Reflections and Recollections
Part 4

Give them roots and wings

As parents we are caught up in the everyday chores of giving our children a stable home life, good food, care for their health and keeping them safe. When it comes to education, we send them to schools and maybe to supplementary classes, throw in a few extra books and CDs. Together with family values and culture, this gives them roots. Well, that’s our basic duty.

But what can we give that will prepare them for life? Maybe even prepare them for the day when they have to leave the nest and establish their own lives? A life that will be sooner or later lead them away from the cocoon of 'home'? What tools can we give them to help them grow and learn? How will they learn say, what it is to be human, to develop artistic expression, to identify, analyse and feel one with the natural world? Many of us adults did not get an opportunity to learn some of these skills when we grew up.

Like many other parents, we experience that these questions arise in our minds too from time to time. When we were introduced to the concept of the Integrated Education Programme (IEP), it was obvious that it addressed the concerns in a comprehensive way. We had no second thoughts about enrolling our children in the inaugural batch. But it came as a pleasant surprise when I was asked to be the facilitator for the Mental Education part of IEP.

To prepare the course objectives and outline I turned to Sadhana: A Guide to Self Mastery. This guide identifies the five principal phases of mental education based on The Mother’s and Sri Aurobindo’s teachings. In brief, according to the book, they are:

1) Development of the power of concentration, the capacity of attention.
2) Development of the capacities of expansion, widening, complexity and richness.
3) Organisation of one’s ideas around a central idea.
4) Thought control, rejection of undesirable thoughts, ability to think only what one wants and when one wants.
5) Development of mental silence, perfect calm and receptivity to inspirations coming from the higher regions of the being.

Since the course was targeted at primary school students in Singapore, it was decided to focus on the first three to begin with. While it is true that for most people, these phases follow one another, it was felt that the children needed to be exposed to the first three to a certain , so that what they would learn at IEP could be useful in their daily life. Greater emphasis was to be given on the first two at the initial stages.

When I tried to find suitable teaching material and collateral workshop material for the kids in line with these objectives, I faced a challenge. One that my colleagues who teach Vital and Psychic modules also faced. We could not get any ready material from sources in Pondicherry and their affiliates elsewhere in India. We understood that such workshops had been conducted for college students but not for primary school children. It is from this stage that the Mental Education course content and collateral material was developed.

The Mother has said, ‘There is nothing in the human or even in the super-human field, to which the power of concentration is not the key...’ We adults often tell children to concentrate more and not to be distracted. But have we really given them a set of tools and techniques to practise it? Most schools do not teach these. It is one thing to close one’s eyes and meditate but completely another thing to try and concentrate in a class of bubbly 8-10 year-olds.

The mental education workshops in IEP took note of the children’s day-to-day challenges and set about addressing them within the framework of Mother’s teachings and guidelines. They were taught simple techniques to develop their power of concentration. They were given practical tools to avoid distractions even in an active classroom environment.

It was not all just tools and techniques. There were games, quizzes, brain-teasers, mazes, word puzzles, and even questions that required lateral thinking. There was a play that broke the mould of stereotyping of characters and made children look at a popular tale from a different perspective. All in all it was designed to stretch their mental skills.

We hope we have given them the first feathers, which will grow into wings. These in turn will prepare them to take flight when they leave the nest and years later establish their own lives.

- Venkat

Be Here NOW!

(Mental Education at IEP)

My father was going to conduct these lessons and I was sure it would be very interesting. I was looking forward to it. As usual we did Suryanamaskar and Pranayama. My father started with concentration exercises. The first was to count from 100 to 1 backwards. The next was to find the word count of a passage without using a pencil or a finger to follow. Only the eyes to be used to count.

He followed it with some quiz sheets. He told us to think a little further than usual to get the answers. He said the final answers were simple. He said those of us who did not get the correct answer would be so amused when we found out the ease of calculating the answers. We managed to answer some of them. Some of them were tricky. Finally he solved the problems.

There were some more activities we had to do as homework. We were told to think about the question given to us in the end. I still use the concentration techniques he taught - ‘Be Here Now’, and the ‘Imaginary Tunnel’.

- Pranav Venkat