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CHAPTER I - The Objective of the New Education - Part 1

CHAPTER I

The Objective of the New Education

INTRODUCTORY STATEMENTS

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This presentation might be regarded as concerning itself with three different aspects of one general theme, which is that of the new and coming educational methods and ideas.  The objective is to elucidate the cultural unfoldment of the race and to consider the next step to be taken in the mental development of humanity.  Teaching, if true, must be in line with the past and must provide scope for endeavour in the present and must also hold out further enlightenment for those who have succeeded or are succeeding in attaining the indicated goals.  There must be a spiritual future indicated.  It is that which is required now.

The word "spiritual" does not refer to religious matters, so-called.  All activity which drives the human being forward towards some form of development—physical, emotional, mental, intuitional, social—if it is in advance of his present state is essentially spiritual in nature and is indicative of the livingness of the inner divine entity.  The spirit of man is undying; it forever endures, progressing from point to point and stage to stage upon the Path of Evolution, unfolding steadily and sequentially the divine attributes and aspects.

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The three points of our general theme are:

1. The Technique of the Education of the Future.

2. The Science of the Antahkarana.  This deals with the mode of bridging the gap which exists in man's consciousness between the world of ordinary human experience, the threefold world of physical-emotional-mental functioning, and the higher levels of so-called spiritual development which is the world of ideas, of intuitive perception, of spiritual insight and understanding.

3. Methods of Building the Antahkarana.  This leads to the overcoming of the limitations—physical and psychological—which restrict man's free expression of his innate divinity.  Here we can only prepare the ground for this third point because the subject involves advanced meditation practices which must be approached gradually.  I have dealt with meditation in my other books.

The question might here be asked, why it is of value to consider giving time to that which lies as yet in the future.  I would reply by reminding you that "As a man thinketh, so is he."  This is a truism and a platitude of occultism.  Therefore, what is true of the individual is also true of the group and as a group thinks, so does it eventually react.  As the group thought-waves penetrate into the mental atmosphere of humanity, men become impressed and the inaugurating of the new ways of living and of developing proceeds with increased facility.  Here I seek only to give you some brief and general ideas which will serve to indicate to you the trend of my thought and the purpose which I have in mind.  Perhaps the easiest way for me to do this is to formulate certain propositions which are of interest and which can carry illumination.

I. Education, up to the present time, has been occupied with the art of synthesising past history, past achievement [3] in all departments of human thought and with the attainments to date of human knowledge.  It has dealt with those forms of science which the past has evolved.  It is primarily backward-looking and not forward-looking.  I would remind you that I am here generalising, and that there are many and notable small exceptions to this attitude.

II. Education has concerned itself primarily with the organising of the lower mind, and a child's calibre has been largely gauged by its reaction to accumulated information (where education is concerned), collated and collected data, sequentially handed out, digested and arranged so as to equip the child to compete with the information which other people possess.

III. Education to date has been largely memory training, though there is now emerging the recognition that this attitude must end.  The child has to assimilate the facts that the race believes to be true, has tested in the past and found adequate.  But each age has a differing standard of adequacy.  The Piscean Age dealt with the detail of the endeavour to measure up to a sensed ideal.  Hence we have a history which covers the method whereby tribes acquired national status through aggression, war and conquest.  That has been indicative of racial achievement.

Geography has been based on a similar reaction to an idea of expansion, and through it the child learns how men, driven by economic and other necessities, have conquered territory and absorbed lands.  This too has been regarded, and rightly so, as a racial achievement.  The various branches of science are also regarded as constituting the conquest of areas of territory, and this again is acclaimed as racial achievement.  The conquests of science, the conquests of nations, and the conquests of territory are all indicative of the Piscean method, with its idealism, its militancy, and its separativeness in all fields—religious, political and economic.  But the age of synthesis, of inclusiveness and of understanding is upon us, and the new education of the [4] Aquarian Age must begin very gently to penetrate the human aura.

IV. Education is more than memory training and more than informing a child or student as to the past and its achievements.  Those factors have their place, and the past must be understood and studied, for out of it must grow that which is new, its flower and its fruit.  Education involves more than the investigation of a subject and the forming of subsequent conclusions leading to hypotheses which, in their own turn, lead to still more investigation and conclusions.  Education is more than a sincere effort to fit a child or adult to be a good citizen, an intelligent parent and no charge upon the state.  It has a far wider application than producing a human being who will be a commercial asset and not a commercial liability.  Education has other objectives than rendering life enjoyable and so enabling men and women to achieve a culture which will permit them to participate with interest in all that transpires in the three worlds of human affairs.  It is all the above, but should also be much more.

