort. It will still act through your work. You still have to do the work. As you do it, it will be lifted, and a different quality will begin to flow, and it will follow the natural sequence where actually you will be able to so to say plug in and receive and the words will form and you will be transcribing literally. But whether it reaches that full point or not, or occasionally it touches that, you would always be conscious of what you want to write and the experience as it is unfolding.

From zero, with no capacity, to this, if you do every day with this conscious intention, you can touch at least or glimpse this experience within a few weeks. So I offer this as a suggestion, encouragement, if you like a challenge even, do it and prove to yourself that actually you are capable of this.

And you'll be surprised, once you have done this, that in principle now you should be able to apply this in every skill development, in every capacity development. All that's required is, you tune in to that and the Shakti and allow this process to take place.

It is actually as easy as that. And until you do it, you will not know how easy it is. So please do, and it is worth it. So I think with this we have covered the questions from last time's chat box.

(0:45:02):

In today's chat box, Michael is asking: “Is your education what you bring home from school?”

Depends on you. Unfortunately, in so many children, and I put the blame on the parents, in so many children, what they do in school is all that they understand by education, because that's all the parents have drilled in, and the teachers also then, teachers are also parents, have said: this is education, all the rest is, you are having too much fun, you are wasting your time, you are not doing anything useful.

Look at a child in a village, especially in a farming community, where every day all around everybody is working with very complex operations, some of which are seasonal. Child is watching all this and learning. And to the extent the child begins to participate, there is a very rich growth taking place. Such a person often can reach the same grade of development as someone who spent a very boring school-kind of education and actually has very little to offer for it.

And often the farm child will have grown much more, will be more skilled, more practical, better integrated in all the capacities than this school education which was restricted and narrow.

So, is your education what you bring home from school? Well, it depends on you. If that's all you focused on, then you're stuck with that. If you made the choice that that's only one tiny part of it, and you consciously enrich yourself with access to everything else, then school is almost trivial and unimportant.

I had this benefit at a time when the Internet did not exist. You had to go to the library and borrow books. And I would read, and I said, the homework was silly, meaningless, too easy, there was no learning content. I skipped what I thought was, in my words, ‘boring’. I did what was interesting, I pursued, but I really read everything.

There was a time when I was reading everything, novels and technical books, and my mother once came and caught me reading a book called Lady Luck and she says: Why you are wasting your time with your novels? I said, please read this book. She opens it, and it’s all about mathematics of chance. It was for me fun.

Had I never been exposed to it and gone through the school-route and one day someone gives me the book and I open it, I'll say: Oh my God, this is very advanced maths, too difficult for me. And it doesn't feel interesting, boring, put it away.

But if you followed your pursuit and little bits, steps, in each direction, as it fills out, it naturally grows like a ball, unlike school which is a very narrow track, this is a multi-dimensional track, it's not a track, it's a multi-dimensional whole.

And so at some point you find: I want to know more about this. And you find the book. Today you have the benefit of so much training knowledge in online programmes which teach you everything from the simplest to the most complex, the most advanced, in any field practically.

All that is required is for you to reach out and read, study, watch, experiment, and play with. So what is missing? Initiative, interest. Which if you followed the school track has been completely crushed. And now you don't feel the initiative, you don't have the interest. But if you align yourself a little bit with the psychic presence, all of it comes back, because it's all there. That's you truly, innately. Isn't it?

Sri Aurobindo makes this comment in his writings on education where he says, we make our textbooks supremely boring and then complain that children are not interested.

But we have been taught that learning is boring, school is boring, and so, we look for other things, and the media through cinema and such shows only these examples: children getting bored in school and then having fun doing whatever it is they want to push on you, drugs or alcohol or whatever it is. That's about it.

Where in the media do you get examples of children learning on their own and developing skills, discovering new things, exploring their universe? You are not given examples at all. And this is the unfortunate character of the mind-numbing programming today.

So now we transition from this into the theme itself, developing our power, capacity for learning and for expression.

(0:50:04):

And we have already, I think, entered sufficiently into this. I will touch upon a few parts right now.

Recall we have already discussed over the last three sessions, the capacity to receive. And one of the things which I highlighted is the state of receptivity, where you are intensely conscious, yet entirely still.

Into that we discussed the importance of identifying with, well, the source, the knowledge, the experience, sometimes the teacher, the guru. And at that time I said, modern psychology is picking up these ideas, and there's a term and I couldn't recall the term. It is called, in a whole field called, neuro-linguistic programming, NLP. They call it ‘modelling’. You are modelling somebody else. You are using them as a model and replicating in your consciousness. It's really a, essentially an identification and an absorption, which is innate to all children.

