=1 "All teaching is a revealing"
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All teaching is a revealing
- “Nothing can be taught to the mind which is not already concealed as potential knowledge in the unfolding soul of the creature.”
Sri Aurobindo
The Synthesis of Yoga, p.54, “The Four Aids”
In our superficial way of looking at things we are convinced that education consists in bringing knowledge to a child. But this is not true.
When a child is born he knows all. He comes and incarnates with a whole sun of knowledge behind him. But what he knows is too much, is too beautiful and too marvellous to be contained in a normal limited nervous system. He could not exist as a separate being on earth with this knowledge. He would not be able to play his role in the terrestrial play with the fullness and the glory of his total knowledge. That is why nature provides him with filters, with veils between himself and his totality, between his surface being and the wells of his knowledge.
Just as a living being constituted of organic molecules would not be able to live in the interior of the sun, the mental being can not function in its sum of knowledge. In order to live on a planet it must separate from its sun, its true psychic being, live at a good distance – not too far, not too near. This is true not only of its physical body but also of its mental body and its body of bliss.
A large part of one's play on earth consists in rediscovering, in repossessing bit by bit, under ever-varying circumstances, that knowledge. For somewhere in him he preserves a remembrance of this totality, a memory of his knowledge which the Greeks called Alaethaia: that which one cannot lose when he crosses the river of forgetfulness, the river Lethe. And that is what the Christ meant when he said Ego aimi alethaia: I am that which is unforgettable.
A child has received a true education only when he has learned to go beyond his mammal limitations, to come into contact with his meternal sun, and to take the water from his well of knowledge.
True education helps him to discover the wisdom of his body – instinct – which he needs for the health of his body. The guidance which he needs for his role on earth, that absolute knowledge and security that he needs in order to undertake his next step, he can find in the formless wisdom of his heart or, if he needs a deeper understanding of the shadows and forms which he meets while a traveller on earth, in the form of luminous ideas.
An education which does not indicate the origin of all his knowledge is not an education which will lead to his trans-humanization, but a falsehood which will imprison him in the confusion and obscurity of his animality.
And in the same way that all the little animal needs is to be able to play the play of his particular animalhood, to remind his body and his nervous system of the techniques and the capacities of his ancestors, so it is also sufficient for a child to have the freedom and the encouragement to play the play of his surpassing divinity in order to repossess the glorious inheritance which the Buddha and the Christ and the Avatars of all the ages and all peoples have conquered for humanity.