EWS #14: Battle of Dark and Light, the Educational System
Jan 03, 2019
Topics:
Narad (00:00:59):
Good evening and welcome to our continuing series, Evenings with Sraddhalu. We were talking about all the darkest and negative things. What are the positive possibilities and is it going to be up to the youth?
Sraddhalu (00:01:30):
If you look back at the last 50 years, every generation has said, 'you know, we failed, we couldn't do. Now it is up to you, the youth, you will make the difference'. I was told that when I was a kid, I've gone through one generation where we had the chance, we couldn't do much. We were trapped also in the system. I find myself telling that to the young people, 'you're the guys who will inherit and who will make a difference'. I don't see anything has changed. To say it's up to the youth, sounds nice, but I don't think they can do anything. They are [[soft]] than us. You had a childhood, which was normal. I had a reasonably normal childhood because we didn't have television yet at that point. But after TV came in, none of them has had a normal childhood. None of the children could run around and play in the open, in nature. None of them could relate to pet animals or relate to other children as children. They've spent their time sitting glued to TV for several hours a day. Well, it made them more informationally aware of events in the world, but it broke something of the normal human development of empathy.
And there's some major lack in that whole generation, which grew up not knowing what it's like to just be happy and carefree or to be introspective even. So I give an example just a few days ago. It's a parent who came with a child. The child is six years old and deeply unhappy. So I investigated a little bit and I asked the parent what you're doing? What's happening with the child? And I could see she's majorly sleep deprived. So I ask, how many hours does she sleep? Six and half hours. At the age of six, when you need minimum 10, typically 12 hours sleep for a biologically healthy child. And why? Oh, she's not obeying, she's not doing her studies and I have to sit and force her to do her studies till midnight. And what studies at the age of six are you doing that you have to force? Oh, she has to do so much homework and this and that. And I said, I asked the mother, and it is the mother doing this to the child out of love for her, because when she's old enough, she will have to perform in school and get good marks in exams to get into a good college in order to have a happy life. So she must now kill her happiness! Okay, so I ask her, what was your childhood like at this age? Oh, I was so free and so carefree and happy and we could do anything. I said, what of that are you giving to your daughter? Zero. And then I had to openly say, you're torturing your daughter. You're damaging her brain by forcing her to do this and depriving her of sleep. But you know she's always falling asleep in the middle of the day. I said, yes, that's a sign of sleep deprivation.
She sleeps in the afternoon for three hours. Again, sign of sleep deprivation. That means you didn't have proper sleep at night. So I said, now that you're in Pondicherry, just back off, let her free let her sleep by 10 30 at least or nine o'clock and give her a minimum of eight to 10 hours sleep and see when she wakes up. And literally that's what happened here while she was here. But still, I said, going back, what will you do? Well, you have all these compulsions of pressure. Now this is one sample selected at random from a loving parent's family. And imagine that's happening on a mass scale to all the children today. They are not going to grow up normally. They're going to grow up with psychological problems or deficiencies. So when we ask, will it be up to them? I'll say, no, rather, it's up to us who have been on the last stage of the normal childhood who still remember what it's like. And can we change something for our children now. If we cannot, we have created already a neurosis, which is bordering on psychosis. It's that bad. You remember the projection last 10 years to now, go down another 10 years.
Narad (00:05:43):
But just to put a little light into everything, What about the 'sun eyed children of a marvellous dawn'? Indigo children?
Sraddhalu (00:05:55):
There's a lot of confusion around that term. Indigo children, when you saw the original writings about it, somebody claimed there's a genetic change happening and you'll have 12 strands of DNA instead of two strands. And it's happening in children. Except nobody ever saw one. They all said it's happening to someone in China and someone all over the world, but nobody ever saw. Okay, so the indigo children was a big fake, but the idea behind it that there are children who are more conscious, more aware, more sensitive in some ways, yes,
Audience (00:06:26):
Speaking about them, that new children. Yes, yes.
Sraddhalu (00:06:29):
New children with greater sensitivity.
Audience (00:06:31):
Mother said that children born after the date, 4-5-1967, especially to their devotees, they were special.
Sraddhalu (00:06:38):
Absolutely. And the point is, what happened to those children who were born in nineteen sixty seven, sixty eight, after that age? Have you seen any one of them do anything exceptional? And if that was the generation that Mother said they're special, they have come for my work, she said. How many of them have stood up for her work or done anything of value that you can say yes, this is an example of the sun eyed children.
Narad (00:07:06):
I'll have to compliment my daughter.
Sraddhalu (00:07:08):
Okay, one exception, but my point, you get my point. She said a special batch of souls came for her work. And if we can pick one or two or three who have done something exceptional in their space, we are lucky. And if that was true of the time and she was responsible for bringing them in her physical presence, what does it mean for now? I'm sorry, I'm giving you more negative news, but lemme put it in a positive way. Every generation we find more and more of such conscious children, who are unusual in their sensitivity, in their inner awakening, but the moment they're put into the machinery of the educational system, they get ground up, they get disconnected from their spiritual source or their higher values, they get lost.