Remember, it's the second key that nature imprints in us, curiosity and then the hero-worship, that's this identification, into that now when you open to receive a higher grade of knowledge, consciousness, power, love, the Shakti-Path, the descent.

So I relate it to Maya's question again, through Shakti-Path Sri Aurobindo influenced, what he did was he created a space which was the Ashram community in which there was this 24-hour Shakti-Path, intense. So intense that for most people it was too much and many developed what Mother refers to almost like a thick skin, especially those who were close to her physically. She said that often they can't bear, so they have to develop kind of a, there was certain hardening just to be able to bear the pressure of evolution, of growth, of change, because she is pushing so hard, growing so rapidly, you can't be near her and not be pushed to grow.

But that was imprinted in the community, that was the kind of intensity built up, which is the reason why they did not allow children in the early years and they did not allow people who were not ready for this. People had to come only after sending their photograph, they would be approved and then only they came and they would be bathed in this intensity and then go back.

Get the inspiration, go back and build on it. But this kind of build up of the atmosphere which was there, of course it was diluted later on. I have given this example before, when Golcond was being built and Mother wanted to build this as a model architectural construction which should be the best in the world. She had the best architect, the best engineers and the best materials including building new technologies to make this. She was infusing in that grade of human development something new.

And then they said, we will build in six months, but we will need 500 workers. Sri Aurobindo said, no, it will dilute the atmosphere too much, it will harm the work. So he gave an upper limit of 50 workers. The result was the Golcond construction took, I think, at that time, six years or more. But that was the necessity to protect the intensity that was built up.

We know so many cases, just at the moment of entering the main building of the Ashram, they would feel as if filled with this and all their problems gone.

That intensity of course, you still have it around the Samadhi and at specific times, but it's constantly diluted by a stream of tourists, which should never have been allowed. But you know, as when the administration itself is not aligned to the spiritual objectives, all these mixtures come in and it's getting worse. They have now stopped the darshan messages, which Mother said was a physical way of sending out her Force to people. And whatever their justification may be, they have stopped that now because of the whim of somebody in the administration.

All these dilutions will happen. But from the point of view of Sri Aurobindo's action, the downpour wherever he chooses, wherever the Mother is called and invoked, the downpour can build up. And if you are able to contain and build and provide for it a stable container, it can continue with the same intensity wherever you are. Isn't it?

The problem is our incapacity to contain, to hold, especially an intensity for a sustained period. So begin with short periods of concentration, build your capacity, let it grow, at least build a soft, gentle presence and downpour in your space of work, home or a specific room which will be like a prayer space or prayer room in your home, whatever form it takes.

But we have to make that effort. Our effort is to create the space of receptivity into which we invoke and she pours in. And those of you who have been to the Matrimandir, you know that the Mother said, at that time, build the Matrimandir and I take it upon myself to make it one of the greatest, one of the most powerful spiritual centres in the world.

(0:55:42):

Now you know the actual completion of the Matrimandir took place almost more than 30 years after she left her body. But what you observe if you have been there is almost year to year there is a continuing build up of the presence, power and intensity.

She is doing her part. She doesn't have to be in the body for that. It's for you to provide the vehicle.

So for me the lesson is this: Each one of us has to do that in our lives. What grade? What pace? What space? Choose. Find your way. But the principle is valid, build that. So this was a very important part of our power of receptivity.

From there comes this aspect of retaining. You retain what you have received, contain, hold, integrate. And the best way to retain is when you become that which you have received rather than merely receiving like a superficial coating.

So you allow your entire consciousness to become, to change, in shape, as if, in state. In growth of consciousness you become the knowledge, the truth, the experience and hold as experience what is received. You never lose. Once held as experience, it is never lost. You may forget superficially, but leaning back into the experience, you can draw out everything, including tiny nuances.

All this we have discussed. I am only summarising, because now I want to link it to this aspect of articulation. We discussed last time in some detail the general sense of the power of expression and especially in the angle of speech, using particularly the question that was asked by Vachaspati as a starting point, but that set the broad base.

I want to touch now on a specific angle which has to do with the aspect of articulation in speech, in writing and generally in the expressive power of thought and of consciousness.

So coming to, as I said, we will cover everything from school through adult life through to the spiritual principles and foundations.