V. Education has three major objectives, from the angle of human development:

First, as has been grasped by many, it must make a man an intelligent citizen, a wise parent, and a controlled personality; it must enable him to play his part in the work of the world and fit him for living peaceably and helpfully and in harmony with his neighbours.

Second, it must enable him to bridge the gap between the various aspects of his own mental nature, and herein lies the major emphasis of the instructions which I am now purposing to give you.

In the esoteric philosophy we are taught, as well you know, that on the mental plane there are three aspects of the mind, or of that mental creature we call a man.  These three aspects constitute the most important part of his nature:

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1. His lower concrete mind, the reasoning principle.  It is with this aspect of the man that our educational processes profess to deal.

2. That Son of Mind, which we call the Ego or Soul.  This is the intelligence principle, and is called by many names in the esoteric literature, such as the Solar Angel, the Agnishvattas, the Christ principle, etc.  With this, religion in the past has professed to deal.

3. The higher abstract mind, the custodian of ideas, and that which is the conveyor of illumination to the lower mind, once that lower mind is en rapport with the soul.  With this world of ideas philosophy has professed to deal.

We might call these three aspects:

The receptive mind, the mind as dealt with by the psychologists.

The individualised mind, the Son of Mind.

The illuminating mind, the higher mind.

Third, the gap between the lower mind and the soul has to be bridged, and curiously enough humanity has always realised this and has talked therefore in terms of "achieving unity" or "making the at-one-ment" or "attaining alignment."  These are all attempts to express this intuitively realised truth.

VI. Education also should concern itself during the new age with the bridging of this gap between the three aspects of the mind nature:  between the soul and the lower mind, thus producing at-one-ment between soul and personality; between the lower mind, the soul and the higher mind.  For this the race is now ready, and for the first time in the career of humanity the bridging work can go forward on a relatively large scale.  On this I need not enlarge, for it concerns the technicalities of the Ancient Wisdom, on which I have given you much in my other books.

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VII. Education is therefore the Science of the Antahkarana.  This science and this term is the esoteric way of expressing the truth of this bridging necessity.  The antahkarana is the bridge the man builds—through meditation, understanding and the magical creative work of the soul—between the three aspects of his mind nature.  Therefore the primary objectives of the coming education will be:

1. To produce alignment between mind and brain through a correct understanding of the inner constitution of man, particularly of the etheric body and the force centres.

2. To build or construct a bridge between the brain-mind-soul, thus producing an integrated personality which is a steady developing expression of the in-dwelling soul.

3. To build the bridge between the lower mind, soul, higher mind, so that the illumination of the personality becomes possible.

VIII. The true education is consequently the science of linking up the integral parts of man, and also of linking him up in turn with his immediate environment, and then with the greater whole in which he has to play his part.  Each aspect, regarded as a lower aspect, can ever be simply the expression of the next higher.  In this phrase I have expressed a fundamental truth which embodies not only the objective, but also indicates the problem before all interested in education.  This problem is to gauge rightly the centre or the focus of a man's attention and to note where the consciousness is primarily centered.  Then he must be trained in such a way that a shift of that focus into a higher vehicle becomes possible.  We can also express this idea in an equally true manner by saying that the vehicle which seems of paramount importance can become and should become of secondary importance as it becomes simply the instrument of that which is higher than itself. [7] If the astral (emotional) body is the centre of the personality life, then the objective of the educational process imposed upon the subject will be to make the mind nature the dominating factor, and the astral body then becomes that which is impressed by, and is sensitive to, environing conditions, but is under the control of the mind.  If the mind is the centre of personality attention, then the soul activity must be brought into fuller expression; and so on and on the work proceeds, progress being made from point to point until the top of the ladder has been reached.

It might be noted here that this entire exegesis of the mind and of the needed bridge building is but the practical demonstration of the truth of the occult aphorism that "before a man can tread the Path he must become that Path itself."  The antahkarana is the Path symbolically.  This is one of the paradoxes of the esoteric science.  Step by step and stage by stage, we construct that Path just as the spider spins its thread.  It is that "way back" which we evolve out of ourselves; it is that Way which we also find and tread.

SOME QUESTIONS ANSWERED

I will now attempt to deal somewhat with three questions on education asked by one of the students.  I can but indicate the ideal, and in so doing I run the risk of producing an effect of being so visionary that any approach under our present system might be regarded as impossible.

In answer to the first question, the prime function of all educators is twofold:

1. To train the brain to respond intelligently to impressions coming to it via the sense apparatus and so carrying information about the outer tangible world.