Narad (00:07:57):
And how does the educational system change?
Sraddhalu (00:08:04):
We've been at it for a long time trying to change the system. In the latest government, run by Modi, he started a whole programme to change the educational system. At the root of it was such a good intention, to remove that whole communist brainwash, to remove all these Western influences to bring back innate, traditional spiritual values and so on. They put at the head of that institution, a man who was a product of the old institution, who was a hardcore physics scientist, with zero sensitivity or empathy or anything spiritual or deep who brought with him a team which was thinking like him. And the first thing they did, we need to do numerical analysis, number driven like Google, that's the example. So they made a study of all the past reports of the educational committees, to make analysis of which words occur more often and incorporate those ideas. I mean, it is ridiculous. They spent four years and came out with something which was so ridiculous. It's not going to applied at all. This is what I'm told. Now you see where the problem is. The people who are being placed to change the system are themselves a product of the old system. I look at my own example now, when I came out from the ashram school and remember what the Mother achieved in the ashram school was a complete shift of the fundamentals of the educational system. But once we got into the class processes, the teachers were from the old system and they opposed what she was doing. Now this is not known, this is not politically correct to speak of, but somewhere we need to speak of it so that people know what really happened.
Narad (00:09:53):
Kittu has spoken of it. It's on record.
Sraddhalu (00:09:58):
Yes, Kittu da has spoken. I'm glad about that. He's the only one who knows this part of the story, can speak of it today. The others who know will not speak of it. And the reality was more than half of the teachers opposed Mother's efforts. And this included Nirod da, who actually said, what is this new fangled system? I don't agree with all this. Because he was a product of that old system and didn't accept it. Now it's not that he didn't accept the Mother, he didn't accept the ideas of Sri Aurobindo, but it made no sense to him and he could not understand what it meant practically to be done. And this is the problem with all the good intentions, when you are a product which is already deformed from the old system, you don't even know and you can only replicate what you are. So what Mother managed to do in spite of this humongous opposition, and we have to see this in terms of consciousness, not people. She managed to squeeze in certain fundamental changes. And when I look back at my own passage through the school, we had teachers who were completely warped in the old model and would teach us things which were in the old way and in the old content, which created a kind of an internal dissonance. Here were values we were receiving from the Mother's atmosphere and from her statements and here the complete contrary values from the teachers. And it was a struggle to manage that. And I can see most of the people in my class could not handle it. I was fortunate because I grew up under care of Panditji. And there I got the content which I needed to manage this dissonance. But the practical result was when we were leaving school at the last stage of equivalent of college in the last year, we were sitting one day watching a movie. It was an American movie. Sidney Poitier was the hero. And his father in the movie is a postman. And the father says to the son, I have worked all of my life to save money to give you a good education and you're answerable to me to some extent because of what I've done for you. And this young man says to his father, you owe me nothing. You brought me into the world. It was your responsibility to do your best. And I owe, he said, I owe you nothing. You brought me into the world. It was your responsibility to do your best and I can do what I like. I don't care for you in so many words effectively. And the moment that stuff came immediately I disconnected, nah, this is wrong. I don't know what's right, but this is wrong. I can feel it. So I disconnected and I looked at the other children. There was only one other boy who was shaking his head. Everybody else was glued to the TV and just drinking it in.
Audience (00:12:50):
Absorbing it.
Sraddhalu (00:12:51):
And I give this as an example to show that for most children, the values that they imbibed on the deeper levels had not been integrated into the surface thinking that they could not feel this dissonance or recognise what was the correction required. Now without exception, all the children who have passed through our school are different because of those deeper values. But if it has not been integrated into the surface part of the thought, if it cannot be articulated logically and brought in objectively into your life, there's a gap which was missed.
Narad (00:13:27):
But looking positively, there were some who fully agreed with Mother's free progresses.
Sraddhalu (00:13:34):
Absolutely. And it's not just the free progress, it is the very approach that she wanted in the education itself, which was missed by most people. One does not have to make it necessarily free progress, but the earlier model where you drill in factual data and have children pick up by rote was to be replaced by a curiosity driven, project driven, personal investigation driven process of learning, which in its extreme becomes a completely free progress system, but can also be implemented in a well, less free, more structured environment. That was not always done. And Kirit Joshi, in a private conversation, told me the change that we were making went all the way up to the last level. But from age 16,17, we did not have enough time to complete that portion of the change. Mother wanted to take that through, but that was left somehow incomplete for that purpose. What we did see though was those who had been so shaped as teachers who were part of that framework, they were exceptional. One of them was Jayanti bai. There was this French man, Tanmaya. And there were others like this who were exceptional as teachers. And then there were those teachers who were completely product of the old system who did not know, who did not even try. And so my point was there was this dissonance of something between the values that the mother brought successfully and then this layer which came with the mixed content and this work, this bridging has to be done still. And I'm speaking of our school as an example, not yet complete in terms of what is required. Now this being the case here, consider how much more difficult it'll be elsewhere. I'm happy to say there are many schools today which are attempting this change. There are even incremental changes at a systemic level with what is being projected today as IB schools, international baccalaureate schools which are more project driven than the others, allowing for more creativity and so on. But a large part still in India is still entrenched in the old industrial education. If you go to a good school and reasonably good school in the US or Europe, it's way better than what is in India. Now when you have some of these very sensitive conscious children born in India for the spiritual atmosphere, they also get the worst of the education, the most drilling and grinding experience. If they take birth in Europe, then you have an education which is much more creativity and initiative, personal initiative driven, but with the coarseness and confusion of those contrary values which are anti spiritual, anti soul value, which will you choose.