So looking at a language as the basis through which we articulate either in speech or in writing, we realise that we need to have reasonably good skills in a language in order to be able to express. Otherwise you find this: ‘I mean, mmm, uh, what's the word? I don't get it’.

When you speak in a second or third language that you have, you'll have this all the time. You know exactly what you want to say. In your own maternal language you will just flow, but here in the second or third language, you're translating, jumping, looking for words, looking for similar grammar structures. It doesn't work. You need to have a flow in that language. Isn't it? How do you do that?

Language is a convention. It's arbitrarily set. There's no clear logic about it. Sanskrit is the only language which has a logic. But still you don't learn it by logic. But all languages derived from the original language of the gods, well, they are not logical. They are full of exceptions and exceptions to exceptions and variations to those exceptions. How do you get fluid flow?

When you are speaking, let us say right now as we speak or write, do you ever pause to think: How should I put in grammar structure this idea? You don’t pause, you flow simply. You have an idea, and the words form, and they fit into the structure of grammar.

How did that happen? If you stop and think ‘Is this grammatically correct?’, you will pause every half sentence to verify your grammar rules. That is not the way to speak or write nor the way to learn any language. But it is the biggest mistake: You go to any school, any training program, the first thing they put you is through grammar.

That's the worst way to learn a language. As an example, all of us as children learnt our mother tongue without ever knowing the grammar rules. And then you came to school, and they made you learn some grammar rules which you didn't need to anyway, because you already spoke correctly the grammar. Right?

(1:00:21):

Nor even did anybody teach you vocabulary? Did somebody ever have to tell you, this is we call a ‘cow’, that we call a ‘tree’, that we call ‘sky’, that colour is ‘blue’? Nobody told you that. You just knew it by watching, living life in that language.

So people converse as they speak of this blue sky, you know what it means and nobody needed to tell you. Right?

There are more complex concepts and words. For example, I just used the word ‘concept’. You know what that means. What is an idea? You know what it is. Now please tell me what is a dictionary definition of ‘concept’ or ‘idea’. Okay, without bothering with the dictionary, tell me in your own words what do you mean when you use the word ‘concept’ or the word ‘idea’? And what is the difference between the two?

Most of us will have a huge problem. Isn't it? You know exactly what it means, but now if you have to translate it into words and then explain the difference between these two words, you have a huge problem. But try it anyway, do it as an exercise. It's fascinating to see how the mind works and how language works.

You will use these words accurately with the correct sense in the right place without being able to define the words with precision. How does that work? And this all the more in your mother tongue.

And we do exact opposite when you start learning a new language, don't bother with grammar, start living the language. Like I said, language is a convention you have to learn by absorbing like a sponge experiences. So of course the best place would be you go to the place where the language is spoken and lived and live with them, and you'll pick up the language like a child learns very quickly as he grows. That's the best way.

Well, you can't do that always. So the second best way is, you watch movies, read books. But I don't know enough the language to read. Okay, so you start with just conversational component by watching movies and getting into conversation with somebody. At first by imitation the way a child does.

So I'm going to actually push it way back so that you get the way it works. We have to really understand the basic principles. The child never learned to speak entire sentences first, with a few exceptions. They all learned to make sounds first. Right?

So a child does ‘ga-ga’, ‘boo-boo’.

What do the parents do?

They go ‘ga-ga’, ‘boo-boo’.

Notice, very interesting the instinct. We are going to come on this with another question that will come later after a few sessions about training a child.

But you notice, instinctively the parent creates an echo of the child’s sounds.

The child says, now the child is speaking a little bit, and he will say, Thath is hosse! Thath is hosse! The Mother understands and she will repeat and say: Yes-yes, Thath is hosse! That is horse! He can't say ‘ra’ yet, so. She's giving him a feedback of sound of which sound he is making.

He gets the feedback and recognises that's not how the adults speak, and automatically his brain-mind-biology systems are tuning-in to approach his sound closer to the adult. But he doesn't know how he sounds like until the feedback comes to the parents. That's why that parent-child interactivity is so critical.

Exactly the same process happens in more complex learning when you interact in society, with people, with friends, with adults, and so on, with objects, with computers, with your tablet, screen, the interaction is giving you feedback which allows you to tune-in and calibrate your responses to finetune until it matches exactly.

And this is happening constantly. That's our essential learning process: through feedback loops. And the same happens in language. So, what you're going to do is you're going to start speaking the language. Assuming you're a little baby, your parents would give you a feedback of how you're pronouncing correctly or wrongly, and you will be refining it.

