The Task of Integral Education

           

            The task before Integral Education is to explore the multiple planes⁴ of consciousness and call down their influence on the objective surface world. Integral Education is the utilitarian aspect of Integral Yoga whose doctrine can be constantly relived, renewed and reshaped in the inner life of developing humanity. A Sadhak of integral Yoga is primarily a student of integral Education and secondarily a teacher who is accountable for his persuasion of learning to himself and world through the accumulation of the power of concentration in order to arrive initially at individual perfection and finally a contributary to the world perfection. This process of learning is identified as an adventure into the unknown multiple planes of consciousness which will continue through successive births known as all life and he will not be satisfied till all the lines of subjective and objective perfections are gathered together to experience endless growth, endless unfolding of Truth and endless total fulfilment.

 

            Similarly, a Sadhaka of integral Yoga is primarily preoccupied with Self-concentration and secondarily preoccupied with self-expansion where the latter is identified as the outcome of the rigorous self-disciplines of the former. Thus he primarily emerges as seven-fold indispensable self-concentration that of follower, seeker of truth, disciple, servant, slave, instrument and child of Their limitless Divine Consciousness and the Divine demands from him ‘subordination and service.’⁵ He secondarily experiences union with Divine’s sevenfold personality of the Creator Father, Creatrix Mother, all-embracing Lover, hidden Master of all works, evolving as child God, the inner Guide and compassionate Friend of all creatures. And his tertiary objective culminates in becoming above self-expansive sevenfold Divine personalities.

 

         All objective research in the field of modern Science, Arts, Literature, Technology, Commerce and Economics can be reinforced by entry into subjective Research of the Soul, by discovering tenfold Selves and their interpenetration into tenfold Sheaths. We have to reconcile the full account of one-tenth ‘potent though limited revelations of modern knowledge and seeking’² with nine-tenth unlimited subjective Spiritual wisdom by constantly updating, renovating, renewing and regenerating the existing wisdom from tenfold Selves.

 

             Integral Education proposes that the greatest unity of all Science, all Religion, all Philosophy, and all Tradition are possible through a most conscious individual when he is perfectly capable of every kind of  Material and Spiritual experience, embraces the whole universe in his cosmic Consciousness, possesses the highest Integral Knowledge³ and ‘gathers together all experience in the truth of a supreme and all-reconciling oneness.’¹ That ‘knowledge is likely to be the highest knowledge which illumines, integrates, harmonises the significance of all knowledge.’¹ And he calls down the ultimate Divine Truth and absolute Delight to elevate the things and creatures to their highest, profoundest and widest Divine manifestation. For him ‘general and ultimate solution is likely to be the best which includes and accounts for all so that each truth of experience takes its place in the whole.’¹

OM TAT SAT

 

References:

 

1: “As in Science, so in metaphysical thought, that general and ultimate solution is likely to be the best which includes and accounts for all so that each truth of experience takes its place in the whole: that knowledge is likely to be the highest knowledge which illumines, integralises, harmonises the significance of all knowledge and accounts for, finds the basic and, one might almost say, the justifying reason of our ignorance and illusion while it cures them; this is the supreme experience which gathers together all experience in the truth of a supreme and all-reconciling oneness. Illusionism unifies by elimination; it deprives all knowledge and experience, except the one supreme merger, of reality and significance.” CWSA-21/The Life Divine-485,

2: CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita-10,

3: “We realise now what the Upanishad meant when it spoke of Brahman as being both the Knowledge and the Ignorance and of the simultaneous knowledge of Brahman in both as the way to immortality. Knowledge is the inherent power of consciousness of the timeless, spaceless, unconditioned Self which shows itself in its essence as a unity of being; it is this consciousness that alone is real and complete knowledge because it is an eternal transcendence which is not only self-aware but holds in itself, manifests, originates, determines, knows the temporally eternal successions of the universe. Ignorance is the consciousness of being in the successions of Time, divided in its knowledge by dwelling in the moment, divided in its conception of self-being by dwelling in the divisions of Space and the relations of circumstance, self-prisoned in the multiple working of the unity. It is called the Ignorance because it has put behind it the knowledge of unity and by that very fact is unable to know truly or completely either itself or the world, either the transcendent or the universal reality. Living within the Ignorance, from moment to moment, from field to field, from relation to relation, the conscious soul stumbles on in the error of a fragmentary knowledge. It is not a nescience, but a view and experience of the reality which is partly true and partly false, as all knowledge must be which ignores the essence and sees only fugitive parts of the phenomenon. On the other hand, to be shut up in a featureless consciousness of unity, ignorant of the manifest Brahman, is described as itself also a blind darkness. In truth, neither is precisely darkness, but one is the dazzling by a concentrated Light, the other the illusive proportions of things seen in a dispersed, hazy and broken light, half mist, half seeing. The divine consciousness is not shut up in either, but holds the immutable One and the mutable Many in one eternal all-relating, all-uniting self-knowledge.” CWSA-21/The Life Divine-524-25,

4: “This earth is not alone our teacher and nurse;

The powers of all the worlds have entrance here.” Savitri-153,

5: “The acceptance of the law of sacrifice is a practical recognition by the ego that it is neither alone in the world nor chief in the world. It is its admission that, even in this much fragmented existence, there is beyond itself and behind that which is not its own egoistic person, something greater and completer, a diviner All which demands from it subordination and service.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga-106, “Action is demanded of man by the Master of the world who is the master of all his works and whose world is a field of action, whether done through the ego and in the ignorance or partial light of limited human reason or initiated from a higher and more largely seeing plane of vision and motive.” Essays on the Gita/SABCL/Vol-13/P: 436, “The Master of the worlds who in the Gita demands of his servant, the bhakta, to be nothing more in life than his instrument, makes this claim as the friend, the guide, the higher Self, and describes himself as the Lord of all the worlds who is the friend of all creatures, sarvalokamahesvaram suhrudam sarvabhutanam;  the two relations in fact must go together and neither can be perfect without the other.” CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga-565,

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