EWS #56 Questions from viewers (7)
Dec 14, 2019
Topics:
Narad (0:00:00):
Namaste and welcome to our continuing series, Evenings with Sraddhalu. Last time we took up illnesses and this time we'll conclude in the first hour on auto immune diseases and nervous disorders. The last two subjects of our talk, last time was two hours. So be sure to watch it on our website, Mother and Sri Aurobindo or Richard Egenberger or Integral yoga, no.. integral studies, integral studies, sorry.
Sraddhalu (0:01:07):
Good, I think the questioner had asked for some observations on these two kinds of illnesses, autoimmune and nervous disorders, which seem to be suddenly growing in numbers. And we could even say for a lot of these kinds of illnesses, the numbers are growing so large, so rapidly, that it is almost as if we have an epidemic. I remember about 15 years ago, I was visiting Bombay and I went to a school for what is called challenged children. They were retarded children which is not a word we use now, it's not politically correct, but for a school for retarded or challenged children and the principal of the school made this observation that there is the sudden outburst of ADHD, attention deficit, hyperactivity disorders and retardations, various kinds, autism and she used this word that it is almost epidemic, in the rapid rise and that was 15 years ago in Bombay. But what you see subsequently, the dramatic increase of cancer and other extreme kinds of disease. But these two were put in the question and I thought it worthwhile to dwell on them separately because first of all we will notice a certain pattern among these special kinds of diseases and then we can dwell on the specifics of each. In almost all of these kinds of diseases which target a particular function, you will find you can trace back to a particular psychological route, a certain tendency or a certain level of consciousness associated with it. So autoimmune disease for example is some part of your immune system or some part of your own body turning upon itself and it's, think of it first in terms of energy. An energy of the immune system which is supposed to push out illnesses, protect you from foreign bodies entering energetically, is now turning upon yourself as if it's a foreign body. So if you remove all idea of cells, biology and physical process and just look at the energetics of it, what you'd recognise is your energy is recognising a part of you as a foreign body or thinks a part of you is a foreign body. It's as if your own energy turns upon yourself to say I don't want this, this must go out, I don't like this. So it can come from two psychological tendencies, one a kind of a self-hate, I don't like who I am, I don't like this person, I don't like this behaviour and it can take, it can have mental roots, psychological roots, social roots, it could be anything but once that has taken a strong possession of you, it becomes from there an autoimmune disorder.
Narad (0:05:04):
So it's not exactly an attack but a wanting to throw out.
Sraddhalu (0:05:11):
Yes, self-hate something in you that you don't like that you want to throw out and it can begin with a purely psychological construct Many people have this problem and a lot of it will still trace back to social pressures children are given an ideal they need to live up to or they need to feel because that's what they see in movies that they should be liked or not liked in a particular way, and often it has a highly sexualized component. I need to be attractive and that's when I'm really valued and liked but attractive, this is a very coarse form of liking, it's not the more natural most spontaneous human form of liking. And since I don't fit that, I begin to look at myself, what's wrong with me, and the girl looks in the mirror and says maybe I'm too fat or maybe I'm not attractive enough, my skin colour, my face, my nose, something you pick on which to you looks odd. What's interesting is if you ever do a painting of a human face, you will find when you have completed the painting, you are still obsessed with one part, that earlobe is slightly too long, this nose is slightly too wide and others who don't come with your bias of what should have been look at the picture and say, oh it's so beautiful. And the same thing happens with your face in the mirror, when you start critiquing it, you will find not one but dozens of things to critique. And then it tends to take on an obsessive form. It could take a form where I'm too fat, so I have to start dieting. And after I've dieted, because that has got fixed in me, I'm still too fat and you get into those extremes of anorexic and other forms of disorders. But behind that is the not liking myself and there the energy now begins eventually to eat up or to react and the autoimmune pattern starts. Once the energetic pattern is sufficiently stabilised as a habit, it moves down into the biological processes and then the molecular processes and then you have an autoimmune disorder or all kinds of unusual sensitivities to food or temperature or climate or whatever. Now remember this is in the backdrop of what we have already discussed before where we have spoken of poisons coming through the environment through the food etc., which also can be cause for autoimmune disorders. Because your immune system is recognizing the poison which has spread inside your blood and tissue and it wants to remove that. But here I am dwelling more on the psychological aspect which at the root is still primary because although you have poisons in your body, the body can remove the poisons without getting violently against itself in an autoimmune reaction. So what you see in the autoimmune reaction may have a biological basis also which may need to be separately treated, but still that alone would not produce this sharp autoimmune inflammation and that has a strong psychological root. What happens then is a slight entry of a material or a slight reaction of some kind and immediately there's a violent inflammation of the autoimmune system. One of the persons that I had seen as a child had a strong autoimmune problem and every now and then when he felt lonely or he felt not loved enough he would have this flare-up and one day he told his parents now I know how to control you because that's the moment he recognized that whenever he needed attention something shifted and he got this autoimmune reaction and everybody came rushing, what's happened to you my child and so on and that was the way he could get the affection, the love that he felt otherwise he missed. So you look at the psychological basis and every disease especially those which are highly targeted, will have some psychological root of this kind. It doesn't mean that when you have that psychological root you will get this disease, because a root can express in many forms, but you have to be free of the root if you want the illness to be entirely cured, otherwise the same root will come up in another form.
Narad (0:09:34):
One time Huta told me something that was very dramatic. She said, Mother said to me that cancer is a psychological disease.