Narad (00:16:34):
And Mother has written so much on education and Sri Aurobindo too.
Sraddhalu (00:16:39):
And all of this is so practical, so practical, so easy to implement. But you hit the roadblock where you have a system that wants to evaluate your child and from that it seeps backwards to reverse and undo everything. So there's still efforts now to find ways to bypass this. But two things which very practically for us, there are parents who take the responsibility of homeschooling at least the first six or seven years. They make sure that they give all those values and everything necessary and then get them into the conventional system with the school best aligned to these values. It was interesting, recently I was part of a conference in Delhi, which where we had people from the management side who were looking at consciousness based approaches to management, who are fed up with the old systems of management and governance and business and we're looking for something different. One of them came up there saying, I was homeschooled till I think six or seven years. And they said I was put in a conventional system and later in his life he found in the school and first school years his business, he was one of the most creative persons. So later he comes and meets me and says, I have a connection with Sri Aurobindo though, when my parents finally put me in a school, it was Sri Aurobindo connected school in Hyderabad. Interesting,
Okay, so certain values did come although it was a semi-conventional school, but still, we have a problem today that the system is not able to give you what you need. So either parents have to do that, homeschooling and then once you're sufficiently rooted, you go through and manage, survive the system. And this is what is the bigger challenge for the rest of us. While the system does its stuff, we create a space at home where different values are cultivated and I'm again reminded of the example I gave last time about this young boy in Delhi age 11 at age 14,15 who is invited to a party where all the other children are drinking alcohol. And the parents say, what can we do? You have to rely on his innate sensitivity, values, idealism, what you have given him in his childhood. And so the child actually says, ‘don't worry, I don't drink’. He's telling that to his parents. And when I asked the parents, 'what can we do, we can only trust'. So you have to equip the child early on, provide the necessary counterbalance in the home space to give the nourishment for the soul, that the child will be sensitive enough that going through the system he will be able to select and then equip him to face the social conflicts that he will have. He might be outcast because he does not drink or take drugs or whatever or find a school that's reasonably clean and that's difficult to do today. It's a challenge.
Narad (00:19:58):
Now to go back to all the darkness of the past session. How do we all of us make a change?
Sraddhalu (00:20:14):
When Mother spoke of the worst case scenario, she spoke of the possibility that humanity might have to pass through one of those dark nights of civilization. And we are seeing the whole thing crashing heading towards that collapse, whether we will go that far or whether there'll be a corrective movement now, it's difficult to say. Even if there's a correction beginning right now, it'll take a generation to pick up to what we were a generation ago. So in any case, we have to recognise that the times will be more difficult in the immediate future. What can we do in the midst of the dark nights of civilization, even if it has to be such as has been in the past? There were always units, small pockets of light. We have to create those pockets. We have to protect those pockets. Where necessary and where we can, we push back right now to ensure there's no dark night of civilization. I but now already the momentum is too strong, it's going to take time to reverse. But assuming we can reverse, let's start the process of pushing back to reverse it. Each one in our own spaces has to make that effort. And while we cannot influence spaces farther out our own immediate spaces to form communities, collectivities, within a city, wherever you are, bring together parents with similar ideals, associate with a school that shares partially these ideals ensure that only parents who share these values are introduced into the school system. And so you create a little bubble of protection.
I'm going to give an example here in Delhi, the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Delhi branch, which is little island in the midst of the city, you enter the space, there's a shift of atmosphere. The values in the school, even though the main school is affiliated with a board, the whole approach is completely different. The values they share with the teachers completely different. And so it used to be until 10 years ago when the Delhi government passed an order that said you cannot select your students. You have to accept students from your immediate physical space, whatever they may be. Now earlier they maintained their values by selecting carefully, their teachers, ensuring the students came from a background where parents had these higher aspirations or ideals that aligned to the school objective. And so they could create an island. Now the government rule basically broke that possibility. Now whatever leeway they have, they will surely utilise it. But in practice it means all kinds of people come in with contrary values and mix the quality that you've created. So the important thing I'm getting to is the need to create a pushback to form a local island. Can we as parents and maybe with a local school create a space like that? Yes, in principle, nothing stops us. We have to fight a little bit, but it should be possible.
Audience (00:23:34):
In our school also. Now all kinds of children are, which are children of officials, which are children of politicians.