2. To train the mind so that it can fulfill three duties:

a. Deal intelligently with information relayed to it by the brain.

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b. Create thoughtforms in response to impulses emanating from the physical planes; to emotional reactions set in motion by the feeling-desire nature; to the thought world, in which the man's environment is found.

c. Orient itself to the subjective spiritual self, so that, from a condition of potentiality, the self may emerge into active government.

In this formulation of the function of the apparatus with which all educators have to deal (the mind and the brain), I have indicated the answer to the second question asked, which was:

"Are there definite types of activities, changing with the growing years and based on the phases of the growth process in the individual, that make for his best all-around development?"

I differ somewhat concerning the periods indicated by such occult teachers as Steiner, for though the seven year cycles have their place, the division is apt to be over-applied.  I would also suggest ten year cycles of development, divided into two parts:  seven of learning and three of application.

In the first ten years of a child's life he is taught to deal intelligently with information coming to him via the five senses to the brain.  Observation, rapid response, and physical coordination as the result of intention, must be emphasised.  The child must be taught to hear and see, to make contacts and to use judgment; and his fingers must then respond to creative impulses to make and produce what he sees and hears.  Thus are laid the elements of the arts and crafts, of drawing and of music.

In the next ten years the mind is definitely trained to become dominant.  The child is taught to rationalise his emotional and desire impulses, and to discriminate the right from the wrong, the desirable from the undesirable, and the essential from the nonessential.  This can be taught him [9] through the medium of history and the intellectual training which the cycle of his life makes compulsory under the laws of the country in which he lives.  A sense of values and of right standards is thus established.  He is taught the distinction between memory training and thinking; between bodies of facts, ascertained by thinkers and tabulated in books, and their application to the events of objective existence, plus (and here lies a thought of real importance) their subjective cause and their relation to the world of reality of which the phenomenal world is but the symbol.

At the age of seventeen the study of psychology will be added to the rest of the curriculum and the nature of the soul and its relation to the World Soul will be investigated.  Meditation along suitable lines will be part of the curriculum.  It should be noted here, however, that the religious implications of meditation are needless.  Meditation is the process whereby the objective tendencies and outgoing impulses of the mind are thwarted, and it begins to be subjective, to focus and to intuit.  This can be taught through the medium of deep thinking on any subject—mathematics, biology, and so forth.

The tendency of the newer education should be to make the subject of the educational experiment the conscious possessor of his equipment; it should leave him standing clear-eyed before life, with open doors ahead of him into the world of objective phenomena and relationships; it should have brought him to the knowledge of a door leading into the world of Reality and through which he may pass at will and there assume and work out his relation to other souls.

This second question—relating to the type of experience which would aid the child to round out his development and be supplementary to the compulsory state curriculum—is well-nigh impossible to answer, owing to the wide differences in human beings and the practical impossibility of finding those teachers who work as souls and as minds.

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Every child should be studied in three directions.  First, to ascertain the natural trend of his impulses:  Are they towards physical expression, towards manual labor, in which one would include such a wide range of opportunity as that of the mechanical factory worker and the trained skill of the electrician?  Is there a latent capacity for one or other of the arts, a reaction to colour and form, or a response to music and rhythm?  Is the intellectual calibre one that should warrant a definitely mental training in analysis, deduction, mathematics or logic?  Then perhaps as life goes on our young people will be graded into two groups:  the mystical, under which heading one would group those with religious, artistic and the more impractical tendencies; and the occult, which would include the intellectual, scientific and mental types.  By the time a child is seventeen the training given should have enabled him to strike his note clearly, and should have indicated the pattern into which his life impulses will most probably run.  In the first fourteen years, opportunity should be given to experiment in many fields of opportunity.  Pure vocational training should not be emphasised until the later years of the educational process.

The time is coming when all children will be studied in the following directions:

1. Astrologically, to determine the life tendencies and the peculiar problem of the soul.

2. Psychologically, supplementing the best of modern psychology with a knowledge of the Seven Ray types, which colours eastern psychology (see pages 18-23).

3. Medically, with special attention to the endocrine system, plus the usual modern methods in relation to eyes, teeth and other physiological defects.  The nature of the response apparatus will be carefully studied and developed.

4. Vocationally, so as to place them later in life where their gifts and capacities may find fullest expression [11] and enable them thus to fulfill their group obligations.