Okay, we can't do that as adults, but we will find some equivalent vehicle for that, which in the classroom teacher says, oh that is wrong pronunciation.

No, there's no wrong. You're only in a learning mode. Great, you've got the first step, now finetune-finetune-finetune until you've calibrated it.

(1:05:27):

So I found, for example, as long as I chose to speak in French with my Indian accent of a ‘rra’, you see the French don’t say ‘rra’, they say [‘hra’].

And for the purest of the Sanskrit sounds you want to stay with pure sounds. The ‘hra’ sounds not pure. To them your ‘rra’ sounds harsh, rude.

And so at some point when I found I had to speak there, and I had to make it easy for them to understand me otherwise their brain has to struggle with my accent, so I said, okay I will tune-in. So I constantly worked on my tongue, I consciously worked on my tongue to make the speech ‘preshka’.

And the distinction between ‘woohn’ and ‘oohn’ is a subtle distinction, to the Indian-ear the ‘woohn’, ‘oohn’ is similar sounding. To the French-ear the [‘a’, ‘aa’] (1:06:20) are similar sounding.

So when you say [‘a’, ‘aa’], they hear the same sound just as [‘woohn’] and [‘oohn’], we hear the same sound.

But these are distinctions I'm conscious of. And now I have to consciously shape my mould of language-consciousness into the French mould. So I made that effort consciously, tuned in. Of course, it made it easy at that time I was in France, so I could tune in more easily. But then I worked on it a little bit, and that's when I clicked into the flow of the language most easily. Because I found, it's not, it’s not that you make the sounds. There's a poise of the mouth, tongue, jaw structure, where all the sounds become easy. If I bring them to the poise which is, well, the Sanskrit poise of the mouth, trunk structure, then all those sounds are difficult.

I shift the shape, and all those sounds are easy, these sounds are difficult. So in a sense, there is as if a position brought in essentially of consciousness, but then which has a biological-physiological basis and a mind basis, you shape into that box or that mode, and now all the sounds and even the thought structures and grammar structures flow more easily.

That's what's happening in a newborn child. They grow into the mould effortlessly and everything just happens. So in some sense you're going to do that. To what degree, I leave it to you, but I'm showing you the principle.

So language being a convention, you slip into the convention and identify with the flow of the language itself and then the rhythms, vocabularies, grammar, all these form naturally. Now there are two modes. First is through listening. So there are a few, I said a few rare children who have actually started with full sentences.

I, right now I just cannot recall, but I know of at least two or three such examples, famous examples.

Ganapati Muni I believe was one of those who was the teacher of Kapali Sastriar and who was the sage who named Ramana Maharshi as “Ramana Maharshi”. He was an extraordinary being, very powerful, a man of great tapas, and he is the one of whom Mother said, when he walks in the hostile forces run away.

So for a, as a child I think up to the age of four or five, he did not speak. And he just listened and watched. And everyone thought, he was damaged mentally or retarded in some way. And then at some point, this used to be the tradition, so I just share it, it sounds harsh, but they took him to a, some teacher or priest who took iron, heated it in a certain shape with sacred symbols and branded him on the shoulder. The shock of that broke his boundary and he began to speak: complete sentences, fully grammar structured, normal, adult.

Now the rationale of that, there is a rationale, his consciousness, whatever it was in a passive, learning, absorbing state, it needed to be re-engaged with the physical consciousness, and so a physical sensory shock was the means. But from that point he just spoke normal full sentences.

So there have been a few such examples of people in history which are known. But my point is initially we are in this mode of reception and then some interaction.

(1:10:01):

But now you want to amplify, you want to accelerate, you can't be having a talking speed interaction, that's too slow. That's when you switch to reading. Now you can read typically many times faster than someone can speak. And then if you work upon it, you can easily go 20 times faster than speech, and so, what would through conversation would take an hour, you can reduce it to three minutes.

That's a huge acceleration. You read rapidly, you're getting several things:

First, the language, grammar structure, vocabulary, all these are weaving-in subconsciously, subliminally, automatically, and at the same time, your mind-potential for ideas are growing. So, you have the skill of the language, and the flow of the language, the vocabulary building, the breadth of ideas and depth of ideas which you could not do or maybe you would do over 40 years that's being compressed in a few years which is the advantage of reading books of other people who have already thought things for you and they set a base straight away, not only in breadth but also in depth and life-experiences.

