The Psychic Being and Education

With the development of the mind, humanity has used its powers of observation, categorisation, and analysis as the leading method of developing our external life. Humanity recognises the need to organise and upgrade the physical being, the vital being and the mental capacities as part of an overall approach to improve the external life that we lead. As a result of this extreme focus on mental powers and their impact on education, we have created a mechanical world-view. Charles Dickens, in his novel Hard Times, explores the implications of this world view on human life, the rigidity, the limitations and the increasing mechanisation that accompanied the industrial revolution. The application of mind to life, and the extension into the educational system, no doubt brought about enormous changes in the opportunities and comforts associated with life in the modern world. As this world view promulgated further, as it permeated agriculture, leading to factory farming, and education, leading to standardized testing and focus on facts as the important aspect of education, it changed the way humanity interacts with the world, and with our own deeper, inner life and purpose.

As is usual when the mind takes the lead, humanity has become more and more enamoured of the mechanical mindset. Everything is pre-determined, fixed within boundaries, regulated, controlled with laws and procedures, and eventually, controlled by police, courts and litigation.

At the same time, the vital nature has its desires, its fears, its passions and these naturally beat up against the mind’s strict control mechanisms, causing an increase in disregard of the regulations on the one side, and an increase in cheating or hiding to fulfill the vital desires without being restricted by the rules.

Amidst this framework, the deeper sense of the meaning of our lives, and the purpose of the creation itself has been covered over, seemingly lost and abandoned. Yet, as Sri Aurobindo describes in the first chapter of The Life Divine, the aspiration, the seeking for something more always returns after each period of darkness, denial and avoidance. This is the aspiration for God, Light, Freedom and Immortality.

It is the psychic being, the soul essence within each human being, that holds this flame of aspiration. As it begins to grow and take hold within the being, it first begins to exert an influence on the actions of the body-life-mind complex. Eventually it can take direct control of the direction, purpose and actions of the life and gain power over the mind, life and body to overcome the limits, rigidities and obfuscations that they have due to their inherent nature and the results of past development.

Sri Aurobindo writes: “It is not yet realised what this soul is or that the true secret, whether with child or man, is to help him to find his deeper self, the real psychic entity within. That, if we ever give it a chance to come forward, and still more if we call it into the foreground as ‘the leader of the march set in our front,’ will itself take up most of the business of education out of our hands and develop the capacity of the psychological being towards a realisation of its potentialities of which our present mechanical view of life and man and external routine methods of dealing with them prevent us from having any experience or forming any conception. These new educational methods are on the straight way to this truer dealing. The closer touch attempted with the psychical entity behind the vital and physical mentality and an increasing reliance on its possibilities must lead to the ultimate discovery that man is inwardly a soul and a conscious power of the Divine and that the evocation of this real man within is the right object of education and indeed of all human life if it would find and live acording to the hidden Truth and deepest law of its own being.”

reference: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Psychic Being — Soul: Its Nature, Mission and Evolution, Section 6 More Lights on the Psychic Being, pp. 168-169