5. Spiritually.  By this I mean that the apparent age of the soul under consideration will be studied, and the place on the ladder of evolution will be approximately noted; mystical and introspective tendencies will be considered and their apparent lack noted.  Coordination between:

a. Brain and the response apparatus in the outer world of phenomena,

b. Brain and desire impulses, plus emotional reactions,

c. Brain and mind and the world of thought,

d. Brain, mind and soul,

will be carefully investigated so as to bring the entire equipment of the child, latent or developed, into functioning activity and to unify it into a whole.

The third question asks:

"What is the process of the unfoldment of the intellect in man?  How does the higher mind manifest, if at all, in the growing years?"

It is not possible in the short time at our command to deal here with the history of the progress of mental development.  A study of its racial growth will reveal much, for every child is an epitome of the whole.  A study, for instance, of the growth of the God-idea in the human consciousness would prove a profitable illustration of the phenomena of thought development.  A sequence of growth might most inadequately and briefly be tabulated as follows, based upon the process of unfoldment in a human being:

1. Response to impact, the infant's sense awakened.  He begins to hear and see.

2. Response to possession and to acquisitiveness.  The child begins to appropriate, becomes self-conscious and grasps for the personal self.

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3. Response to the instinct governing the animal and desire nature, and to human tendencies.

4. Response to the group.  The child becomes aware of his environment and that he is an integral part of a whole.

5. Response to knowledge.  This begins with the impartation of informative facts, and so to the registration, through the memory, of these facts; thus are developed interest, correlation, synthesis and application to the exigencies of the life.

6. Response to the innate need to search.  This leads to experiment on the physical plane, to introspection on the emotional plane, and to intellectual study and a love of reading or of listening, thus bringing the mind into some condition of activity.

7. Response to economic and sex pressure or to the law of survival.  This forces him to use his equipment and knowledge and so take his place as a factor in the group life, and to promote group welfare by some aspect of active work and by the perpetuation of the species.

8. Response to pure intellectual awareness.  This leads to a conscious free use of the mind, to individual thinking, to the creation of thoughtforms, and eventually to the steady orientation of the mind to a wider and wider field of realisation and awareness.  These expansions of consciousness finally bring a new factor into the field of experience.

9. Response to the Thinker or the soul.  With the registration of this response, the man enters into his kingdom.  The above and the below become as one.  The objective and the subjective worlds are unified.  Soul and its mechanism function as a unit.

Towards this consummation all education should tend.  Practically speaking, except in rare and highly evolved souls, [13] the higher mind does not manifest in children, any more than it did in infant humanity.  It can only truly make its presence felt when soul and mind and brain are aligned and coordinated.  Flashes of insight and vision when seen in the young, are frequently the reaction of their very sensitive response apparatus to group ideas and the dominant thoughts of their time and age, or of someone in their environment.

Let me now deal briefly with the points raised concerning the attitude of the teacher, particularly towards adult aspirants.

The true teacher must deal in truth and in sincerity with all seekers.  His time (in so far as he is held by the time equation on the physical plane) is too valuable to waste in social politeness or in refraining from making critical comment where a good purpose would be served.  He must depend thoroughly upon the sincerity of those whom he teaches.  Nevertheless, criticism and the pointing out of faults and errors does not always prove helpful; it may but increase responsibility, evoke antagonism or unbelief, or produce depression—three of the most undesirable results of the use of the critical faculty.

By stimulating their interest, by producing a subjective synthesis in the group he is teaching, and by fanning the flame of their spiritual aspiration, the group may arrive at a right discrimination as to their joint quality and necessities, and thus they will render the ordinary faultfinding attitude of the teacher unnecessary.

Those upon the teaching ray will learn to teach by teaching.  There is no surer method, provided it is accompanied by a deep love, personal yet at the same time impersonal, for those who are to be taught.  Above everything else, I would enjoin upon you the inculcation of the group spirit, for that is the first expression of true love.  Two points only would I make:

First of all, in teaching children up to fourteen years of age, it is necessary to bear in mind that they are emotionally [14] focussed.  They need to feel, and rightly to feel beauty, strength and wisdom.  They must not be expected to rationalise before that time, even if they show evidence of the power so to do.  After fourteen years and during adolescence their mental response to truth should be drawn out and counted upon to deal with presented problems.  Even if it is not there, an effort should be made to evoke it.

Secondly, an attempt should be made to approximate the child's place upon the ladder of evolution by a study of his background, his physical equipment, the nature of his response apparatus with its varied reactions, and his major interests.  This enquiry sets up a subjective rapport with the child which is far more potent in its results than would be months and months of strenuously used words in the effort to convey an idea.