I've shared here how watching certain movies, literally the essence of an entire life’s of a heroic action can be absorbed in a few minutes, and that was the essence that the soul took from that life, and you just got that if you received it the right way. And so you can have a very rapid accelerated learning, but with high quality content.

Into this, I will combine some of the modern tools of cinema, videos, which can give you a dimension which you could not get otherwise. It is literally somebody in front of you showing you certain things.

So I can show you very complex, let's say we are going to discuss advanced electronics and antenna theory. There is no way you can see how an electric field moves on an antenna, how it literally ripples and waves and resonates. You can't see it with physical eyes, you can't sense it, but you can animate it visually, and through the animation what you get as a sense of it, it's literally translating that which is beyond the domain of physical sight into the domain of sight. And you see the resonances. And the insight you get from that one video is more than anyone could have given you. It is literally identifying with the electric and magnetic fields. And there is no way you could do that without this kind of animations.

And so there are very powerful tools today. Unfortunately, bulk of it is wasted. I look at so much material on, let's say, YouTube or other videos and podcasts. The fellow starts with a long- winded ‘so, friends, how are you, good morning’, and then he starts talking. He's not got to his topic for the first 10 minutes, because he has to maintain his podcast of whatever 40 minutes and he has nothing to say. And you're sitting and waiting passively. If your 10 minutes have been passive and then if he gets into something interesting, you're already too passive.

When I, this some people found it difficult, when I would speak in certain, let's say, spaces, I would start with the topic and just dive straight in and really push the boundary of the mind of the students. It's hard.

But if you have gripped them right at the beginning, they are forced to think and to keep up, and their boundaries are pushed and expanded by the time you're finished. And maybe in a few seconds, they have, in a few sessions, they have grown.

But my point in saying this is, don't think watching a video is going to give it to you. The content, the nature of what you watch, is very important. What I have to do very often when I look at some of the videos on YouTube, fortunately, on YouTube you can speed up the video and the voice. so, typically I find, for most discussions or lectures, I have to put the speed at 1.5, that is 50% faster.

Then that's when I, the pace of content is coming closer to what I need just to find it worthwhile. Otherwise, it’s, I have to sit for an hour for something which has actual content of 5 or 10 minutes. It is a huge waste. So use these tools, these are very powerful tools which, well, nature has gifted to us to allow for an accelerated learning. Expose yourself.

So if you're learning a language now, you would watch perhaps a movie which engages you and at the same time as you're building vocabulary, giving you experiences, you are also absorbing the linguistic content and the cultural content, so there you might want to watch at a pace, but then choose a movie where there is a richer content for what you want of the language.

You cannot be having long scenes of beautiful visuals if you want to develop the language part. So there you would probably watch a theatre piece, where you cannot have visuals, you have to have conversations to hold attention.

(1:15:14):

So my point is, choose carefully for the objective that you want to develop and then you can accelerate enormously.

Once that basic structure of language and grammar has come, you read books and there absorb far more as I said 20 times faster than someone can speak.

Sri Aurobindo was reading at one time when he was for example in Baroda, a crateful of books per week. Now typically that was two to three books a day, all kinds, which gave him a huge, very rich base, and he was looking for books which were obviously worthwhile and insightful.

And this is the reason why later on he could directly comment upon various authors and poets, even musicians, and make comments about them, so-and-so has this style, this is what he lacks, that is what he does. Unless you've really read all that they wrote, you cannot make that kind of an insight, insightful comment with authority.  You see. And all the sweep of history!

If you see his descriptions in “The Human Cycle” and “The Ideal of Human Unity”, especially because he takes a lot of the examples of European, he draws upon incidents which are barely known today. He will refer to some person even in Savitri sometimes, there is a reference to one, one word. You actually have to go and look up the historical event associated with that to understand the full import of it. And that's the kind of a rich, wide, base that he exposed himself to within a span of maybe 10, 12 years, and that was it.

Subsequently he was too busy with his political work. After he came to Pondicherry, there was not too much that he was reading other than what was, he was doing later on with the Vedas and Upanishads, and so on.

But you can develop this if you follow this natural sequence, and into that last part of reading, you can bring-in speed reading which I have mentioned before.

Simply at first speed up, do not stop with the pace of enunciating words, speed up the reading and learn to capture pure ideas without focusing too much on the vocabulary component, that is when you grasp very rapidly, then of course your focus is not on language but on ideas.

But now you find your midpoint, closer to language or closer to ideas and depending on your priority at that time.