Sraddhalu (0:09:43):
Hmm! And similarly, Mother spoke of tuberculosis as having its roots in depression. And depression is one of those things which is quite prevalent today, again because of a society which is sick and so people tend to fall sick and depression is one of the forms in which people get sick first and she associated tuberculosis with depression. The problem with depression is people have a wrong notion of it. If you tell somebody you are depressed the person will say no I'm quite happy but depression has nothing to do with happiness. You can be happy seemingly but depressed which is a condition of your energy which often comes from a sense of helplessness or a sense of feeling trapped, inability to be free to do what you want and it can have a psychological sense. Apparently I can do all I want but I feel trapped in the circumstances not able to do what I want because of too many reactions which I might get from society or I try to live up to expectations of society and so I feel trapped and the sense is the energies begin to subside, they lose enthusiasm, they lose joy of life and they feel constricted, restricted and that's the movement of depression. You may still smile and pretend to be happy and enjoy things but somewhere inside you you feel pointless or helpless or trapped and that's the movement that can lead to various kinds of illnesses including of course this tuberculosis which is one of the most extreme forms when it gets fixed in the lungs. But think of it this way, the location of the disease again indicates the grade of consciousness in which the knot is rooted or in which the knot expresses itself most strongly. So tuberculosis representing this higher part of the chest is in the range of the higher vital. The part of the energy is which would want normally to flow out and to do constructive things, to be creative and to spread out and enjoy the expansion that's blocked and restricted and it starts as if suffocating or rotting, it becomes stale, the energy becomes stale and that becomes the stagnation of energy, becomes the tuberculosis eventually.
Sraddhalu (0:12:17):
So there's another, the other disease which we wanted to touch upon was diseases of the nervous disorder, all kinds of nervous problems. I recently, just a few days ago, I was with a very old family friend. She must be now in her late 70s, very fine lady. During her youth, she was caring for everybody in her family and it was a large family of many brothers, many sisters and all of them were married with all of them having children and this woman was as if in everybody's life helping them, caring for them, giving them, nourishing them in every way she could, full of positivity and dynamism, never once criticising anybody, never once a mean thought or statement. But in the last few years, they found that there was a sudden decline in her mental faculties. She was beginning to forget and then they said early signs of Alzheimer's and the time when I met her a few days ago I didn't realise it had gone so bad that when she wakes up in the morning, there has to be a board in her bedroom that says number one do this, number two do this, number three do that, without which she is disoriented and her daughter's picture which is which was there in her room, she said, ‘who is this person, I don't recognize’. Because in the regeneration of the memory she went back to a period about nearly 25 or 30 years ago and this picture is a later picture, so that to replace it by an earlier picture of her daughter, and she said, ‘yes, this one I recognize’, and we wonder why that happens.
So in this case there is a story behind it. She had a knee surgery, knee replacement surgery, which could have been done with a local anaesthetic. For reasons of convenience, the doctors gave her a cocktail mix of a general anaesthetic injection. It's a mix of four different barbiturates, if that's the term, things which make you slightly drowsy or unconscious, a mix of four and just for their convenience, so that they can chat around and fool around while they do a long surgery and so they gave it to her without asking the family. She had a long history of diabetes, she was on diabetes medication and it's a known thing that when you have had a long period of diabetes you are susceptible to the degeneration of the brain and memory eventually. They just gave her that when she woke up from the surgery, it was after four days. So again, they'd overdone it. From the point she woke up, she was in that period 30 years ago. Now here's a good example of how a combination of psychological and physical causes can trigger something which is a decline of the, eventually nervous system, brain or generally other parts of the system. So the excessive dose of that, totally unnecessary, led to a dulling and the suppression of the higher faculties long enough.
Sraddhalu (0:15:31):
What does the medicine do when it's trying to put you under anaesthesia? It blocks the higher faculties from registering. The lower faculties continue. So if you look at the human consciousness in terms of a hierarchy, the lower parts of the consciousness are more mechanical. They are sustaining the automatic biological processes. The highest faculties are the discriminative faculties of judgement of good and bad, the frontal lobe and then in between there's a whole series of gradations going down the spine all the way. These higher parts are made numb so that the part which feels I am conscious is made numb, everything below that is operating, but when you make numb, it means the life force functioning in the cells is held back, depressed, its functioning is dulled. That's how you become numb, your consciousness becomes dull. It was held back long enough that those cells lost their vital force or their enthusiasm I would say at the cellular level to push back and recover their normal joy of working. But I will tie it down to the psychological cause. Somewhere along the way, her son had passed away, her husband had passed away. Quite a large number of her family members or relatives had passed away and she'd been through all this. She'd helped everybody and when you look at her life, there was practically nobody there to help her. She was the head of the family, so she takes the burden and somewhere along the way there's this part that begins to feel tired. There's not enough that you can do creatively or bound in a routine of responsibilities and burdens. And after a point when there was no more this active social life, it was routine life which had taken over in the daily routine. And so the cells no more have the enthusiasm, they begin to dull, and those higher faculties and even sense of identity, begins as if to lapse back. And what remains is an earlier, more habitual part, including the memory of the habitual part and so this whole movement of Alzheimer's having a psychological basis and also physical trigger.
Equally Alzheimer's has been correlated with certain heavy metals in the bloodstream in the tissue and then saturating the brain, particularly aluminium. So if you look for it online you'll find medical statements which will say things like oh there is no confirmed study, there is no final study, but there have been some associations but they have been disproved. Not so. The study was very simple. They compared brain tissue of normal people with Alzheimer's and they found large quantity of aluminium proportionally, in the brain cells. That's all there is. So the rest is a question of conclusion that you can make on a practical level.
[Narad] You know what Mother said? She said, do NOT cook in aluminium. Very clear.