Sraddhalu (00:23:45):
And the problem is the moment you create a space like that, the local politicians will say, ah, here's a nice school, I want my kid here. And what do you do? Because he introduces his child with good interest for his child, but the child comes with the baggage of a perverse value system. And that will always be, and we have to accept that.
Audience (00:24:05):
Even in the schools of Auroville, they cannot speak of Mother and Sri Aurobindo.
Sraddhalu (00:24:10):
And that's okay. That's other important point. Speak up openly of what your values are. Stop being politically correct. If the other side can push back imposing on your false values, you need to speak up and expose the false values and speak. What are the true values that you stand for? And then only parents who value those things will come and that's fine. And let me assure you, there are more people who want to share in those values than those who don't want. But if you don't speak up, it's not going to happen. So in some form, this pushback of the light has to begin with whatever we have, whatever partially realised, we need to begin to exercise it and spread it.
Narad (00:24:59):
Whereever we are.
Sraddhalu (00:24:59):
We have to begin wherever.
Audience (00:25:01):
One thing, I don't know if you can shed some light on this because you've travelled around so much and I presume also in India, I think somewhere we see that the picture in urban India is quite grim and particularly of course I also live there, but if you go to rural India, I think we have centres there because I lived there for 15 months, although just in Bengal, rural Bengal recently, yeah, recently. That's where this idea struck me that if we have to preserve the cultural fabric of India, so we need to preserve rural India, as a whole, in their own ways.
Sraddhalu (00:25:43):
The beauty of the Indian problem of poverty and non-development for so many decades, while we may blame the politicians for the poverty and the poor development, after India's independence, the beauty of it was that it protected rural India from these perverse influences which largely settled in the cities. The problem today though is with the rural India rapidly getting access to internet and electricity, that lifestyle is quickly changing. The cycle of decline in the cities which took place 30 years ago when they had whatever sufficient comforts and access to internet, et cetera, that is now going to be replicated in rural India. It's already begun the last two years, but it'll take a few years before it gets to a level that will cause significant damage. So yes, you're right in rural India, still that innocence, that freedom, that clarity of values is present.
Audience (00:26:50):
Don't you think we should urge the people at the top to sort of start up things at the rural level?
Sraddhalu (00:26:59):
Yes. So again, in your vocabulary, we have to ask the people at the top to make a difference. Why? Because the system is so entrenched, it does not allow you to make a difference. And lemme put it now in a different context. Under British rule, there was a deliberate structured strategy to break up local indigenous value systems, languages, cultures, traditions, etcetera, deliberate for this purpose to reduce you to becoming part of that whole system. And one of the things they did, they uprooted you from your language. They killed local schools, vernacular schools, Sanskrit was stopped, and so on. This is all going back two a hundred years, where earlier you had the equivalent of what today would be called university at each district level and people spoke in the vernacular, most people had some access to Sanskrit to whatever degree relevant for their life. And all of that was cut off and removed to be replaced by English schools driven by missionaries. Now at that point they passed a law that vernacular schools had to take permission of the government to start or to run. English schools could start anywhere. When the British left after independence, the same law continued. So to this day, if you want to start a school in the vernacular there are all kinds of government regulations, English schools or the missionary run schools, they don't have those regulations, so they can sprout all over the place. Second worse. Now going back about, I dunno, five or six years, there was something called the Right To Education (RTE) act which was passed, which required for every school to take in a certain number of poor students so that you could have equal access to education for everybody. But this was only required for schools which were majority schools, meaning they're not applicable to missionary run schools.
The result was economically the schools became unviable. Already these schools were running on very low profit margins where the missionary schools were running on very high profit margins. They're the ones who could afford to take in new students. These ones couldn't. And effectively the schools began to shut down. The situation became so bad. All the vernacular schools have been shutting down the last two years. So top down never works because they have no idea. What you need is a kind of liberalisation, get them out of the way, allow local entrepreneurship to create its own school systems and structures, but they're scared of that. They don't want to let go of power. We are actually in a jam in the way the system is constructed.
Audience (00:29:46):
No, I was just saying that, I mean there are so many spiritual organisations also like Chinmaya mission is there, they have Chinmaya Vidyalayas in Delhi. Art of Living is there. They're having something. Our integral schools, so many in Odisha. Are they not pockets of light or nodes to create positive change.
Sraddhalu (00:30:07):
So if you look at many of these schools run by religious institutions, a large number of them are conventional schools. What they're doing is they're offering you low, low-cost education and throwing in a little bit of the teachings of their spiritual preceptors. But in what form? Okay, things to learn by heart before you start your day. Speak a few sayings of so-and-so head of who is inspired there institution, but what's happening in the actual content and methodology of the education? Zero change. Most of them, a few have made a huge effort. Chinmaya mission particularly is one of them and they have tried to actually change the pedagogy and the content of classroom, training their teachers for a different approach. And to the extent that they've been able to do that, it is exceptional. But at the end of the day, you are competing with other schools which have a better branding because they're associated with something more international. And this one is somehow considered to be less. They've made them accessible by putting lower prices. So again, the practical result is you cannot multiply easily. Now you see for example, on the other extreme, the more expensive schools, a specific school group in mind, they're opening two entire schools every year, in each school, 5,000 children. It's a gigantic machinery of manufacturing. And how do they do that? The profits from the current school are being invested the next year into the next two, which are being invested doubling each time. It's a massive machinery.