So all this is still about power of articulation. Build the base of language. You do not have to remember, you do not have to learn by heart. It is there somewhere. Now this is the interesting thing. I shared the example perhaps last time or time before in response to a question: Can this work with a foreign language?

And I mentioned there my experience when I finally clicked into that mode of the language, I found certain turns of phrase and certain grammar structures which I had never practised consciously, popped up spontaneously because I had read them and they had been absorbed subliminally. But in this state now they could flow through streaming because the material was transparent, and they pop out.

You might have read once and ten years later it can pop out, if your material is transparent. You see. That's where the purification is so important. So, for example, with Sri Aurobindo, when he makes a reference to some historical personality or event, it's not that he had read it 10 times to be able to remember. It is there, and that's it.

So, there's a point where whatever you have read is absorbed and held and forms the basis for your formative expression, the creative power, expressive power. The richer and deeper the base you have, the more you can draw upon. And when the intuition flows, it uses this material, brings it out from the subliminal where you have forgotten, it pops it out at that moment and you remember, ah yes I had forgotten this, and it flows through. It has access to your subliminal. It draws, organises and shapes what flows.

But you must have that base.

Otherwise what happens, this is also interesting, the intuition sometimes points to something, you know it exists, but you do not have validation in your consciousness. So you may say something like, surely there has been a situation like this. But if you had read it once, that pops up at that moment and you say, ah yes that happened then. That's it.

It's quite fascinating how this works.

(1:20:08):

So reading a lot of high quality content, watching high quality content. Don't waste time with it. It's not about entertainment. It's about nourishing. And then comes something which we already touched upon: trigger the growth of your brain cells, boundary capacity of your mind, push the boundary of that capacity.

And one of the best ways the Mother recommends is, read Sri Aurobindo. And at first you will say, ha I don't understand, too much, ho it gives me a headache, ho it's too much, it's too heavy, I have to stop. Fine. Stop at that point.

Remember the three-step process we spoke of earlier? Absorption, assimilation and re-expression.

Well, you have reached the limit of your absorptive capacity, pause there. Stay quiet. Allow it to assimilate. Dwell on what you have read. Try to understand. Think about the implications. Brood on it or simply remain dwelling in the mood of the experience or the insight. Just stay quietly, as still as possible in all the parts. Allow it to soak-in and shape your consciousness inside out.

Do this. In a few days, the signal has gone through, and the brain cells start growing, the boundaries of your capacity start expanding. A month down, you read the same text. Wow, I understand it, it’s is so clear, it's so simple, it's so profound, which earlier I struggled with. Sometimes it happens, people give up, after a month they come back, and now it works.  They shouldn't have given up. They should just have gone on. Complete the chapters. Take the first chapter of The Life Divine or any chapter that interests you. Complete the chapter even if you don't fully understand. Now come back. This time you'll find, ha it makes a lot of sense. Because meanwhile, and this is the Mother's explanation, meanwhile your brain cells have grown and now you can understand better.

You know I gave this example last time that you can do all the Shakti-Path you want, the monkey will not be able to speak. It’s partly true.

Actually, you can push the boundary, except in this case, the monkey does not have or you have no means to make the monkey push the boundary, but it can be done, it can be done, and we have already got to a point where through human interaction many of these animals have learnt to push the boundary.

I recently saw a very interesting video, you see they have little buttons with commands, you can record. So, a dog is given these buttons with words, and this dog, I think, it's called, there's a Instagram or Twitter feed that's called ‘What about Benny’,  the dog is called ‘Benny’ or ‘Bunny’, and what it does is, it presses these buttons to convey its, a sentence.

So the dog comes from being at the window and presses the button saying, ‘cat’-‘outside’-‘window’.

So the, well, dog's parent goes, keeper, human, goes and says, ha yes-yes there's a dog, and she talks to the dog and says, yes-yes very nice cat. After a while the dog has gone, comes back, and pushes button saying, ‘cat’-’gone’, equivalent, but some other words. So it's fitting its structures of his message in the vocabulary available, and I think it's reached some 40 or 50 words already.

But I saw a fascinating video where the dog's babies are receiving commands from the mother dog. So the mother dog is pushing the buttons and the baby do those tricks. And the master of the dog is telling the dog, now do this, the dog pushes those buttons and the babies follow.

Imagine the complexity already involved. Nowhere in animal-world this would have happened naturally. But through human contact, the element of human mind is being transmitted and infused. And I do believe a point may come when something, some kind of a breakthrough might just happen.