THEORY, METHODS AND GOALS

All that I have to say here is still in the nature of introductory remarks.  Please bear this in mind.  I am anxious, however, to lay a sound foundation for our future discussions on the building of the antahkarana, so that we can work intelligently, but not critically.  It is essential that as we start our work it should be based on that which is today in existence.  Nature works without any gaps, and this is so even when (from the standpoint of academic science) there is an apparent hiatus between facts and known species.  In transitional periods some of the bridging forms have disappeared and the gap appears to be there.  But it is not so in fact.  We have not yet discovered all that is to be found in the world of phenomenal appearances.  We are passing through one of the great natural transitional periods at this time.  We are laying the foundation for the emergence of a new species of human being—a more highly evolved unit within the human family—hence much of our problem, and much of the present failure to meet the demands [15] of the race, and to measure up to human need for development.

We have, in the world, a general theory as to education, and certain basic methods are universally employed.  Countries vary greatly in the application of methods, and systems differ very considerably.  All, however, teach these same fundamental things; they teach the youth of the country to read and write and to attain a fair measure of ability to deal with figures through instruction in elementary arithmetic.  These three are curiously symbolic of the whole evolutionary unfoldment of the race.

Reading has to do with the clothing of ideas with form and is related to the first step in the creative process, wherein Deity, governed and impelled by an idea (embodying God's purpose and plan), converted that idea into the desired substance and clothed it with the needed outer appearance.  Writing symbolises the method whereby the process is carried on, but it is of course far more personal in its implications.  Reading is concerned essentially with the realisation of a clothed idea of some kind, whereas writing is, curiously enough, concerned with the individual's conscious self-relation to ideas, and his use of words in writing is the measure of the grasp he may have of these universal ideas.  Arithmetic (and the power to add, to subtract, and to multiply) is related also to the creative process and concerns the production of those forms upon the physical plane which will adequately produce the idea and bring it to manifestation.

Vision might be regarded as concerning itself with the higher levels of the mental plane, whereon the idea is sensed and seen.  Writing has a more definite relation to the concrete levels of the mental plane and to the ability of the man to bring through and express these visioned ideas in his own particular form.  Arithmetic has a definite relation to subsequent aspects of the process and to the emergence of the idea into some correlated form upon the [16] physical plane.  The visioning of the thoughtform is a process which must be succeeded by the appropriation of as much energy by the idea as is needed to make it effective or "apparent" (esoterically speaking).  Of this the symbolism of arithmetic is the expression.

From another angle, man reads his destiny in the heavens and writes out that destiny in his life upon the earth; he reduces, knowingly or unknowingly, the idea of his soul to due and proper form, so that each life adds, subtracts and multiplies, until the sum of each soul's experiencing is complete.  Thus, symbolically, the three basic ideas are held in elementary education, though their true meaning is divorced from reality and the right significance is entirely lost.  All that we have, however, emerging slowly and definitely through the medium of world education, is built upon this unrealised scaffolding.  The fundamental necessity which today confronts the educational world is the need to relate the process of unfolding the human mentality to the world of meaning, and not to the world of objective phenomena.  Until the aim of education is to orient a man to this inner world of realities, we shall have the misplaced emphasis of the present time.  Until we can arrive in our educational objectives at the bridging of the gap between the three lower aspects of man and the soul (a bridging which must take place upon the mental levels of consciousness), we shall make but little progress in right directions and all interim activity will be inadequate to the modern need.  Until the fact of the higher mind is recognised, and the place which the lower concrete mind should fill as the servant of the higher is likewise recognised, we shall have the overdevelopment of the concrete materialising faculty—with its aptitude to memorise, to correlate facts and to produce that which will meet man's lower desire—but we shall not have a humanity which can truly think.  As yet, the mind reflects the lower desire nature and does not attempt to cognise the higher.

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When the right method of training is instituted, the mind will be developed into a reflector or agent of the soul and so sensitised to the world of true values that the lower nature—emotional, mental and physical or vital—will become simply the automatic servant of the soul.  The soul will then function on earth through the medium of the mind, thereby controlling its instrument, the lower mind.  Yet at the same time, the mind will remain the recorder and reflector of all information coming to it from the world of the senses, from the emotional body, and will register also the thoughts and the ideas current in its environment.  At present, it is alas true, the trained mind is regarded as the highest expression of which humanity is capable; it is viewed entirely as a personality, and the possibility of there being something which can use the mind, as the mind in its turn uses the physical brain, is overlooked.

One of the things which we shall seek to do in our studies together is to grasp the relation of the world of meaning to the world of expression; we shall attempt to study the technique whereby this world of quality (which expresses itself through the world of meaning) can be entered and understood by the integrated consciousness of the intelligent human being.