Audience (00:31:55):
Isn't this commercialisation of education?
Sraddhalu (00:31:58):
Of course it is. And the content of education is trash, but they've built a brand image and the parents say, ah, there's a big name. Dump your kids in. On the other side, Chinmaya mission schools, which are doing excellent work, lower priced, so you cannot multiply easily. If you wanted to multiply, you'd have to train the teachers. They invest hugely on their teachers. What do you do? How fast can you get? You cannot double every year. So practically this is the problem. Look at the Montessori system. It's an excellent approach. It is perfectly in alignment to the integral education approach. It is one of the formulations, let's say, of an integral approach. One very specific form. Maria Montessori was a mystic. She knew Sri Aurobindo, I dunno if you're aware of this, very close connection. She lived for 13 years in Chennai and that's when she had the biggest burst of her creativity in her revolutionary education. One of her books she dedicated, she not dedicated in the print, but she wrote to Sri Aurobindo and with words of adoration which was sent to Sri Aurobindo. Now take just the Montessori system. If you want to train a good teacher in the system, two or three years of training, how do you do mass multipliers?
The correction would be for example, for the Indian government to say, all right, all kindergarten age, we will follow Montessori. Then you could do it. But will they do that? I don't know at the moment at least. Or let's take the principles and implement a modified form of Montessori. Why not? Or take the principles and create your own framework. But that means a bureaucrat is being given charge of something which he's utterly incompetent to manage. That's the problem we are facing today. I'm sorry I don't give a solution here, but I'm showing you why there's a gridlock. No, but it's interesting. The way out will require something which either breaks this gridlock or something, I don't know, something drastic, revolutionary.
Narad (00:34:07):
How can the ashram help, or at least some people in the ashram?
Sraddhalu (00:34:13):
The ashram and Auroville were meant to be or are still meant to be centres where we can set up a model that can be replicated. Now the ashram is very specific in that the teachers are not paid teachers and so you have a problem in replication, but the methodology used of course can be replicated. Even there. If we look at what we were as in terms of the creativity of the pedagogy, content, all the systems in the school, what we were going back 50 years ago at the peak when the Mother had brought all that push, we were somewhere there and we have only had a decline. We've not been able to sustain the new approach. At that time we were ahead of the norm in the world. Today we have declined and the world has gone forward in many areas. So the best in the world are ahead of us, even in the pedagogy and approach in the classroom.
What we have, which is unique of course, is the atmosphere that the Mother has placed there and that remains to be unique. But in terms of content, we need to revamp ourselves. Auroville, the Mother tried to rebuild from scratch. The very first school that you see in Auroville, the mother called it Last school. So after a while they had to build a second school. So they went to mother give a name and she called it After School. And the name of the school is After School. The third school, they created, Mother named, she said, No School. Now imagine if as a child your first entry into school is called Last School, and then you go to, now I'm growing up, so I'm going to go to No School and now I'm in my late teenage, I'm going to go to After School. When does it tell you? Just the name tells you what she wanted done.
In practice though, the bulk of the educational system in Auroville as it developed later, became almost entirely the conventional education and there was very little of real innovation. It's only in the last five years that there has been an attempt to, it's five years about, yeah, it could be 10, 10 years. Okay, there's been an attempt to change. There were a lot of ideas. There was some creativity and innovation, but the radical change that she wanted was not present because they just picked up existing teachers who came in and ran it. They're not even allowed to speak about the Mother or Sri Aurobindo, because the people who were teaching said, ah, that's religious, that's cultish in Auroville. And contrast it even in our Ashram school to speak about Mother and Sri Aurobindo though. Teachers will hesitate why you have quotations everywhere. So as kids we see quotations, you don't know what they mean. Most of them are pretty high polluted language. And in our class we would tell the teachers, and remember we were at that point about the age of 14. We tell the teachers, you are making us learn by heart so many British poems. How about learning something from Sri Aurobindo? Ah, Sri Aurobindo is very high. He's very difficult. You will study him when you go to college, Knowledge. Okay, that's it. And we are denied it. How do you explain that.
Audience (00:37:48):
I feel like crying. I don't want to...
