Mental being
On Education
“Mental Education”
“It is only gradually, very slowly, through the movements of life and a more or less careful and thorough education that you begin to have sensations which are personal to you, feelings and ideas which are personal to you. An individualised mind is something extremely rare, which comes only after a long education; otherwise it is a kind of thought-current passing through your brain and then through another’s and then through a multitude of other brains, and all this is in perpetual movement and has no individuality. One thinks what others are thinking, others think what still others are thinking, and everybody thinks like that in a great mixture, because these are currents, vibrations of thought passing from one to another. If you look at yourself attentively, you will very quickly become aware that very few thoughts in you are personal. Where do you draw them from? — From what you have heard, from what you have read, what you have been taught, and how many of these thoughts you have are the result of your own experience, your own reflection, your purely personal observation? — Not many.
Only those who have an intense intellectual life, who are in the habit of reflecting, observing, putting ideas together, gradually form a mental individuality for themselves.”[1]
- “And in the head?
Ah! In the head it is all the perversions of thought, all the treacheries — treacheries, there is a huge number of them: one betrays one’s soul so often and so persistently, it is frightful — all the decisions, the points of view and favourable explanations, as I was telling you, and then a kind of habit of criticising... What one doesn’t want to hear, when there is something higher which makes you feel your fault, there is a habit of immediately finding an explanation and a severe criticism of the idea or thought; or else some people turn it into ridicule; there are people who immediately oppose it with another idea or some commonplace notion or other. You can’t imagine the bazaar there is in the head! It is something terrible. If you were to look really objectively at what is going on in there, it is frightful — before you put some order, see clearly, arrange all that, see that two contradictory ideas are not lined up parallel.
I know a large number of people who shelter in their minds contradictory ideas, not organised or synthesised — there is no question of a synthesis for them — but like... an almost fraternal cohabitation among things which are mortally opposed, that is, ideas which cannot lodge together. You can arrange them in a vast synthesis but that of course is a work of a higher order; yet two things, two ideas which have absolutely contradictory consequences in action and are absolutely contradictory explanations of the same fact... and these two things are there, side by side, they are even sometimes so close that one feels they are joined and live together without being troubled by the ridiculousness of their association.”[2]
“A new humanity means for us the appearance, the development of a type or race of mental beings whose principle of mentality would be no longer a mind in the ignorance seeking for knowledge. Instead, it would be possessed already of what could be called a mind of light, a mind capable of being truth conscious and manifesting in its life a direct in place of an indirect knowledge.”[3]
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- ↑ Questions and Answers 1957-1958, p.44
- ↑ Questions and Answers 1955, p.90
- ↑ Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, p.585
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