Certain words will recur again and again as we work and study together; such words as meaning, quality, value—all of which stand revealed in their vital spiritual significance when man learns to grasp the fact of the higher realities and bridges the gap between his higher and his lower consciousness.  The significance also of creative activity and the right understanding of what we call genius will likewise be made clearer, and in this way creative work will no longer be regarded as unique and manifesting sporadically as is now the case but will become the subject of trained attention, and so assume its normal place in man's unfoldment.  It might be added here that creative activity in the field of art becomes possible when the first aspect of [18] the bridging energy of man can function and the soul (manifesting its third or lowest aspect) can begin to work.  Creative work can be carried forward when two of the "knowledge petals" of the egoic lotus are unfolded.  The man can produce, through knowledge and creative energy, something upon the physical plane which will be expressive of the soul's creative power.  When two of the "love petals" are also unfolded, then a genius makes his appearance.  This is a technical piece of information for those students who are studying the science of the Ageless Wisdom, but it is of no value to those who do not recognise symbology, or the fact of the higher ego or soul.

It might be of value here if I clarified my use of the words "higher ego."  As you know, if you have read A Treatise on the Seven Rays, Vols. I and II (Esoteric Psychology), the soul is an aspect of the divine energy in time and space.  We are told that the Solar Logos circumscribed for His use and for the meeting of His desire, a certain measure of the substance of space and informed it with His life and consciousness.  He did this for His good purposes and in conformity with His self-realised plan and intent.  Thus He submitted Himself to limitation.  The human monad followed the same procedure and—in time and space—limited itself in a similar manner.  On the physical plane and in the physical body, this phenomenal and transient entity controls its phenomenal appearance through the two aspects of life and consciousness.  The life principle—the flow of divine energy through all forms—is temporarily seated in the heart, while the consciousness principle, the soul of all things, is located (temporarily as far as the form nature of a particular human unit is concerned) within the brain.  As again you know, the life principle controls the mechanism through the medium of the blood stream, for "the blood is the life," and uses the heart as its central organ; whilst the consciousness principle [19] uses the nervous system as its instrument, with the intricate extensions of the organ of sensitivity, the spinal column.

The objective of education should therefore be the training of the mechanism to respond to the life of the soul.  The higher Self or Soul is the sumtotal of the consciousness of the Monad, again in time and space.  The lower self or soul is, for our purposes, as much of that sumtotal as any one person in any one life can use and express.  This activity is dependent upon the type and quality of the body nature, the mechanism produced by soul activity in other lives, and the effect of reaction to environing conditions.  The increasing of soul awareness, the deepening of the flow of consciousness, and the development of an inner continuity of awareness, plus the evocation of soul attributes and aspects upon the physical plane through the medium of its triple mechanism, constitute the objective of all education. These aspects are, as you well know:

1. Will or purpose.  This, through education, should be developed to the point where the manifested life is governed by conscious spiritual purpose and the life tendency is correctly oriented towards reality.

The right direction of the will should be one of the major concerns of all true educators.  The will-to-good, the will-to-beauty, and the will-to-serve must be cultivated.

2. Love-wisdom.  This is essentially the unfolding of the consciousness of the whole.  We call it group consciousness.  Its first development is self-consciousness, which is the realisation by the soul that (in the three worlds of human evolution) man is the Three in One and One in Three.  He can therefore react to the associated groups of lives which constitute his own little phenomenal appearance; self-consciousness [20] is, therefore, a stage on the way to group consciousness and is the consciousness of the Immediate.

Through education, this self-consciousness must be unfolded until the man recognises that his consciousness is a corporate part of a greater whole.  He blends then with the group interests, activities and objectives.  They are eventually his and he becomes group conscious.  This is love.  It leads to wisdom, which is love in manifested activity.  Self-interest becomes group interest.  Such should be the major objective of all true educational endeavour.  Love of self (self-consciousness), love of those around us (group-consciousness), become eventually love of the whole (God consciousness).  Such are the steps.

3. Active Intelligence.  This concerns the unfolding of the creative nature of the conscious, spiritual man.  It takes place through right use of the mind, with its power to intuit ideas, to respond to impact, to translate, analyse, and to construct forms for revelation.  Thus the soul of man creates.  This creative process can be described, as far as its steps are concerned, as follows:

a. The soul creates its physical body, its phenomenal appearance, its outer form.

b. The soul creates, in time and space, in line with its desires.  Thus the secondary world of phenomenal things comes into being and our modern civilisation is the result of this creative activity of the soul's desire nature, limited by form.  Ponder on this.

c. The soul creates through the direct agency of the lower mind and hence the appearance of the world of symbols which fill our united lives with interest, concepts, ideas and beauty, through the written word, the spoken word, and the creative [21] arts.  These are the products of the thought of the thinkers of the race.