Sraddhalu (00:37:49):
I was fed up. I was fed up with this ridiculous poem we had to learn all about romance, marriage and death. I found nothing else other than these three things. I said, what the heck? This is Ashram school. And the head of the school, current head, publicly makes a statement that the greatness of our school is that our children can go right through it without having read anything of Sri Aurobindo. So that's why it's a matter of pride, right? So you're afraid to speak of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, if you do speak of them, it is very high and very difficult. You will study Life Divine when you go to knowledge and you think, what did the Mother do? And I remember as a child, there were books which were published by the ashram, which are all out of print now. One of them was in French, which said, the Mother works with the children. I'm translating. These were actual poems that the Mother taught to the children when she was teaching them. Now remember when Mother started the school, she started as the first teacher and she had children of all ages in one group, in one classroom. She made them go through all kinds of activities and what she taught as poetry, we used to learn as children when I was there and then it's gone. Today nobody talks about it. Nobody teaches it. So that's why I said we have gone through massive decline and we need to gear up and clean up our own centre. That's why I said we were meant to be models, inspirations. We still are to some extent, but there needs to be a major revamp. First by reviewing why we are here, why did the Mother create a school in the first place in Sri Aurobindo's ashram? What was Auroville about? What are Auroville schools meant to represent? And then we have to rebuild from scratch and we face the same old problem.
How do you get your new teachers because they come with their fixed routines and ideas. I've had these very strange conversations with famous teachers. Famous means popular in their own space, not products of this space. And somebody, I was explaining that something historically, this is what happened. And the lady says to me very proudly, that's not correct. I should know I'm a history teacher. 'I know these things, so I'm right', that's the implication. And I said to myself, what as a history teacher makes you so confident of what you were teaching? You learned it by heart from somebody. You repeated what you mugged up. You never questioned whether it is true. And what I was showing was logically that story which they gave historically did not fit. And she was very upset. And this is the problem that happens when the teachers come in, I already know how to teach. Who are you going to teach me how to teach? And I have taught in such a big school, I was a doctor in such and such a hospital. So what I do now, you cannot question. That's the kind of mentality they come with. So what Mother tried in the ashram was to build from scratch a whole generation of children who could then become the teachers and create this new value, et cetera. Unfortunately, the bulk of the children left, and it's not like the Mother didn't know.
Pranab da narrated to us this incident. He said it was 1970 or 71. The Mother had built up an entire generation. The people who came as children to the ashram, she had prepared now for leadership, groomed them, trained them. And then Mother said to Pranab, I saw in a vision all the pigeons flying away. And Mother said, it means that whole generation will leave and we will have to start all over again from scratch. 71, this is two years before she leaves her body. So it's not that she didn't know, this is humanity, whatever. But she had the power, the courage, the conviction, the inspiration which she gives to us even now to rebuild. And that's what we have to do. It does not happen. Whatever is happening, it does not matter what has happened in the past. What she set as an example, what she has taught. If we rebuild from there, it's all there. And she's present. She gives us the energy, the courage, the inspiration because we have to change forms. Some of the forms created then were relevant. When we didn't have tv, it was so simple for the Mother to just say, none of our children will go to cinemas or restaurants outside. Great. You have already insulated them from most of the junk. Okay? Except now the television sits inside your house. It does not matter anymore.
Audience (00:42:43):
There is this explosion of commercial lifestyle
Sraddhalu (00:42:46):
In our school, children have access to mobile phones and computer screens, they watch pornography. What do you do about it? So you have to review how you address the whole problem, find ways by which you will reverse or undo these things. I've seen an example of one spiritual community where in order to maintain that bubble of protection, they cut off all television access, but they created internally television channels, two TV channels in which they broadcast their own selected content. Very similar to the idea Mother had where she stopped the kids from going to outside cinema halls, but because they want to watch cinema, she brought cinema into the ashram playground. Created a big screen and every Saturday was your access to the world. So to say, well, if you can do that for cinema, why can't you do that with television? It should be possible again. But all of this requires a rethink and a reviewing of what we need to do, where we need to draw the line. A lot of experimentation and we shouldn't fear that. Again, we could do the same thing in Auroville. Can we create a space within Auroville that we create a degree of insulation from conventional television, have a filtered access within, should be possible. It's not such a big deal. But the initiative needs to be taken and we will have to work at it.If meanwhile, a pushback can begin sufficiently that the overall trend of civilizational collapse can be stopped and then even reversed, then at that point these will be the centres which radiate out because the need in humanity is so great that they'll radiate out these values. And even these examples.
Narad (00:44:40):
Last week in our session, you spoke of two leaders in New Delhi conference. Have you met more?
Sraddhalu (00:44:51):
Yes. I find everywhere in the world there are people who are making this effort. And the degree to which they're able to succeed or even the degree to which they're able to conceive of a different approach will vary. Forms necessarily will vary, but common to all of them is some kind of an awakening or inspiration which comes from a deeper spirituality within them. So we come back also to the earlier question about the 'sun eyed children'. It's not enough that the children come with potentiality of the system can damage them, but if they are able to survive the system and come through and wake up in spite of the system, then yes, we have the potential and these are the people that we see.
Audience (00:45:48):
But don't you increasingly find these children? I'm sorry, but I've been trying to say this. There's so many of these are exposed to all this nonsense. They go through it and there comes a point when they reject it. Exactly. Put it to one side and live side by side with it.
