=1 "Education Unlimited – Unitive"

Education Unlimited: Unitive

The first result of an accelerated evolution is that man no longer has anything he can hold on to except the eternal foundation of things, unity. And it is at this point that the university discloses its deepest significance. For the university is not, as in its narrow sense, an institution for the teaching of certain things, in a certain way, to youth of a given age. Above all, the university is a consciousness, and as its name indicates, a consciousness turned toward the One: universitas.

At the mental level it is a consciousness that sees, behind appearance and change, always the One; that examines all experience, all facts that it encounters in the light of the One; that accepts them into its memory only after they have been illumined by the One. It is a consciousness which takes the whole universe as a ‘universe of discourse’, which always considers the whole in order to understand the part. It is a consciousness at ease and fearless in the immensity of the universe and its vertiginous becoming, because it does not lay stress on things but on the relations between things. It is alive to the interaction of all, the intersection of all, and finally the union of all with all.

This way of seeing and of operating is the very spirit of the new logic, of the new thought, brilliantly expressed in the symbolic language of the new mathematic.

The intensity of communications and the infinity of relations which the new thought perceives between all the elements of the universe, inter-individual television will realise between men and the computers and between data. As in fairy tales where the stones, trees, animals and men talk to one another, everything communicates, nothing is separated any longer, for the universe is a single set and not a series of isolated systems. It becomes comprehensible, calculable, and capable of transformation.

In the university of the future, instead of learning how to separate, to dissect, to isolate, one will learn how to relate everything.

And for the child of the new wave it will be the most interesting and rewarding play. No longer will he meet with endless repetition of rules and classifications set up by others, for others, or experience the shock of his flights of fancy knocking against narrow, squirrel-minded prejudices.

Primary school explained small facts, small isolated events, and gave them a name in a world with the dimensions of of a village. Its true role was to teach reading and writing – that is, to prepare the child for a book civilization. This function, however, has been accomplished only rarely. Very few children leaving primary school really know how to express themselves in writing or to select reading for continuation of their study.

Secondary education, or instruction at second-hand, was created to train subordinate officers and civil servants in a world with the dimensions of a province or nation or to prepare for university training by teaching the university language, Latin or Sanskrit.

At the university, one should not lose himself in the multitude. All information should be inscribed in a vaster wholeness which relates everything. Only one major subject should be studied at a time, not as if it existed independently of all the rest, but in order to find anew the whole universe through it and in it at leisure.

In primary school, for example, one learns to use an electric switch. In secondary school one studies some of the secondary effects of electricity, like those discovered by Ampère, Joule, Edison. But at university one should recognize that the whole physical universe, including our physical body, is an electromagnetic field to which countless biological and mental phenomena such as memory, the genetic code, and transmission of nervous sensations are connected. The electric light, then, is just one particular aspect of an immense reality which permeates all.

Thus that which distinguishes the university is not so much the subjects taught as the way in which they are taught: it is the seeking for an ever deeper identity of things, and the presence of a more and more integral totality, even to the supreme relationship: unity – the flame that unites, illumines and recreates all.

This unity, grasped by the Greek genius as a unit of measure and by the mystics as the Beloved, has now become the very foundation of new thought which tries to express it in a more subtle and yet a more concrete form. Consequently matter, life and mind will appear as frequencies in a scale of being. Man, with this new thought, will discover those identities that can serve as a foundation for a planetary language; and this language would not be an ersatz language like Esperanto, but perhaps a superlingual way of commanding similar to mathematics or music. He will also find those secret analogies for a new physics, a new medicine, a new psychology, a new society. Everything will rise toward new heights. Each being, each thing will benefit from the existence of all others, will shine in the united blaze of all others. All will have become transparent and immanent. On this foundation we shall be able to build a civilization so different that we will no longer be ‘human’ beings.

In Auroville one may search in vain for a ‘primary’ or ‘secondary’ school. In a world with the dimensions of an evolving metagalaxy, all education, from birth to death, will be university education.