Acharya Mahaprajna
No child is born educated. With the passage of time he gets to know more and more. The child lives in the present. He has no memory of the past nor any image of the future. But as he grows and becomes socialized, he comes to have both memory and imagination. The environment, specific circumstances and contacts and the teacher - these are the agencies of his education. And the aim of education is the development of personality. But there is a difference between secular and spiritual education. The former also aims at the development of personality but the latter aims at developing an independent personality. This difference is truly vital.
Man has his physical needs and appetites. All his actions are the result of these needs and appetites. Man's aptitudes and desires make compulsive demands on him but if steps are taken to fulfil it each time such a demand is made, there can be no development of an independent personality. One who always yields to desires and aptitudes cannot be called an independent person. For someone to be independent it is necessary that he be able to discriminate between a right demand and a wrong demand and thus accept the former and reject the latter. This power of discrimination and of rejection lies at the root of the development of an independent personality. Secular education is incapable of generating this power in man. Even this education sets itself the ideal of creating an independent personality, but its impracticality is always lost sight of.
One can thus preach: reject the demands made by the senses and by attitudes and desires.
But the question is whether mere preaching and sermonizing of this kind can achieve the desired results. Can the students really develop the power to reject by merely being preached to do so? Here it is important to note that theoretical knowledge and understanding by itself is not capable of giving a man the necessary power to translate it into action. This power is the most important thing. Worship of power in this sense is an unexceptionable principle. But it does not mean worshipping anything external. This power is within man himself. And to worship it is to awaken it, to awaken it from its dormant stage. The real thing is not merely to inspire but to awaken. Secular education does not have adequate means to awaken this power - it can only 'inspire' the intellect, induce thinking. It is not thoughts but experience that awakens power. The teachers of spirituality have laid the greatest emphasis on the development of the vital energy or the life force. When this energy, this force is developed, all other powers become automatically activated. In its absence no other power can be awakened.
Today the most difficult thing is to awaken the life-force. Ecological pollution has literally poisoned the atmosphere and men do not often get adequate life-sustaining oxygen to breathe. Furthermore, for awakening the life-force we need full and long breath. We breathe inadequately and this further reduces the quantity of oxygen inhaled by the lungs. The result is we are unable to get rid of all the toxicity accumulated in the system.
Breathing itself has its own limits. We breathe through the nose and the breath has no means of getting beyond the lungs. The human body is so big and it has many other organs too. What enables us to live is not breath as such but the life force. The former is merely a spark, as it were, of the latter. The life-force is the real power and it permeates the whole body. Any part in the absence of this life-force will die and this life-force is drawn not from any particular part of the body but from all over, from even the minutest cell in the body.
One can stop breathing for a minute, a day or even a year. It is a matter of practice. But one cannot survive even for a moment without the life-force. The real source of our power therefore is the life-force. In the initial stages one may experiment with mere breathing, but later on one has to learn how to draw the life-force from every part of the body. One has to lie down in the relaxed posture of kayotsarg and start breathing intently. One has then to start drawing the life-force from the entire body by actually experiencing that every cell of the body is taking part in the process of breathing. By so doing, sensitivity will be awakened in every pore of the body and the entire organism will become inundated with the life-force. This is an experiment in the development of the life-force. The teachers of spirituality did not merely preach the importance of developing this force. They also described the experiments through which one can draw the life-force from the entire body.
There are three Important centres from the point of view of such spiritual practice and experimentation:
- Pran Kendra (the centre of the life-force), which is the nasagra, or the tip of the nose.
- Darshan Kendra (The centre of Intuition), which is at the middle point between the eyebrows.
- Jyoti Kendra (the centre of controlling and disciplining one's temperament and nature), which is in the middle of the forehead.
These are three prerequisites to the development of an Independent personality - development of the life-force, development of intuition, and development of self-discipline. We will discuss them one by one.
The first thing is the development of vital energy or the life-force. For this it is necessary to concentrate for prolonged periods on the Prart Kendra, i.e. the tip of the nose. Without life-force it is not possible to develop in any other direction. Life-force is almost like the power of an explosion. This energy enables man to struggle, to put up a fight, to avoid escapism, and struggle is a part of life.
When the life-force has been adequately developed, conditions become very favourable for developing the intuitive power. Power can be very usefully employed, but it can also be misused. In order to ensure that the vital energy - which can be potentially dangerous also - is put to proper use, intuition is very necessary, and for this concentration on the Darshan Kendra, the exact middle point between the eyebrows, is necessary. Intuition, it must be remembered, transcends the limits of the mind and of the intellect. Those who base their judgements purely on the power of the intellect remain deprived of the superior power of intuition which is truly astonishing. If there is any line that divides the physical from the metaphysical, it is intuition. There are two worlds, the sensory and the supra sensory. In between is the world of intuition.
It is not uncommon to see the aberrations of the exercise of the mere intellect untempered by Intuition. Very often people literally go crazy full of the feeling of revenge for any real or apparent wrong done to them. They show an utter incapacity for forgetting and forgiving. Forgiveness is one of those qualities that come not through the intellect but through intuition.. It requires keeping the attention away from the immediate and the external and interpreting every event on a deeper insightful basis. This can be possible only through intuition and not through the intellect.
As remarked earlier, an awareness of independence should be the ultimate goal of education. It has also been noted that this goal cannot be achieved merely by preaching or theorizing. It needs the development of intuition by first developing the life-force or the vital energy. It is, thus, clear that modern education has failed in achieving its declared objectives simply because it has ignored the vital connection between itself and spirituality. If it be unwise to believe that the evolution of man has reached the final stage, one has to explore new possibilities of progress. Quite a few people, including social scientists and psychologists, believe that man in the remote past had a 'third eye', as it were, that was the power of intuition. As life became increasingly competitive leading to infinite struggles and excitability, this 'third eye' got atrophied and fell into disuse. To revive it, it is essential to create conditions conducive to its activeness, which is possible only through the practice of meditation. Mere theoretical conviction of the efficacy of meditation will not do. Theory has to be matched by practice, for without the latter awareness that comes only through experience will not be achieved. Moreover, it has to be remembered that practice of meditation has to become an integral part of daily living; else it well have no effect. Only when it has thus entered our daily lives can it be an instrument for the awakening of intuition. Thus, the importance of regular practice cannot be minimized.
Finally, we come to discuss the development of discipline. As mentioned earlier, the seat of control is situated in the middle of the forehead - what we called the Jyoti Kendra. Of all things, this needs concentrating upon most. Even physiological science recognizes the crucial importance of the pituitary, the pineal, and the hypothalamus in controlling and governing our entire personality. The Darshan Kendra develops intuition; the Jyoti Kendra develops all behavioural traits, and the front brain controls body temperature. The master controller or governor is the hypothalamus which controls even the pineal, which, in turn, controls the pituitary.
It is only after these three developments take place - of the vital energy or life-force, of intuition, and of discipline - that an independent personality is developed. A man who is tied down to animal or biological urges and drives can never be independent. Only practice of spirituality and meditation in the sense explained above to the awakening of intuition and once that happens all ties, all bonds to animal passions loosen automatically.
Today when science is making great strides and when truly astonishing secular and material achievements are taking place, it is time man paid attention to the development of an independent personality through spirituality and meditation.