[Sraddhalu]And for those of you who are listening to this, you may not realise that you have aluminium vessels. Because today the aluminium vessels are coated with Teflon and non-stick. If you have any non-stick vessels which are Teflon coated, they are aluminium coated with the Teflon but here's the catch, the Teflon eventually tears. You scrape it, you can take all the care you want, it's a thin coating, it begins to tear and the aluminium begins to leach. And if you have in the aluminium vessels a little bit of acidity which can come from tomatoes, it can come just from a little bit of lemon juice in the food, any kind of slightly acid taste in the food is enough to leach rapidly into the aluminium. A simple test you could do is take an aluminium vessel put a few tomatoes and heat it or many people cook today with the microwave and wrap in aluminium foil. So take tomatoes put aluminium foil, heat it and after that you'll find the aluminium sticks to the tomato, it's actually got disintegrated at the part where it touches the tomato that's all going straight into your body and straight into your bloodstream and to your brain accumulates there and all these kinds of nervous disorders come from there. So the breakdown, physical breakdown of the nervous system is coming from heavy metals which are coming in our food and a large part is also from lead and other heavy metals.
Narad (0:20:06):
You did mention earlier about the higher vital and tuberculosis. What about the diseases that are in the lower vital area?
Sraddhalu (0:20:15):
Yes. A lot of diseases today are in the abdominal region.
[Narad] So many, so many.
[Sraddhalu] And that's the part where the life force is primarily concerned with self-preservation and basic survival processes. Digestion being a part of that, procreation being a part of that, anger which is a response of protection or defence again being based there. So this region is relating to the narrower functioning of the vital forces which serve to protect and sustain your basic animal survival needs. So again it's a reference, if you have illnesses there you can find psychological roots which map to those tendencies. Anger for example, very clearly maps to a sense of intensification of heat or hyper activity or attention. Fear tends to compress, constrict and restrict. I think we've discussed that on another occasion. So all of these would then get fixated at the level of energy flow, either expansion or constriction and then the energy flow would get mapped into biological process and then get fixed into the biology itself. So if you have for example, insufficient release of gastric juices, insufficient release of certain important hormones which are released here. They would all have to do with fear, constriction, inability to face the world. One of the very important routes for diabetes is this. So if you see the pancreatic function is first of all putting out signals which have to do with proper digestion, it has to do with proper absorption and assimilation, it has to, it also controls the filtration through the kidneys. It controls, it's like a master control of this whole region. And when you look at the particular function of it and the dealing, particularly with sugar, it's interesting how the psychology maps to the biology. All those functions have to do with how you process life experience. So digestion and absorption is what you take in and then the kidney function is what you throw out, what you keep and what you throw out. Assimilation is what you're able to take and conserve or not take even though it comes upon you. All that is centering around this and then sugar which has the characteristic in the body, it is not only the energy but it gives the it represents the force of enthusiasm and activity which drives all the functions. It all relates to that.
So if you look at the pancreatic function primarily, you could say the psychological root has to do with the sense of not fitting in into the world or inability to assimilate the life experience as it comes to you, inability to enjoy what comes to you, you feel guilty about what comes to you as a life experience or and there's a very particular aspect to this the fear of enjoying life. If you go back into any diabetic, you'll find some of these tendencies. One of these four aspects quite strongly present. There are many who in the things given to them have a guilt association. I can't overdo, I can't enjoy, I shouldn't and you hold back, you restrict or there's a whole rich range of possibilities you fear engaging with it and taking, assimilating. All of those forms really end up with some problem here and often focusing on the pancreatic function. So this is just a kind of an explanation of how these things happen. Head especially, even if it's a nervous disorder when it focuses on the head it has to do with the mind and sense of self in the mind. The mental ego would be the term we will use in a general way. When the mental ego has a certain rigidity or is locked in a narrow groove of processes, routines, that's when you will find degeneration or declining faculty of the, inside the brain. So I was looking at generally nervous disorders. I gave an example of this Alzheimer's but there are other nervous disorders which have to do with the nerves in expression through hands like when Parkinson's or other movements. They are more motor disorders, so it's not so much in the brain but the extension of life force as it moves out to act. So it's mind turning to action in the physical and there you have a block, there you have this inability to hold and again one can look at the person's life stream and the condition in which they are and if you help the person to become conscious of that thing often it is a tremendous release when they realise, ‘oh, this is what I am doing, I'm holding myself back. I want to act. I'm holding myself back’, and the conflict between these two ends up with the hand wanting to move but being pulled back and then it starts getting into the shaking. It's interesting to see how the root, psychological root actually reflects in the physical symptoms itself. So all of these increases of disease I will relate to first the toxicity in the environment and the food and the other second, to the toxicity in the psychological circumstances of our life today. But the understanding of why it takes this form is helpful.
If there are any questions from those who are here we can..
Audience (0:26:15):
There is a lot of impact of allopathic medicines also. My father is also a homoeopathic. I understand that even heavy doses of antibiotics and some other medicines are given.
Sraddhalu (0:26:27):
Yes, so often medicines which are given and unnecessary as in the case of the lady I spoke of who is given the injection, general anaesthetic. Often when they are unnecessarily given, they have also these side effects and then to suppress the side effects you give another and it just piles up until the body eventually is unable to function and correct its own balance.
Narad (0:27:00):
In talking with Dr.Pachegoankar in our weekly interviews, he mentioned that rarely is knee replacement required and he gave many many examples to me of how he teaches people to walk backwards and how he teaches them not to put pressure on certain areas and so many things can be healed without surgery.