The right direction of this already developed tendency is the aim of all true education.  The nature of ideas, the modes of intuiting them, and the laws which should govern all creative work are its goals and objectives.  Thus we come to the world of attributes which supplement the activity of the three aspects, in the same way that the three major rays are enhanced and aided by the work of the four minor rays.  These four attributive unfoldments in man, through the activity of the soul in manifestation, are:

4. The attribute of harmony, produced through conflict.  This leads to release and to the eventual power to create.  This is one of the attributes which education should deal with from the angle of the intuition and should hold before its exponents as personality and group objectives.  It is the attribute latent in all forms and is that innate urge or discontent which leads man to struggle and progress and evolve in order finally to make atonement and union with his soul.  It is the lowest aspect of that higher spiritual and monadic triad which reflects itself in the soul.  It is the consciousness of harmony and beauty which drives the human unit along the path of evolution to an eventual return to his emanating Source.

Education must work, therefore, with this dissatisfaction and interpret it to those who are taught, so that they can understand themselves and work intelligently.

5. The attribute of concrete knowledge whereby man is enabled to concretise his concepts and so build thoughtforms whereby he materialises his visions and his dreams and brings his ideas into being.  This he does through the activity of the lower concrete mind.

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The true work of education is to train the lower man in right discrimination and true sensitivity to the vision, so that he can build true to the purpose of his soul and produce upon the earth that which will be his contribution to the whole.  It is right here that the work of modern education has to begin.  Not yet can man work with intelligence in the world of ideas and of patterns; not yet is he sensitive to the true spiritual values.  This is the goal for the disciple, even though the masses cannot yet function on these levels.  The first thing that must be done is to train the child in the correct use of the discriminating faculty and in the power of choice and of directed purpose.  He must be brought to a truer understanding of the underlying purpose of being, and be led to work with wisdom in the field of creative activity, which means, in the last analysis, in the right use of the "mind stuff" (the chitta of Patanjali).  Thus and only thus, can he be released from the control of his lower nature.

6. The attribute of devotion is the next to be considered.  Devotion grows out of and is the fruit of dissatisfaction, plus the use of the faculty of choice.  According to the depths of a man's discontent, and of his power to see clearly, he passes from one point of temporary satisfaction to another, each time demonstrating his devotion to a desire, to a personality, to an ideal, and to a vision, until he finally unifies himself with the ideal which is the highest possible to man.  This is, first of all, the soul; and then the Oversoul or God.

Educators are therefore faced with the opportunity of dealing intelligently with the innate idealism to be found in any child, and with the interesting task of leading the youth of the world on from one realised goal to another.  But this they must do in the future from the angle of the ultimate [23] soul objective and not, as in the past, from the angle of a particular standard of national education.  This is an important point, for it will mark the shift of attention from the nonessential to the essential.

7. Finally the attribute of order, and the imposition of an established rhythm through the development of innate faculty to function under directed purpose and ritual.  This particular attribute of divinity is now highly developed in one aspect, so that we have today much standardisation of humanity, and the autocratic imposition of a ritualistic rhythm upon public life in a large number of countries.  It can be seen to perfection in the life in our public schools—but it is an undesirable perfection.  This is partly due to the recognition that the unit or individual is only a part of a greater whole (a recognition which is much needed) and a part of the evolutionary unfoldment of the race.  Owing, however, to our faulty application of any new truth it means as yet the submergence of that unit in the group, leaving him little opportunity for the free play of the individual will, intelligence, purpose and soul technique.  Educators will have to work with this principle of innate attribute and this instinct to ordered rhythm, making it more creatively constructive and so providing, through it, a field for the unfoldment of soul powers.

I have digressed thus far so as to instill certain of the basic ideas which should underlie the educational tendencies.  These thoughts, coupled with those already given, constitute a statement of the objectives before the educators of the world which you would find it of value to consider.  Earlier I suggested the goal.  I now link that goal up with possibilities, for I have here touched upon the [24] equipment (aspects and attributes) which is found, in some stage of development, in every human being.  It is with these hidden traits and instincts that the future educational systems must work.  They must not work, as they do today, with the brain apparatus and with the lowest aspects of the mind; nor must they lay their emphasis upon the effort to impress upon that brain and mind the facts, so-called, of the evolutionary process and of physical plane investigation.