But unlike the dog and ape, the human being is sufficiently flexible now, it can do anything. So through Shakti-Path you can actually through this way push the boundaries and essentially develop any capacity to any limit or beyond any limit.

But do this. So start with this. I am looking at first steps now: Read Sri Aurobindo. Develop new physical skills, learning to play a musical instrument or some other activity.

And then there is a very interesting thing with the biology that you do cross-coordination exercises, like walking with marching, coordinating left and right sides of the body, juggling with balls where you have to coordinate left and right side with precision.

(1:25:09):

Some of which it happens when you play a musical instrument, if you are playing a sitar or guitar or violin, you have to coordinate left-right, playing keyboard, wherever there is cross-coordination, something fascinating happens in the biology, and this is medically observed.

Your right-hand growth of skill is the left part of the brain; left-hand growth of skill triggers the right part of the brain; and the cross-coordination triggers the centre which links the left and half, left and right halves. Through that the two communicate.

This is key.

I am going to come back to this discussion in a later question which will come after a few weeks perhaps about the distinction between men and women, boys and girls in the learning processes. But it is in this centre that we see the distinction.

But through this cross-coordination exercises, this centre rapidly develops, and it allows integration of what Sri Aurobindo has called right-hand faculties, left-hand faculties, the intuitive faculties, and the analytic faculties, the synthetic faculties and the analytic faculties, long before modern science developed right-brain and left-brain knowledge.

Before we discovered in science the right and left brain difference, Sri Aurobindo wrote about this as right-hand faculties, left-hand faculties, and their integration. And there is integration on a biological level happens through these cross-coordination activities or exercises. Do those especially in your learning.

Work on the cittaśuddhi, purification, and stilling of your consciousness of] on all levels consciously by stilling, purifying thoughts, purifying emotions, if possible purifying also nutrition to make it more sattvic, and suddenly you will find great clarity and amplification, smooth learning, and smooth expression now will begin to flow.

I have also mentioned last time the ‘Just a Minute’ exercise. I described what happened: As you speak, and you are required to speak continuously without repetition, without hesitation, and without pause. A part of the mind automatically separates and starts preparing for what next you will speak; as you speak the current thing, that part of the mind is preparing for what next you will speak, organising ideas; and now by the time you speak this, that part is looking at the next; and so on, you can flow smoothly.

Work on this, in the split between the mind's perceptive side and expressive side. So one side is seeing, another side is expressing, and the two are as if linked but split. This also relates to right and left brain, but we don't worry about that. We just look at the faculty.

Essentially, this is also or implies the split between the poise of the Purusha and the Prakriti in the mind: the part that stands back to see the knowledge that has to be expressed; and the part that flows to express the knowledge itself or the experience. And the two momentarily separating but are linked, and the seeing side and the expressive side now aligned, it flows.

Very simple exercises, but we understand the deeper rationale, apply it and you will see rapid, dramatic growth.

Some of these can be better done when you do with a partner, you have friends who share similar values, do that, otherwise do it on your own.

You can do it with a recorder sometimes to listen to what you speak and then correct for it. That's your feedback mechanism. You don't need the parent to be repeating.

But I'm just going into the psychology of this for the power of articulation. Very smoothly from this comes one more step:

As you perceive, and this part expresses, you notice the difference between the two begins to get more and more distinct. That is, the expressive part is active, the perceptive part is totally still. And the more still it becomes, the more it can perceive with clarity and wideness and depth. And then even it can turn up to become a reflector. And at that point you have something quite amazing. Instead of thinking what you're going to say, you are seeing and then expressing. And then from there, from the seeing, you open to the reception, which is intuitive, and then you feel the flow of experience that is revealed, which turns into now the words or the form.

(1:30:01):

I'll share with you an experience I had. This was about two years after my teacher or maybe one year after my teacher had left his body. So probably 1994-95. These were some of my very early talks. Till then I had given some general talks on science and a few science-spiritual mix talks. And I was called to some place in Pondicherry and they wanted me to speak on a theme which was more directly spiritual.

And I spoke, I had prepared my notes and I spoke, but I always speak extempore the notes as a reference for content.

Then in the Q&A, which is the most important part, somebody asked a question and it was very specific to a human experience: ‘When we feel like this’, I think, the question was, some suffocating feeling, ‘what is the reason for that?’.