Sraddhalu (0:27:30):
Exactly, but one should be willing to make the necessary effort. So much of the damage of the knees or in the hip joints is because of the way we walk. You'll see in our youth we can walk any way we want and the body is regenerating. And you'll see people walking with a great sense of forcefulness and with every step they take, it's as if they're stamping their way into life, pomp, pomp, pomp, pomp. And it all comes down to the psychology, your relationship with life. I want to assert, I want to push, I want to dominate, control my space and the force of vitality which is not in the physical body but in the vital and then flowing into the physical is hammering away in each step as you do. And the result is you're battering away at the cartilage in the knees. With age eventually you will have a problem there because the body cannot repair overnight at the pace at which you're breaking down during the the day and what you need to do is change your walking style. You cannot, unless you change your internal state. You cannot, until you change the relationship you have with life which is to have this dominating, pushing, stomping into life. So you have to start by shifting the state of energy and consciousness which will then ripple down into the body, you'll still have to work initially to change the habit of the body to walk like that because to walk consciously with a soft step has never been done in your whole life and you may be down 30, 40, 50 years of that habit. So you'll of course have to correct the style of walking. But eventually you'll have to correct the energetic relationship you have and the way it expresses in the walk.
I saw people quite a late age, something in the hand and they go, they hit, jerk the arm and you could hear the click in the muscle, in the bone joint and it hurt me even to see, I cannot even do that gesture, it is so violent and crude, but they did it like that and I realised at that point that they were not conscious of the gesture. It's a gesture which is there from childhood and they probably inherited or seen others do it in their childhood and it's now gone into a reasonably old age, where now their gesture is enough to start damaging cartilage or tissue or create other problems. The jerk might pull a nerve or any other thing. And so, to become conscious of your whole body, to become conscious of how you walk then, to walk consciously, would be a first step for which you would have to simultaneously also become conscious of your awareness of the body and then of the state of your consciousness, which also you will have to correct. And the whole thing becomes the initial yogic process of self-change, self-correction. So I tried that with a few people, they were heading for some kind of a surgery and I pointed out to them, I said you can walk and as they showed the walk, I pointed out these deficiencies. I showed them how they could walk straight and this person was heading for a hip replacement, he would get pain every step. I showed him how to correct it, stand in balance instead of leaning on one side and then place each step consciously. It was amazing he walked like a perfectly normal person and I asked him did you feel pain, he said no. I said you have to now develop this as your habit and a month later I hear he's gone for his hip replacement because it's easier to replace the hip than to change your body walk, than to change your consciousness, change your habit, well with age, but that's when Mother says your age has nothing to do with your physical biology, it has to do with the inability to grow, inability to change and that's what makes you aged and when you are willing to grow and change at each step and I will put it in a very general way; every day, to learn every day, to relearn every day, to change or improve maybe a tiny bit every day. When you're young, whatever your biological age, and your biology keeps up it actually supports, because the root is in the psychology, in the state of consciousness.
Narad (0:31:52):
We have a big subject, because I've had a number of questions, and by the way, you can all send me questions that you have that we can consider for future talks. So if there are difficulties, problems, questions of any sort, please do send them to me. My email is narada12 at gmail.com. This person has written about a child prodigy being born with extraordinary skill. How does it help the soul born with it? I feel in our world, child prodigies are more prone to be thrust into the superficial world, detaching them absolutely from the soul consciousness, exactly because of their extraordinary skill. I mean like Saregama kids. They are amazing, but such limelight will be difficult to handle. They will earn name, fame and money, but would they have a fulfilling, purposeful life?
Sraddhalu (0:33:13):
I think there is also another example she gives, Amira?
Narad (0:33:18):
Yes, you had once mentioned Amira, an opera singer.
Sraddhalu (0:33:23):
Yes. Just to take an example of that child, Amira, Willie Gargan. She first appeared on one of these TV shows as a child prodigy, little girl, eight or nine years old, and adults asked her, are you going to, what are you going to sing? And she says, a piece of opera. And the adults asked, should we block our ears? And very quietly she says, no, not necessary. And when she sings, her whole face changes, her voice changes, and the voice is so rich and mature and one of the persons among the judges actually says, ‘it's an old soul’, she can't help but say it. When you see that one video, it's something so beautiful, so inspiring, it brings you to tears. And then you see her next video which is her first public performance and at that time she is this young girl dressed in some excessive finery on a huge stage with fancy lights, big audience and there's another person who sings with her. So she is a little taken aback by this show. But you see a third and fourth and fifth videos and you find now she has got into the swing of this experience of being a celebrity and she is now full of herself and that purity and transparency which was there in the first song and the joy which came is covered up and there's a personality and an appearance and almost a fake layer which is forming. But I wonder whether that could form anyway whether she was child prodigy or not. It's the difference you see when you see an eight or nine year old child and the same child after another five or ten years and you see the whole personality has got so many layers and some rigidities and pretences but it would probably form anyway. So in terms of the prodigy losing something of that soul influence, it seems to be more a matter of the way education or society helps us to grow than of the skill of the prodigy itself being corrupted by this personality shift. It's just that you don't get to see other children being unusually skillful at that age, but if you see them playing with their toys at that age, and then you see them playing with their toys in their late teenage with other toys, mobile phones or whatever else. It's the same difference really. But to come to the question of whether it is helpful for the soul, I would put it another way, it could be that the soul chose to develop that line of skill that it had already worked upon and it wanted to now perfect it and develop it in this life. It could equally be that the soul came with a prior skill but now wanted to develop a different direction in which case it's the pressure of the parents which is forcing the child into this particular form and either at some point the personality will rebel, lose interest in the skill and very rapidly lose something of the skill itself, Or the child will find herself constricted and blocked and then depressed or unhappy in their life journey and still the change may come eventually.
[Narad] I would think public adulation would be a big negative.