Sraddhalu (00:46:02):
Yes. So this is the challenge the children face. If they survive the system, then they struggle with a conflict of values. Many of them though, in surviving the system may be partially damaged and they may not be conscious of it. Look, they are damaged. Yes, they are damaged, but then they recover. They recover, they will rebuild. And this is the power of this spiritual force and the supplemental consciousness. We began this whole discussion with your question about, well, what is the supplemental force doing? But it needs that little effort on your part and it'll support you. But still you've come through damaged. And this is the problem that the Mother tried to bypass by creating a space where you could grow up without damage. You see, there's a statement she made which is described by her as her dream. And it was originally put in the context of the ashram, and later they took the text and put it in the context of Auroville,
Narad (00:47:02):
Beginning With, "there should be a place on earth..."
Sraddhalu (00:47:04):
There should be a place on earth where children can grow up without fear and so on, where the motivations will be for the sake of the higher possibilities rather than just rewards, et cetera. There's a whole text if you need to see that.
Audience (00:47:19):
For the Ashram or the school?
Sraddhalu (00:47:20):
For the ashram. For the ashram. And at the end she says, and so when I was given the opportunity to create this ashram, I took it as an opportunity to establish a space on earth where this be, this ideal would be realised as a dream. And she says it is still a dream, but is in the process of developing, of realising. And Auroville when it was started, was taking the same concept now to a broader scale. So the same text was used there and the last paragraph about the ashram was removed. But many people don't know. They say Auroville is Mother's dream. No, it's not just that. It is the ashram and Auroville and it's just a difference of scale and focus of priority. But this eventually has to become the whole world. So if you'll start viewing that whole text in this way, can we create a space in our own lives within our own family, with our own children among our own friends? Of course it requires a basic spiritual common foundation, otherwise you cannot even attempt it. But if we can, then yes, these children will be equipped, they will survive in spite of the damage. But we wish we could help them grow without the need for that damage. And it's possible. It's difficult, but it's possible and we have to work for it. You see, when I speak of damage, some of the damage can stay for life. If you have been exposed to drugs, then the psychiatric damage on deeper levels often takes a very long time. Or depending on how far you've gone, it may stay with you for the rest of your life. Even sometimes across lives, depending on the nature of the damage. If you smoke a cigarette, it impacts you at a genetic level. Measurable, by the way, you can see this fellow has smoked before the age of 21. Interestingly, after 21, the genes become sufficiently rigid that that marker does not appear so easily. But if you've already done it, something stays with you and then is passed on in the progeny, in the heredity.
Narad (00:49:32):
Mother speaks about living in a place in France where the people drank a very diluted wine every day, and yet she found damages in all of them. Interesting, very diluted wine.
Sraddhalu (00:49:51):
And to tell children that don't drink alcohol, don't smoke, don't take drugs, and maybe also don't have sex prematurely, it's impossible to even say that because of the context they're in. So again, I give an example because I was with a family, their daughter is living in London. So after an education in India in a very protected space, now she is suddenly in London and everybody's drinking alcohol, what do you do? And if you don't, it is very difficult. And if you tell them 'don't', they'll say, 'what's your problem? I only took it once'. So somewhere in the whole machinery of the media, it has been made so acceptable that to not drink is unacceptable. To not have smoke is unacceptable. To not take drugs is unacceptable. So the reversal of values is what you're fighting against. One wishes, one could literally start from scratch, and that's what Mother attempted here.
Narad (00:50:56):
So how would we begin in the ashram life with small groups like this, adding people who are like-minded regularly meeting?
Sraddhalu (00:51:11):
And parents. And also you need to teach parents how to raise children and how to manage these challenges.
Audience (00:51:24):
I think what you're saying is true. I have seen my friends, parents of my age, unfortunately, they cannot prevent the kids from remaining glued to the iPad. They in fact think that, okay, let it be for a while.
Sraddhalu (00:51:38):
And with all the love that the parents have, they don't know what to do. And all they can do is replicate what was done to them. Or sometimes in the example I showed, they make it worse because they don't want that error. So let's tighten further the controls. And of course that has the opposite effect. But there has to be a more open discussion and transmission of what we will call best practises, which have to be necessarily evolving. The pace of change is so rapid. The knowledge of the scientific knowledge of how these things harm you needs to be told to the children and you have to catch them before it's too late.
Narad (00:52:25):
But we also have to be wary of the self-help concept. Like what? Well, there are so many self-help groups out there, but none of them on a higher plane.
Sraddhalu (00:52:38):
Right? Right, right. Yes, yes. Much of the discourse taking place is even in the name of spirituality, is emotional sharing among people who are desperate for personal contact. Yes,
Narad (00:52:55):
Yes, confessional kind, right?
Sraddhalu (00:52:56):
And it's not spiritual and it's not going to change anything fundamentally. At best, it may help you heal a little bit, but it might even deepen your wounds if you do it the wrong way. You get to speak more about what was done wrong to you. And by wallowing in it, you make it worse. You never move forward and so much, which is confused in the public space. I've seen groups which were considered be spiritual in the west, and what they did, they came together and they were asked to speak up. What was their deepest pain? What was their deepest suffering? And they were told in this process, you will let it out and you'll be free of it. That's a very seductive idea, but it's completely false spiritually. Mother said, it only worsens and exaggerates the problem. On the other hand, there's a truth to it.
