=1 "A mind of light"
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A mind of light
- The great passage,
- the transition from mind to supermind,
- the transfiguration of the intelligent into a divine light.
- — Sri Aurobindo
10,000,000,000 cerebral neurons and ten thousand billion or more possible connections between the neurons! The superbrain of a galactic intelligence? No, a human being!
For hundreds of thousands of years man has been aggregating this formidable instrument, but he has never used more than a small part, and that is in a very summary way.
- “Almost all (the experts) agree that people now are using less than ten per cent of their potential abilities: some put the figure at less than one per cent.” — George B. Leonard
Man had to invent civilization and education as echo chambers in order to become conscious of his own inborn mentality, and in our day to invent Boolean algebra and cybernetics in order to understand his most elementary mental structures. But he has not yet succeeded in creating a culture that would fully utilize his brain, which remains undernourished and understimulated, in an environment that gives him, like so many stars, ten billion intelligence signals every day.
- “Not until we realize that a poor culture will never become rich, though it be filtered through the expert methods of unnumbered pedagogues, and that a rich culture with no system of education at all with leave its children better off than a poor culture with the best system in the world, will we begin to solve our education problems.” — Margaret Mead
The genetic programme which builds for our children ten billion cerebral neurons, stops with this microgalactic tour de force, this triumph of evolution. Most of these neurons will never attain to normal size and will never function at all. They have no interconnections. To follow up the genetic programme and create these connections has been left to chance, external stimulations, and incompetent educators who excite a few neurons at random, inducing them to make desultory connections, some correct, some incorrect.
To be the proud possessor of a brain with all its physical, chemical, biological and cosmic connections in expanding order, belongs to a coming of age of education. The enormous work on oneself, which contains in methodically awakening one’s cerebral cells and establishing between them more than ten thousand billion physical connections averaging 10,000 per neuron and in some cases even 50,000, has never been done by anybody on our planet; it has never even been attempted. Science has just now become conscious of these possibilities and begun to perceive new methods of teaching that might jet toward this mastery. Yet this is merely post-natal mental education. The entire process can be accelerated if it is begun before the physical birth. Even then it will comprise, through the medium of the parents’ consciousness, everything which concerns a human being.
The weight of a newborn baby’s brain increases one to two milligrams per minute. The slightest slowing down in the flow of food that sustains this incredible growth creates an irreversible damage to the brain. The backwardness so created cannot later be compensated for; it amounts to a definitive impairment. A scientific programme of nourishment is therefore part of mental education.
The brain of an adult human being can stand fasting without deterioration, but the least food deficiency during the prenatal period and early infancy can never be made good. A single day without the necessary quantity of protein and lecithin, indispensable to cerebral growth, and the child will be crippled permanently; something has been taken from his fullness of being, from his divinity. And what is true for food is just as true for the sensations, ideas, identifications and joys which, on all planes of being, feed the child’s integral becoming.
The newborn child receives a part of his education through his skin, which constitutes the most awakened and the most individualized of his senses. When he is not asleep, and perhaps even when he is, his mother should fondle him constantly as the mother monkeys do their children, manipulated his limbs, play with him, carry him about with her, rock him in her arms, bathe and massage him, take the inventory of his body by caress, challenge his sensitivities, his strength and his beauty. These initiatives of movement and feeling awaken various sectors of the brain and play an important part in the development of the child’s intelligence.
Psychologists have noted that young babies, put into orphanages where they lacked these constant stimulations, remain more or less backward throughout life. Even with the best food and hygiene their learning capacity never comes up to average. On the other hand, young prodigies are generally average children who, while very young, were played with by their mothers more than most children and who in this way received the necessary neuronic stimulations for their awakening. We all know that movements showing an extreme physical suppleness such as those of circus performers are movements that any baby can make quite naturally. They have simply been maintained by regular practice. In the same way a genius of memory, or of mathematics, or of music is someone who has kept alive and systematically trained the mental capacities and plasticity he had as a baby. Almost all our children can and should be prodigies.
The mother’s task is above all not to damage her child. This implies putting at his disposal the multiple inflow that he requires for his growing fullness, the stimuli from the universe and from the future, and the massive cultural and spiritual impact of an environment with which he should be in continual interaction and resonance. Failing this, he wilts within. What he needs is the whole universe and all spacetime. There he can be simultaneously performing and seeing, audience and actor, in his theatre, the world.
- “Too many kids today are raised like plants.” — Burton White
The brain of modern man is not only 99% asleep, and artificially diminished, but also incomplete. Billions of isolated neurons remain unused. The major role of mental education is to create the missing links in order to form a complete instrument.