[Sraddhalu] It's always a problem but on the other hand it's a problem for anybody. You are successful in any skill, in any achievement and you have public adulation, it tends to swell up people. But what I have also seen is that there are a lot of people who don't get swollen up. And the difference is this, the ones who don't get swollen up, they realise, I did something, yeah, you guys are impressed by it, but I don't think much about it. And they are transparent with themselves. And we will use the word here, sincere. They are sincere about what they have, what they can do or cannot do. The ones who get lost are the ones who now start believing that their relation is true. When people say you are so great, they start telling themselves, ‘Oh yeah, I am great’, not realising that I am still what I am. And then when they start pretending or need to cover their reality with this pretence, they go off track and very quickly they tend to lose their strength or even it goes in a completely different direction. Occasionally you have these unusual types, Elon Musk would be one such, very strong vitality, very creative mind, it's a very interesting combination of high intellect and strong vitality and a body to support both, which is again rare as a combination. And so, he's able to push through and ram through things. If you interact with him on a one-to-one level, sometimes it can be extremely coarse and painful, because he might be so full of himself, pushing, dominating, he knows what he wants and he'll just slam his way through. Because he has the background of being successful in what he wanted to do, he doesn't need to hear your opinion, he knows what he's doing and he's always succeeded anyway. So he's able to ram through but at the same time it's the character of the strong vital to ram through your opinion. On the other side, if the other person has equally a strong vital who is able to push back on his terms and say, ‘no, you're wrong on this’, and logically convince him, he'll say, ‘oh, yeah, you're right, that makes sense’, and he'll accept immediately. So in the personality because he is a strong vital difficult to work with if your vital is weak but if you have a strong vital, he respects it and then you make a very good team. So I still don't see that as a problem of the fame. It seems to be more a problem of how you manage the fame and whether internally you are sincere with what you can do or cannot do.
Narad (0:39:35):
But young children may not have that capacity.
Sraddhalu (0:39:41):
Yes, sometimes I find, if they have the capacity it comes from a certain maturity of the soul that already knows this is how it is, but they don't have the capacity of how to manage interfacing with people. So people come and praise highly. So there is this type, for example which is a more introvert type, which will say, ‘why are they bothering me’, and they tend to become anti-social, to pull back from social engagement or even put up a front that is rude to protect themselves and disengage from this which to them is anyway quite superficial and meaningless. Or it may be that they put up a facade of responding with platitudes and then escape as quickly as they can. But I think that's more a part of the learning in life. If there was an education that taught them how to deal with these circumstances, even taught them how to deal with fame, that would be so helpful. And that's where our education has been such a huge failure. It does not teach you to be truly yourself. Sri Aurobindo even puts it in these terms. The attempt at moral education actually creates hypocrisy, because what you do is you teach the mind what is actually a matter of the heart or emotional experience and values. So you say you should be charitable, the mind is thinking of what it means to be charitable and it thinks only of an appearance. It's not what you feel, you don't feel charitable just by being told you should be charitable. And so the result is precisely to create a split and to create a veneer of appearance and it's the best way to create hypocrites. And a lot of that is part of our current education and he wrote about this a hundred years ago.
[Narad] Yes, yes.
Sraddhalu (0:41:44):
And at that time he said you are creating hypocrites by giving moral education in this manner and the other thing which he also, very sharp language he uses, he says the modern mind has this fickleness, inability to hold attention, inability to follow through with a single idea or weak power of concentration, always wavering between thoughts, possibilities, emotions. And modern mind he is remember, talking about it a hundred years ago, in 1908 or ‘07 something in that range, when he wrote his articles on education education. So he says the modern mind is fickle, from then to now, we become far more fickle, far more weak, far more unstable in our concentration and personality. So for the soul, if it is a choice of the soul to bring that power and to develop it, it is a great opportunity that you have started early. I have the skill now, now I need to amplify and develop something much more profound, which earlier I could not do because of the age of the previous body. It takes a whole lifetime to reach a level of maturity of any art and having got to that you wish you had this when you were young, when your biology supported the full flexibility and possibility and so it's an attempt as if to take this into the next body without losing the maturity. And Amira is a good example of that. What line the soul takes and I would assume if the soul was consciously bringing this forward, it has also strong enough imprint that it would navigate through these difficult passages. And if she does not lose herself in drugs or any of the other perversions which tend to warp the personality then the soul will navigate through that difficult passage of managing fame and wealth and build on this capacity and grow. There again an education would have, a good education making her conscious of this would be a great help.
Narad (0:44:04):
We have a long session to do on integral education. I'd like to read a little bit from some of our correspondents. You're going to cover how to keep children properly educated within existing semi-asuric or fully asuric educational system. However, I'm very interested how proper integral school education should look, ideally. Which subjects should be picked up? I believe a lot of information approaches and even whole school subjects are totally outdated and should be got rid of? Well, at the same time, new subjects and approaches should be introduced and keep on being introduced along with world rapid changing. Should there be at all division on subjects? What should assessment-based system be turned into? How to deal with children of different types and different family background. So that's one and we'll have more later.
