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SMRITI GRANTH
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(iv) Thought control, rejection of undesirable thoughts so that one may, in the end, think only what one wants and when one warts;
(v) Development of mental silence, perfect calm and a more and more total receptivity to inspirations coming from the higher regions of the being.
numerous other educational activities. An adequ..te account of this work would fill a volume.
It is in the context of this vibrating and powerful process of the psychic and spiritual education that the activities of the physical, vital and mental education are set and worked out at the Ashram. In euch of these fields, again, there are specialists in the Ashram who are cngaged in various activities of experimentation.
(The following is a very brief account of the conclusions of the research conducted at the Ashram in the physical, vital and mental education and of the present organisation of the activities in this field at the Sri Aurobindo Intern: tional Centre of Education. )
MENTAL EDUCATION
The mental f.culties should first be exercised on things, afterwards on words and ideas. “Our dealings with language," writes Sri Aurobindo, " are much too perfanctory and the absence of a fine sense for words impoverishes the intellect and limits the finanss and truth of its operation. The mind should be iccustomed to notice the word thoroughly, its form, sound and sc.1se; then to compare the form with other similar forms in the points of similarity and difference, thus forming the foudation of the giamm.t cal sense; then to distinguish between the fine shades of sense of s.milar words and the formation and thythm of different sentences, thus forming the foundation of the literary and the synthetical faculties. All this should be done informally, drawing on the curiosity and interest, avoiding set teaching and mcmorising of rules. The true knowledge takes its base on things, a tha, and only when it has mastered the thing, proceeds to formalise its information."
(1) All the processes and methods of mental education can best be determined by the knowledge of the nature of the Mind. Mind, as we reg i'd it, is primarily a faculty of understanding : all understanding again, is à discovery of a centre rourd which the ideas or things in question are held together.
Mental education then is a process of training the mind of the student to arrive at such central conceptions round which the widest and the most complex and subtle ideas can b: assimilated and integrated
Multiplicity of ideas, richness of ideas, totality of points of view these should grow by a developed power of observation and concentration and by a wideness of interests. Care should be taken to see that the central ideas are not imposed upon the growing mind--that would be the dogmatic method, which tends to atrophy the mind. The mind should grow towards the central ideas, they must come as a discovery of the mind, they must come as a result of a rigorous exercise of the speculative faciliy.
It is again found that even these central conceptions point still to a beyond, to their own essential Meaning, which can be glimpsed and conceived by the mind, bit which cannot be held and possessed fully in experience by the mind. This pint murk: the climax of the mental development as also a clea sign of the limitation of the mind. Having reached there its offic. is to fall into a contemplation of slence and to open to the higher realms of experience, to receive clearly and precisely the intuitions and inspirations from those higher realms, and to give creative exp.ession to them.
To train the mind on these lines, there are five phases of the programme :
(1) Development of the power of concentrstin, the capacity of attention;
(ii) Development of the capacities of expansion, wideness, complexity, and richniss;
A stress should fall not only upon understanding, but also upon criticism and control cf ideas. Not only comprehension, synthesis and creativity, not only judg. men', imagination, memory and obscrvation, but also the critical functions of comparison, reasoning, deduction, inference and conclusion. Both the aspects of the human reas n are cssential to the comleteness of the mental training
(iii) Organisation of ideas round a central idea or a higher ideal or a supremely luminous idea that will trve as a guide in life;
One of the best methods is to creute an atmosphere in which the massive and powerful ideas are constantly being thrown as a stimulation and a challenge impelling the students to arrive at them or strive to grasp and assimilate them.
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