And as the question is asked, because the mind is still, there is already a perception, but it draws on existing knowledge and intelligence, functions, so there is an activity. So, I was about to say ‘there are two reasons’. So, the words are forming, I am about to say ‘there are two’, and at that time I saw a third as if imprint rising. So there are these two ideas and a third was rising. I didn't know what it was. I just saw it was there.

And as I'm saying ‘there are’, before I could say ‘two’, I said ‘three reasons’. And at that point, I don't know what the third is, here. Okay, but I'm seeing it. But I don't stop. I'm in a state of complete stillness. I start articulating the first reason. And the first reason is this, the second is this, and by then the third is as if unpacked and reveals itself and I say, the third is like this.

And at the point where I am, it's unpacked and is revealed, I'm experiencing the truth of it, it’s as if I have lived that third experience, and I am articulating it as it’s happening. I said, wow, this is so cool, it's so beautiful. And this is the first time it happened in this way.

And subsequently, every time, I didn't have too many occasions. But whenever it happened, my teacher had given me one guideline, he said, in Pondicherry, whenever somebody invites you to speak, always say, yes, never refuse, I said, okay.

So, occasions were still rare, once or twice a year or something. But each time it had happened, this experience became like a reference for me, to get to that point or hold that poise where this can happen naturally.

And I remember, there was Nagin Doshi, he was a very interesting man, got a fascinating correspondence with Sri Aurobindo. So I think he had come for one of my talks. He was a very good friend. And one day he was telling me, you know when you speak you should do like this, like this, while speaking you should try to do this.

And I said to him, I am sorry, I can't do that because at that point my whole consciousness is on the next thing which I am going to speak. So the speech is happening here, but I am there on that thing. And he paused and he said, oh-yes, that's very good. He said something more, he said something like, oh, you're already there, it is okay. But he had obviously an experience like that. It was interesting to see.

I'm sharing this as an example of not only what is possible, but how smoothly the transition takes place, where rather than thinking out, you are seeing, and from seeing it becomes to actually experiences unfolding.

Now when I describe all this, you will feel the truth of it. You will say, yes, of course, it has to be like that. There is a part in you that recognises it, even that feels it familiar. In that part, you already have that capacity, except that part is somewhat subliminal, and the act of listening to this narration or this experience is activating and awakening as if a memory forgotten within you, ‘yes, of course it must be, it has to be like that’.

Allow that part to come forward, allow it to settle. It's already in you. It’s not something you are going to learn. It's just a faculty, a power, a part of your consciousness that is just emergent. Let it emerge.

And if you look at the sequence which I have described in the development of articulation and language, as you work on this, each will lead to the next naturally unfolding, until this will happen naturally unfolding smoothly.

If it is paralleled with the general movement of the Yoga, and the purification, and the equality as basis, the things happen far more rapidly. What would normally take somebody years of effort, you will get within weeks, just like that, smoothly.

And I am saying this with the conviction of personal experience that you do not need a special capacity. As you are today it can happen within weeks, but with this foundation which the Yoga, the Integral Yoga, lays out to you as the path for developing in the Yoga itself.

Trust this.

(1:35:30):

Sri Aurobindo has made what can be called ‘the easiest path of yoga, for the transformation’. So from a certain point of view, he says, it is the most difficult yoga because it aims at a transformation and a divinisation of nature, which is extremely difficult.

On the other hand, he says, considering the nature of the effort and the result got for the effort made, it is the easiest yoga. And this we have to really catch. And it's not a euphemism for something else.  It is truly the easiest way because of the way it is structured.

It builds on what is most natural and most true already within you and allows those things to unfold naturally by the means most direct, most smooth. Just a moment.

So, review this discussion. Choose the line, the form, which is most natural, most spontaneous for you. And start taking these small steps in the way that is for you the most joyous, the most fun, the most interesting, because that will be your reference. That means you have tuned-in to the part in you that is growing.

When it is enjoyable, it is fun, it is interesting, you're growing, something's happening, that's it. Don't worry about the rest.

Trust.

Ask for the help, open yourself to receive the help, and allow it to unfold, to lead you, to shape you and to lift you.

So I think today this is broadly, this will cover what is possible in the time. We will continue this discussion on the expressive aspect and how to make an effective communication of ideas, how to structure and organise your ideas, and then look at aspects of writing also, and distinctions between speaking and writing, etc.

We will see how it goes. So, we will take a moment to review, concentrate, re-center ourselves.

I wish you all a very enjoyable journey, of learning, of self-discovery, and of sharing and expressing joyously.

Namaste.

Alina (1:38:33):

Namaste. Thank you.