Sraddhalu (0:45:22):
I think that wouldn't require many hours if you wanted to do justice to the question. But I can make a few pointers. The first part of the question has to do with how do you protect the children through this phase where they're going through an educational system that is suffocating. Well first as far as possible as a parent put them in a space that you feel is conducive to the overall objectives of a nurturing integral approach. Especially when the children are very young, don't worry about the name of the school or the fame of the school, which is often the wrong reference. If a school is famous it's because they have the highest marks of performance, which means they are the most dehumanised, very often. Earlier they used to be famous because they had a good culture, good discipline, good values, that's what made them famous, today that's no more the reference. So now you're famous because you have high marks, high pass percentages because you're competing schools against schools for percentage marks of passing and that's dehumanising. Instead, what I recommend to parents generally, I say you choose the school not by what you have read about it. Go into the school environment, walk in the corridors, look into the classrooms, even if possible step into a classroom, see what's happening. And as a parent, you will feel the difference. Let's say you go to one school and you see this very disciplined, strict teacher and the students are sitting passive, serious, stiff, fearful. Or you find a school where in the classroom where the children are laughing and playing and are happy, interacting or they're creative, they're engaged with something, you feel the difference. What would you like your child to be like? Don't think of their studies, don't think of the performance, don't think of the jobs they will get, that's the wrong reference. If they grow up to be happy and creative they will get all the money they need, when they need it. But if they grow up to be stiff and dull and mere automatons, then it does not matter whether they get a high paying job or not, they will be unhappy and miserable and you will be responsible for that. So the best is to go into the school and feel the space and then you will know what's good for your child. If you have a choice, take a Montessori system school. It's the closest to integral education.
Sraddhalu (0:48:09):
In fact Maria Montessori was known to Sri Aurobindo. She knew of Sri Aurobindo. She lived 13 years of her life in Chennai, visited the ashram and even when the ashram school was first inaugurated, she sent a message, which was read out by the Mother and the message said something to this effect that you don't realise how fortunate you are to grow up in this spiritual environment, make the most of it. And so obviously she had also been to the ashram. I don't think she met Sri Aurobindo, but one of her books that she wrote while she was in Chennai, under that influence, she wrote in the book, ‘Dedication to Sri Aurobindo’, and sent the copy to Sri Aurobindo. It's a very beautiful dedication, expressing her gratitude. And her main work, really the most creative and the most beautiful part of her work was during those 13 years in Chennai and generally while she was in India. So what she got, what she created is deeply spiritual. Although the system does not openly talk about it because of the secular values in the West, but in her book she speaks about the cosmic work that has to be done. Now what do you mean by that? She says the whole cosmos is working through you and each child has a unique work to do in the cosmic work. Just that, it's such a profound spiritual idea. And then the whole educational system is built around, along similar lines with different articulations. And so if you have a choice, and if you have a ready system that's available, go for a Montessori, as far as possible a pure Montessori. There are those which are new-fangled Montessori, where they are Montessori in name and then they mix into it the conventional competitive and hierarchical stages of teaching. So in the pure Montessori, you have young and older children all together in the same classroom and there's a lot of peer learning taking place. So your child naturally finds her or his level at the point of development in that aspect, in those faculties developed and other aspects on another activity. And the teacher's role is considered to be as less intrusive as possible. You watch the children, only nudge them here and there as required. In the mixed Montessori, they again make the usual class 1, class 2, class 3 and introduce in the classroom, the elements of Montessori form but not spirit. So wherever possible go for the pure Montessori or as an alternative is the Steiner system of education which is also similarly oriented, has also a spiritual perspective. It is much more built though on developing the external forms of creativity. Nevertheless the two together form a very nice practical framework. So we can say those will be along the lines of an integral education. In protecting the children from this distorting influence in a conventional school, you would have to take a much more active role.
Sraddhalu (0:51:30):
I will suggest as parents, you have to engage with the school. The idea that you send children to a school and let them do what they want is a serious error. You have to engage and all schools today have what they call a parent-teacher association in which you have a voice, you have a place and recognize that the teachers are really doing their best. Those teachers even in a conventional school, they care for the children. It’s just they are not allowed to express their caring. If you have 50 children in a single classroom, how do you expect to show affection and just a little bit of disorder is overwhelming with 50 children. And if the same classroom was of 5 children, the same teacher would be an extremely caring, loving and effective teacher for your child. But when it becomes 50, anybody gets crazy. And that's when you start bringing these reactive modes, keep quiet, sit down, don't shout and you try to suppress to bring some kind of an order because you don't know how to manage it. So it's not really the teacher's fault if the child comes through the school with no meaningful values or unhappy from a too rigid system. It's the nature of the beast. So engage yourself first, partner with the teachers, talk to them about what your child needs or what they can do to help for whatever it is your child needs and just the fact that you are there appreciating them and caring for them as teachers is enough to evoke from them a positive response and begin a change. Depending on the school management's openness you may even prevail upon them to introduce elements of creative activity and project-based learning, activity-based learning and so on and even change banners in which things are taught.
If you are relatively free, and this often happens in India where you don't have both parents working, in the West it's much more difficult when both parents are working, but if in India still it's not so bad. It's beginning to happen but where you are relatively free volunteer as a teaching assistant as a parent going to the school spend time there it takes the burden off from the teachers and allows you to engage also and helps to create a positive conducive atmosphere. You can bring in new ideas new creative activities. Very often teachers want to do good but they don't know how and let me ensure you, I'm going to say something which would sound very harsh, but the present B.Ed (Bachelor of Education), which is the framework for you to become a teacher is almost entirely useless. You spend what, two years or something, in studying theory of education and spend maybe two months at the end of it in an actual classroom and what do you think you will do, sitting and watching a classroom happening. You never really engage with, whole teaching is about how you engage and the theory of education is all about XYZ thinkers who are thinking about how knowledge is transmitted which makes no difference at all in your personal engagement. It has no practical value at all. And you passed an exam where you learnt by rote all those things. I would put it another way. It's again a little coarse but it gets the point across. My computer can answer all your questions of the examination better than you can. Can my computer be a good teacher? Can my computer give empathy? Can my computer give love? give love.