Sometimes you have to face the fact that it happened in order to be able to transcend it. If you pretend it didn't happen, you just have a wound that's distorting your personality. So one has to know correctly how to do. And increasingly I find in that space of wellbeing, spiritual new age, increasing confusion rather than greater clarity. And that's why I come back to that comment. The clarity comes only where there's either deep spiritual tradition, which often doesn't know how to manage these complex situations with TV and internet and iPads or it comes from the formulations of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, which although they don't mention TV and iPad, the guidelines are sufficiently clearly formulated that it applies and what to do in this situation. So there are very few spaces where there's clear, direct, well clarity, but even there a lot of people who have devotion to the Mother and Sri Aurobindo don't know, because they're busy reading things which do not have any direct value for the practical day-to-day life. I know you have started this process of bringing out guidelines, which people can, could you speak about that?
Narad (00:55:14):
It's a series called Questions and Answers from the works of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and I take various topics that are of quite concern to people today, faith, doubt, stress and these. And I go through all their works and select about 20 minutes, 15 minutes. Now we're reducing it to about 10 minute sessions, so we don't overtax people's minds, but we're getting a lot of positive results from people. One man from South Wales came last week and he said, "you know, I live isolated in South Wales and the episode you did on Calm has helped me so much". And it's just their words, it's nothing else. Only Mother and Sri Aurobindo.
Sraddhalu (00:56:17):
And taking these as a starting point, we need to have an open discussion of how we can apply this as parents for our children in dealing with the kinds of issues the children have to face and literally equipping them to protect themselves from this invasion in society of the contrary values. What I do see, and I don't see it happening immediately, but what I do see as inevitably necessary is more such spaces like Auroville where an entire township has a spiritual orientation and then allows sufficient boundary to protect the society, not just the school, not just the parents, but the entire social system to be sufficiently protected from these contrary influences. And that's why Mother spoke of Auroville as a model township. It's going to have to be replicated everywhere, whatever variation.
Narad (00:57:14):
But it also has to go through so many changes first because every type of being has been brought there for that work. In fact, when we came, I came in 1969 at mother's request to begin the Matrimandir gardens work. She said, each of you represent a particular problem in the world to be worked out. Great encouragement, but necessary to have heard it.
Sraddhalu (00:57:51):
Yes, but to look at it in a different way. That was the pioneering work that you did in Auroville. When the replica inspired from Auroville is formed, they won't have to go through the same issues to the same degree. The issues will be there because they're human. But because these issues have been to some extent resolved by the pioneers, it'll be easier for them, far easier. And that's the hope we have to work towards. So to come back to the original question from which this whole chain of discussion started over the last few meetings we had, the supramental force is working to overcome and reverse the tide of the past falsehood to put in a very general way the falsehood of life. Falsehood in economics, falsehood in politics, falsehood in social values, falsehood in education, et cetera. Everything to work to reverse that and to bring forward the light by the most rapid means possible with the least damage. That's what the Mother described. And that's still happening. And if nothing else, it'll be through these centres of light and that means each one of us in our own local collective spaces, or it may be on a larger scale, but at some point there will be a breakdown of the structure itself, the entrenched structure of the darkness and the cabal as I've been referring to.
Narad (00:59:35):
And it can only be done by the supermental.
Sraddhalu (00:59:38):
Yes, through human instruments. Yes, it's very critical. So our role is important and the role is heroic necessarily, but there are groups, and I alluded to it last time, but there are groups within India, three centres, Russia, and the United States, which are at the very top of the systems and structures working together to dismantle the cabal. And it is a extreme struggle, to dismantle.. So there are groups, there are groups working at the top level of existing structures who are against this hijack of humanity and who are working to reverse it. And it is an extreme battle because finally at the end of the day, they have weapons, even assassination and even using terrorist attacks as means to neutralise any good work being done, et cetera. But this is happening. There's a kind of a suggestion which comes in a series of movies, which is, I believe, an attempt to a red pill humanity. If you remember, I think it was called, I think it's the Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol.
Narad (01:01:02):
I have not seen
Sraddhalu (01:01:02):
That, is that the one, is it Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol, where they have this idea that at the centre there are all these interests which have come together under one common control and they can create any terrorist attack anywhere to slant governments and force them into their agenda. That is the reality at the top, which is being attempted to be undone by others who are against this kind of thing. It's happening. We have to pray for them. We have to pray for that effort to succeed, however long it takes. It's a plan which was put in place going back several decades. And a significant part of it was JFK, John F. Kennedy, who unfortunately was an effort precisely to neutralise this process. And he was assassinated because he attempted to reverse this trend. It's a plan going back many decades and it is on the brink even as this effort is on the brink.
Narad (01:02:00):
I would like to pick this up a little bit more in our next talk, and thank you so much.
[Sraddhalu] Thank you. Good night.
Namaste.