One should remember, for instance, that pigeons have been taught to read a geographic map and then recognize the same landscape from an airplane. This involves the utilisation of some parts of the brain otherwise left idle, and the establishment of permanent connections. Similarly, experiments with baby mice have shown a clear increase in their mental capacity, a physical development of the brain and of its connections after educational games have been put at their disposal.
- “As the fortunate rat lives out his life in the educationally enriched condition, the bulk of his cortex expands and grows deeper and heavier than that of his culturally deprived brother… We have created superior problem-solving animals.” — David Krech
Thus we have to invent for our children a garden full of games for the mind, mental acrobatic exercises, dances which harmoniously build the muscles of their brain, choruses of relations which put the awakened neurons into resonance. We have to set up a circus of evolution for their capacity of accelerated growth.
The basic method consists in constructing links between all that the child knows, between all the separate bits of information that he receives, so that from the very beginning an immense communication network is built up. Once the habit of relating things has been established, he is able to absorb all information, effortlessly, for it is immediately connected with all the he already knows. It becomes part of an integrated body of knowledge, of a single whole.
As a child’s education progresses, more and more elements interrelate, radiating with an increasing subtlety, strength and richness of thought. Such a multiplicity of approaches and ways of seeing is thus materialized that thinking is released from its limited forms and becomes a ride and pure channel for the flow of intuition and life, a portal for creation itself. Then education is neither tedium nor exercise. It has become a festival, that of the universe where everything communicates, where each adds to the perfection and the joy of the other, and where the whole reveals itself in an exalting intimacy.
- “A brain composed of such neurons obviously can never be ‘filled up’. Perhaps the more it knows the more it can know and create. Perhaps, in fact, we can now propose an incredible hypothesis: The ultimate creative capacity of the brain may be, for all practical purposes, infinite.” — George B. Leonard
To make this prodigious cerebral organism into an instrument of cosmic dimensions and capacities, a supreme refinement must be undergone, a high discipline: it has to tune itself to vibrate in perfect resonance with the whole universe.
The brain of most human beings functions like a badly regulated radio. It gets only the crackling noises: little incoherent thoughts, static fragments of things heard or learned. But in the brains of a true thinker — the artist, the inventor, the genius — the whole universe sings. Even a single atom is in resonance with the universe, and it sings. A brain which doesn’t sing is only a cumbrous machine which deforms reality and impoverishes existence.
To tune our brain so that it may enter into resonance with the universe is one of the conquests of yoga. This conquest is based on what that yogis call the silence, the elimination of all the noises of the merely mechanical mind. And this silence is the condition sine qua non of a liberated intelligence.
If the totality of our brain, fully awakened, can attain to this supreme resonance even for a brief moment of our life, three billion years of terrestrial evolution will not have been in vain. As the Upanishad proclaims, “At this instant all our ancestors rejoice”.
The first cosmic broadcaster will be born; the first man will silently speak, and know that he speaks for the earth, to the universe.
Some day humanity will understand that its true wealth lies in the intelligence of its children, and that all the future leaps into this wealth. But to awaken ten billion neurons and put them into relation with the whole universe is a superhuman task. So rapid a rhythm of information and communication will be needed that only a perfect symbiosis between a child and a computer could create it. No mother, no system of education known to us, could lead to such perfection. Perhaps only fairy stories contain the intuitive genius of forecasting such an ideal symbiosis, — vide the princess and her golden ball. We shall discover the computer as a golden ball, and a new age of education, in a forthcoming book by Medhananda: The Legend of Little Alif and Big Alif.
When one makes the necessary summary calculations and finds that at least three hundred years will be needed for this generalized awakening of the human neurons: three hundred years of adolescence, of plasticity and creativity, for man to become truly human. To realise this development we shall have to move more radically towards the conquest of sickness, old age and involuntary death. Quite simply, man needs more time to attain his maturity, his plenitude.
No other problem is as intricate as education. It now stands synonymous with a conscious and willed evolution, a happy union of man and his technique, of yoga and the conquest of the stars, of the child and a new garden of paradise.
What little we can see today of this new education allows us to anticipate, at least for the second or third generation, a complete transformation in the thinking process. It will become, when compared to present thinking, what warm blood in mammals was in comparison to cold blood in reptiles: a transfiguration, a taking over of a new dimension of the universe and a liberation of intelligence and love.
The task before each mother and each educator is to participate, through a continuous experimentation and a complete turn towards the future, in this new conquest, this miraculous prodigy: to create the first truly human being, the first mind of light.
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