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Psychic
Education and Spiritual Education
So
far we have dealt only with the education that can be given
to all children born upon earth and which is concerned with
purely human faculties. But one need not inevitably stop
there. Every human being carries hidden within him the possibility
of a greater consciousness which goes beyond the bounds
of his present life and enables him to share in a higher
and a vaster life. Indeed, in all exceptional beings it
is always this consciousness that governs their lives and
organises both the circumstances of their existence and
their individual reaction to these circumstances. What the
human mental consciousness does not know and cannot do,
this consciousness knows and does. It is like a light that
shines at the centre of the being, radiating through the
thick coverings of the external consciousness. Some have
a vague intimation of its presence; a good many children
are under its influence, which shows itself very distinctly
at times in their spontaneous actions and even in their
words. Unfortunately, since parents most often do not know
what it is and do not understand what is happening in their
child, their reaction to these phenomena is not a good one
and all their education consists in making the child as
unconscious as possible in this domain and concentrating
all his attention on external things, thus accustoming him
to think that they are the only ones that matter. It is
true that this concentration on external things is very
useful, provided that it is done in the proper way. The
three lines of education - physical, vital and mental -
deal with that and could be defined as the means of building
up the personality, raising the individual out of the amorphous
subconscious mass and making him a well-defined self-conscious
entity. With psychic education we come to the problem of
the true motive of existence, the purpose of life on earth,
the discovery to which this life must lead and the result
of that discovery: the consecration of the individual to
his eternal principle. Normally this discovery is associated
with a mystic feeling, a religious life, because it is mainly
religions that have concerned themselves with this aspect
of life. But it need not necessarily be so: the mystic notion
of God may be replaced by the most philosophical notion
of truth and still the discovery will remain essentially
the same, but the road leading to it may be taken even by
the most intransigent positivist. For mental notions and
ideas have only a very secondary importance in preparing
one for the psychic life. The important thing is to live
the experience; that carries with it its own reality and
force apart from any theory that may precede or accompany
or follow it, for most often theories are no more than explanations
that one gives to oneself in order to have, more or less,
the illusion of knowledge. Man clothes the ideal or the
absolute he seeks to attain with different names according
to the environment in which he is born and the education
he has received. The experience is essentially the same,
if it is sincere; it is only the words and phrases in which
it is formulated that differ according to the belief and
the mental education of the one who has the experience.
All formulation is thus only an approximation that should
be progressive and grow in precision as the experience itself
becomes more and more precise and co-ordinated. Still, to
sketch a general outline of psychic education, we must give
some idea, however relative it may be, of what we mean by
the psychic being. One could say, for example, that the
creation of an individual being is the result of the projection,
in time and space, of one of the countless possibilities
latent in the supreme origin of all manifestation which,
through the medium of the one and universal consciousness,
takes concrete form in the law or the truth of an individual
and so, by a progressive development, becomes his soul or
psychic being.
I
must emphasise that what is stated briefly here does not
claim to be a complete exposition of the reality and does
not exhaust the subject - far from it. It is only a very
summery explanation for a practical purpose, to serve as
a basis for the education which we intend to consider now.
February
1952
- The Mother
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