Sraddhalu (0:55:14):
When the Mother started the ashram school, she started the kindergarten for the youngest children and she picked, guess what age teacher for kindergarten, a 12 year old. Kindergarten children, let's say 3, 4, 5 need not someone who's 50 years old, not someone 60 years old with maturity and experience, but someone they can relate to, who is like them or at least close enough to them. And so she picks this girl who is 12 years old and she goes and says, now you will teach there, you will be the head of the kindergarten. And the 12 year old girl says to the Mother, Mother I don't know what to do. And Mother said, just give them love. That's all. What do you think children at that age need? They don't need to be learning by heart numbers and names and things. They just need to have that affectionate caring and they play and through play they grow. We may even put it in these terms up to the age of 10 or 11. All learning is play and all play leads to learning but play is your means and if you're doing anything which is not play then you're doing it wrong and it's only when the mind comes into its own in a manner that you can say why I'm thinking let's say around 11 typically, 11, 12. That's when you can have a formal learning interaction and even those should be highly tailored to the particular inclination and need and lead through inquisitiveness, through questioning, provoking.
It was interesting when I was teaching in the ashram school, I was given that particular age, which to me is the most fascinating age because the mind is just beginning to be active. And I would bring all kinds of things, which were often like toys or games or some unusual science gadgets which have some element of surprise or something unexpected and I would show that and let the children play with it, interact with it and ask a few questions, what's happening, why is that happening, how did it happen. And because it's also an age where you're transitioning from emotion to mind, you have to bridge both. So my typical class of the year would begin first with a personal interaction but afterwards the first thing I would bring is this little toy called, drinking bird. I don't know if you've seen that. It's a little bird made of glass with a little bit of liquid inside and you dip the beak in water and it comes up and then after a while goes back and dips and comes up and it keeps swinging. So I start the class by telling them I'm going to introduce you to my friend. But you must be very careful, he's a fragile friend. So bring out this bird and we give it a name. You see at that age, 11, 10-11, you are going to relate personally with your heart. So we'll give it a name. And then you tell, oh this bird is thirsty, so let's give him a little water. And then I dip the beak in the water, he liked it, he is swinging happily, you are relating in the heart. So unlike science which is all mind and very very distant, detached, there is a word I am looking for which is clinical, separate, I make it first an emotional connection. Look, he's swinging happily. Children have linked it. Now they can identify with the experience. Oh look, he's bending again he wants more water, and you watch this bird magically bend down and drink and come back. Oh, he's happy again and when it starts doing they are surprised. How is this bird keeping on doing? Now they want to touch. You let them play and then you ask questions. How is he doing that? And slowly it shifts into the mind. Then some child notices, look look, that water is moving, something is happening and they come to a rational description or understanding of, okay it's not yet understanding but a description, the water rises and asks why is the water rising? What will happen if you remove the water which it is drinking? And then I discuss how it warms or cools, we hold with the hand, we see the water rise when we hold with the hand. All this while it's a purely interactive sensory rising from the emotion into thought experience and at the end of it they have understood everything. There's a scientific understanding but it's not clinically detached. It's a heartfelt relation and then we say okay, we will thank the bird and say goodbye and we put it back in the little box.
And so the whole experience now followed the curve of their evolution in consciousness. The science in this way is no more clinical, it is no more abstract ideas, it is experienced. And so the result is by the time they have gone down a few months with a series of such interactive experiments, they are thinking. But thinking is not cut off from the heart, it rises from the heart, it harmonises with the heart. And by the end of the year, you can see they are so excited about new things. One of the complaints we had from other teachers was, oh, his students, they make too much noise. Because in other classes, they are sitting stiffly and bored. And here they are active and shouting and laughing. But it can be taught like that. That's the point. And so you can catch the need of the evolution, what is the grade of faculty of consciousness growing, fill it with experiences and watch the child learn and grow. This is at the heart of the whole integral education self-learning approach and Montessori system similarly makes use of it.
Sraddhalu (1:01:10):
So there was another comment in the subjects which are obsolete which need to be replaced, and that's the wrong way of looking at it. In the perspective of integral education we are looking at the growth of consciousness and the faculties at each level of consciousness. So a primary concern is that the child begins to exercise those faculties. And how do they do that? By applying them, by using them. How do you develop the power of observation? Well, by observing. Now you could do it in a formal way as an exercise, okay I'm going to open this book, look at the picture, observe all the details and I will close it and now you draw with as much detail as you can. So it's a more formal thing. Or I can do it informally, more casually, that they don't even realise that they are observing. So as in the case of this bird, I say well what's happening? When does the bird begin to bend? When does it come back? And they observe, they look for things and then they recognize what's happening. So you can lead them and develop that power and then enhance it by specific forms of exercise as they grow older. Again, all through games, you have cards which you turn one at a time. And if you remember another card which has the same picture, then you can open the other one and then you win those. It's a memory game. It's an observation game. And at the same time, it's developing through a light play, even an element of competition, but light-hearted competition. So through activities like that, one could do so much and what you've taught is utterly unimportant at that stage as a subject. Through any subject you could develop those basic faculties of concentration, observation, comparison, differentiation, analysis, synthesis and so on.
So what I would do ideally is take the child's primary interest and build around that an activity which leads, takes level by level all the way as far as he can and then push a little more. And I'm always I believe in pushing just a little bit more because you're preparing the next grade faculty and activating it okay something more I need to be able to do and it kick-starts the faculty and then it starts working on its own and joins and weaves and merges, emerges. So what you teach as subject or the framework within which I develop the faculties is almost unimportant. Only much later when the knowledge component of the subject becomes important, then the subject may have a meaning. But even there, if your faculties are well developed you can rapidly absorb content of different subjects and even in an interdisciplinary manner without needing to cut them up artificially. So what I would do, let's say, early stages focus as much as possible on faculty development, leading more into formal subjects. So mathematics itself, for example, can be woven into an activity. And it can be an activity which involves paper folding. You fold paper with origami and create a bird. You're developing fine motor skills, but there's a measurement that you do, how you make the square, and it can be an element of geometry, mathematics, as well as fine motor skill development, less an element of visualisation. You're blurring many subjects into a single activity, and as a result, it's a coordinated, multifaceted, rich growth of personality and faculties.