The above remarks will serve to show you that the true educator should be working with energies in a world of energy; that these energies are tinged and qualified by distinctive divine attributes, and that each human being therefore can be regarded as an aggregate of energies, dominated by some one particular type of energy which serves to make him distinctive among his fellows, and which produces the differences among human beings.  If it is true that there are seven major types of energy qualifying all forms, and that these in their turn are subdivided into forty-nine types of qualified energy, the complexity of the problem emerges clearly.  If it is true that all these distinctive energies play constantly upon energy-substance (spirit-matter), producing "the myriad forms which make up the form of God" (Bhagavad Gita, XI), and that each child is the microcosmical representation (at some stage of development) of the Macrocosm, the magnitude of the problem becomes evident, and the extent of our demanded service will call forth to the utmost the powers which any human being can express at any given moment in time and space.

You will note that these words "in time and space" have repeatedly recurred in this instruction.  Why is this?  Because it must constantly be remembered that we are living in the world of illusion—an illusion which is temporary and transient and which will some day disappear, taking with it the illusion of appearance, the illusion of evolutionary [25] unfoldment, the illusion of separativeness, and the illusion of distinctive identity—that illusion which makes us say "I am."  The educator of the future will start his service to the child with the recognition of this ephemeral and transient misconception of the soul, and will deal primarily with the mind aspect, and not with the imposition of as much imparted organised knowledge concerning phenomenal existence as the memory of the child is capable of grasping.  How can I illustrate this changed attitude to you in the simplest form?  Perhaps by pointing out that, whereas today parents and guardians of the child spend much of their time in answering or evading questions posed by the awakening consciousness of the child, in time to come the situation will be reversed.  Parents will ceaselessly meet the demands of the emerging intelligence of the child by always enquiring of the child, Why?  Why ask this?  Why is it thus?—and so throwing always the responsibility of answering the questions upon the child, yet at the same time dropping the solution of the question subtly into the child's mind.

This process will begin in the fifth year of the child's life; the seeking intelligence (which is the child itself) will always be forced by the teacher into the position of inward search, not outer demand for a reply which can be memorised and which rests upon the authority of the older person.  If this seems to you as yet impossible, remember that the children who will or have come into incarnation, after the period of increased stimulation found between the years 1935 and 1942, will normally and naturally respond to this evocation of the mind element.

One of the major functions of those who train the infant minds of the race will be to determine, as early as possible in life, which of the seven determining energies are controlling in each case.  The technique to be later applied will then be built upon this important initial decision—hence again, the growing responsibility of the [26] educator.  A child's note and quality will be early determined, and his whole planned training will grow out of this basic recognition.  This is not yet possible, but will shortly be so, when the quality and nature of any individual etheric body can be scientifically discovered.  This development is not as distant as might be supposed or anticipated.

It is not my intention to deal with the details of this process, nor to elaborate the methods whereby the children of the race can be trained.  Our objective is to deal with the more universal and immediate necessity of bridging the gap between the different aspects of the lower self, so that an integrated personality emerges; and then of bridging the gap between the soul and the spiritual triad, so that there can be the free play of consciousness and complete identification with the One Life, thus leading to the loss of the sense of separateness and to the merging of the part with the Whole, with no loss of identity but with no recognition of self-identification.

Here an interesting point should be carefully noted.  It holds the key to future racial unfoldment.  For it the new science of psychology, which has developed so remarkably during the past thirty years, is preparing us.  Students should train themselves to distinguish between the sutratma and the antahkarana, between the life thread and the thread of consciousness.  One thread is the basis of immortality and the other the basis of continuity.  Herein lies a fine distinction for the investigator.  One thread (the sutratma) links and vivifies all forms into one functioning whole and embodies in itself the will and the purpose of the expressing entity, be it man, God or a crystal.  The other thread (the antahkarana) embodies the response of the consciousness within the form to a steadily expanding range of contacts within the environing whole.

The sutratma is the direct stream of life, unbroken and immutable, which can be regarded symbolically as a direct stream of living energy flowing from the centre to the periphery, [27] and from the source to the outer expression or the phenomenal appearance.  It is the life.  It produces the individual process and the evolutionary unfoldment of all forms.  It is, therefore, the path of life, which reaches from the monad to the personality, via the soul.  This is the thread soul and it is one and indivisible.  It conveys the energy of life and finds its final anchor in the centre of the human heart and at some central focal point in all forms of divine expression.  Naught is and naught remains but life.