To separate out one subject feels artificial until the mind has sufficiently come into its own that it can begin to make sense of that separation. So my focus will not be so much on subjects. I will even go so far as to say there are many things which are called subjects which are irrelevant but which are useful for faculty development. For example, if you go back 40 years before calculators were common, using the what is it called, the slide rule? Slide rule was common to all classes. They don't teach it anymore. Nobody uses a slide rule, so why waste time. It's a subject, remember, it's a competence which is going to be measured in an exam, but you don't need it in life. But actually what slide rule does, it gives you a physical sense of the relationship of numbers. The displacement, addition and subtraction is felt as a physical sensory experience which I will highly value because a child who has experienced what is addition and subtraction in a physical sensation knows what it means. Whereas if you just make a child sit down and do 5 plus 3, they are just numbers and symbols of abstraction having no meaning. A few children get it because their mind is naturally more abstract. Those who don't get it are labelled dull or slow but they are not. They just didn't get it and the way to get it is to feel it in sensation of the hand movement. So slide rule is extremely valuable if you think about it in terms of faculty development. But if you think in terms of subject, it's a waste. So when we review things inside out from a faculty development perspective, I will bring in many of these obsolete elements. They may have no practical value in your day-to-day life for application but they're extremely valuable for the faculty development. We may spend barely a day on the slide rule or an hour but that's enough to give you what you need and later on at a slightly older age, I will again bring back the slide rule when I want to teach about powers and with slide rule you are able to calculate powers easily. It's multiplication but on a more abstract level in a such a direct manner that you cannot do with any other means. And so I would still bring that back. I would bring the method of counting with or doing multiplications or additions with little beads which is that thing called, the abacus? Again we'll spend a couple of days, treat it as fun, treat it as a game, but it will imprint the experience of that mathematical operation on a sensory level.
Sraddhalu (1:07:42):
So remember one of the key principles Sri Aurobindo gives in Integral Education is to grow from the near to the far, from the sensory to the more abstract, and so it's all useful. So when this question comes up about subjects which need to be changed I would not give that so much importance. Later on as they grow older, yes of course. But again there if you really want to prepare them only for jobs then you want them to be an automaton. If you want them to be creative then many subjects which are not useful are valuable. I don't know if I mentioned it here, but I'll repeat it anyway. It was at a, it was in Indore at a college which had just had some senior management students passing out and it's a huge college, so large numbers of management students, out of them an elite which had the highest marks with the only ones allowed in the room for 200 people. They were all to be awarded afterwards and I was supposed to address them and we had on the dais big names from the industry. So the idea is by calling big names you are telling the children this is the example you should be like that so I said to them, you have all these great names, they've each achieved greatness in their own fields and of course you're hoping to be like them but I said it would be an error for you to be like them. Rather the lesson you have to take is, you have to become yourself the way they became themselves. If you try to clone them to become them in your body it's not going to work, it will be an error. They fulfilled themselves, they became great by fulfilling themselves, you have to find your line of fulfilment the way they did, that's the example.
The second idea, I said and it sounds radical, I said everything you have learnt for which you have got all these high marks, you will get awards now, is all going to be useless for you to achieve that kind of success in life. And so they are all a bit shocked. I said it's because whatever you learnt was done through a certain process, through methodologies, through a set system of beliefs and structures of practices. As long as you can learn by an algorithm, we can replace you by an algorithm, by artificial intelligence. So everything you have learned is replaceable by artificial intelligence. So if you're going to enter the job market with AI which is becoming smarter than a human being in many respects, they don't need you. What they need you for is what AI cannot do and that's what you're going to build on. So what you have learned is at best a standing ground on which who you are, what you are as a creative person, as a person of commitment, as a person of values, as a person who lives an ideal and the skills that you develop to express that, that's what will matter which will take you through to wherever you want to go and that's not being taught. That's what you are and that's what you have to now build on. So it's a very different way of looking at it. So to me the subjects, I view in a very different manner that they are useful, all of them are useful but you have to see in terms of faculties. To remove a subject just because it's not needed would mean then that we don't need to learn most of what we learn because anyway you will replace you with AI, the artificial intelligence like I said, my computer can do better than you can in your exams, I don't need you at all. So subjects are not going to be important but subjects are means by which you will develop your creativity and capacities and it will be a standing ground with which you'll have a sense of what the world is like and what you need to do or what you should be able to do.
So I put it this way, all the years you spent learning by heart names and dates of history or geography, you never use in your life. But what it leaves you with as a general impression is the arc of development of cultures, civilizations, values and struggles of humanity. That's valuable and ideally we would teach history in that manner. For me the most valuable learning of history was when I saw certain very well made television series which were historical. Which captured the mood of the age and the values of the age. And to observe how they worked, how they struggled, what they overcame, what new elements were brought in. That's what history must be about. That's what we are going through in our own awakening now. But I don't know anybody who can teach that way today in the school, in a framework of a school, but that's what we should be doing in any case.
[Narad] Okay, we don’t stop here.
[Sraddhalu] We'll continue next time with the other questions regarding education. But I think this gives a broad framework of what we should, the way we should start looking at these questions and our own children and their education.
[Narad] Namaste.
[Sraddhalu] Namaste.