Thank you for inviting me to participate in this webinar on Integral Education in Higher Education. The term Integral Education, of course, has been coined at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry I believe by the Mother and been used to describe the kind of education imparted at the Sri Aurobindo International Center of Education. Mostly we hear of Integral Education in the context of children’s education, and most of the literature on this subject also addresses elementary education, though the SAICE also includes college level higher education in its Knowledge section.
Personally, I teach at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, an American university founded by Haridas Chaudhuri, a disciple of Sri Aurobindo. Though the term Integral was introduced into the university name after his passing, it is understood to mean what it would in the context of Sri Aurobindo’s teachings, though the nuances of the term have grown more complex over time.
Thirdly, I realize that this webinar has been organized by Auro University in Gujarat, India, perhaps with the hope of implementing some approaches to Integral Education in higher education itself. Hence to reflect on the subject of Integral Education in Higher Education, I will try to put in relation, Integral Education as an idea belonging to the teaching of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, as it has been implemented at their ashram in Pondicherry, in what it has come to mean at CIIS and in what its possibilities are in terms of contemporary implementations.
My reflection will of necessity raise more questions than it answers, though it will also open some approaches for consideration. I will frame the inquiry along two inter-related questions:
- What is or are the goal or goals of integral education?
- What is the pedagogy and curriculum of integral education?
The goals of integral education seem to be to educate the integral person. Of course, we hit a stumbling block right from the beginning in this answer. What is the integral person? The simpler answer, arising from the definition of the standard implementation would be the person made up of five constituting forms of consciousness – physical, vital, mental, psychic and spiritual. But we may question that these are constituents of the integral person, not the integral person. In addressing these constituents piecemeal, are we not committing the same kind of error as perpetuated by Swami Sri Satchidananda’s trade-marked Integral Yoga, which teaches traditional hatha yoga, karma yoga, bhakti yoga and jnana yoga and calls itself integral yoga? Or are we saying that an integral education as an education of the constituents of the integral person is an approach or preparation towards the formation of the integral person?
What is the integral person? To answer this question, we have to think of the handles of integrality that can integrate our fragmented constituents – this is addressed by what Sri Aurobindo has called the triple transformation; these handles are the psychic being, the spiritual or overmental being and the supermind. Integral consciousness belongs to the third, the Supermind. The completion of the first two is a preparation for this third, so for our purposes , an adequate education in preparation for the integral person would be an education that aids and makes possible the integration of the human personality around the psychic being and the spiritual being.
In Sri Arurobindo’s yoga, purification or shuddhi consists of liberating the constituents of the personality from mutual interference, allowing each to develop by itself and bringing each directly into contact with and under the influence of the divine consciousness. In a definition of integral education as a preparation towards the integral person, we may envisage something similar – educating the constituents of the person in terms of their independent development and putting them in contact with the psychic and spiritual beings. Hence, psychic and spiritual education would take a central place not only in themselves but also as part of the education of the other parts. This would be one way to think of such a preparation towards integral being.
Another way, which might in some senses be the same but lend itself to a slightly different formulations, is what is addressed in Sri Aurobindo’s chapter “The Intuitive Mind” in The Synthesis of Yoga. The formation of an integral intuitive consciousness, a consciousness in which the constituents of the personality are expressing each its own characteristic intuitive consciousness would be a preparation towards the integral person.
Sri Aurobindo identified this goal early in his National Education writings, when he enumerated the first principle of true teaching being that nothing could be taught. This put the entire weight of pedagogy on the self-reliance of the student, in relation with the mentorship or midwifery of the teacher. In terms of his more developed yoga psychology, this would imply the development of a physical consciousness, a vital consciousness and a mental consciousness, in each of which a spiritual intuition would be expressing from an immanence. How this can be done is another question, but we can proceed further in considering what other meanings integral education can have in our times and our world, particularly as it pertains to CIIS.
The term integral, as far as CIIS is concerned, is used to mean a variety of things, seldom what Sri Aurobindo meant by it. However, a meaning that is adopted from its larger contemporary currency and made synonymous with integral at CIIS is “whole person” as in “whole person psychology.” The definition of the whole person is also debated but particularly in our times, it is increasingly felt that this definition cannot be restricted to the individual as an isolated psychological entity, but rather as an entity in relation with the earth, the world and the cosmos. This relationality is a two way definition – we are in the earth, the world and the cosmos as the earth, the world and the cosmos are in each of us. The whole person, from this viewpoint is the one who knows him/herself in identity with earth, world and cosmos – a psychology that includes ecology, culture and cosmology.
This extended definition of the whole person serves to address the problematic definition of the human as the rational ego that has been the image of thought dominating the modern age since the European Enlightenment, the humanist definition of the human. Our imbrication in larger systems, be they technological, economic, political, cultural or ecological has led to a situation in which this humanist image is increasingly defunct, its edges blurred by its larger contexts, or threatening and threatened by them. This has led to the rise of posthumanist thought, according to which the humanist image of the human has to be rethought in terms of its larger contexts. From a certain point of view, one may say that the integral humanism of Sri Aurobindo is already such a posthumanism – the Enlightenment definition of the human as the “cogitio” is critiqued here and revised as a transitional being, enlarging itself into a cosmic and integral being. But the starting points of address are different. Whereas Sri Aurobindo addresses the human as an isolated individual that must work on him or herself to integrate the psychology internally so as to find the right relation and identity with culture and cosmology, the posthumanist image of the whole person addresses the human as a situated being in relation with its contexts that must find the means for becoming integral through relationality.
Speaking of contexts, one thing which must be recognized in terms of the ashram definition of integral education is that it is not restricted to the walls of an institution. Integral education is the habitus or social context of integral education in the ashram. Students encounter an informal layer of lifelong pedagogy in their environment due to its assumed goals of becoming. The Sri Aurobindo ashram was conceived as a porous island of selective assimilation of the larger world of modernity so as to allow its inhabitants the relative freedom to develop psychologically into their larger possibilities. However, as we know, the contemporary postmodern world is increasingly omnipresent and has entered our homes and exists as an adjunct or prosthetic of our bodies wherever we are. This increasingly includes all human habitats including the ashram. The pressing revision of posthumanist redefinition belongs to this contemporary moment, in which, to utilize the symptomatic COVID phrase, “we’re all in it together.” At the same time, outside of this island, the individual, however much s/he may conceive of a togetherness with others, remains in danger of being anonymized into an undefined mass consciousness, unless a goal of becoming can accompany the posthumanist image. However, this does not change our need for individual praxis in terms of the integral. The praxis must be individual, but its starting points may be more relational, individual and collective, and in more senses than one.
This brings us to the issue of pedagogy and curriculum. Since the time of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the idea of multiple kinds of knowing has entered the academy and is quite prevalent at CIIS. These “kinds of knowing” are not the same as the stratified constituents of human consciousness identified by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, but they could be compared. In a Cartesian definition of the human, one way in which this multiplicity has been conceived is that of multiple forms of intelligence, as in the work of Howard Gardner. These forms of intelligence are related to perceptual and expressive capacity – eg. musical, visual, verbal, kinaesthetic, logical/mathematical, interpersonal, intrapersonal etc. A form of specialized intelligence related to Gardner’s interpersonal intelligence that has gained prominence at present is emotional intelligence. On the other hand, following the work of phenomenological and existential thinkers, prominently Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the body as a form of consciousness has been increasingly acknowledged.
At CIIS, when we speak of multiple kinds of knowing, somatic knowledge is a prominent and popular field of study, related to body consciousness. This includes a praxis of mental recognition of the body as a form of consciousness with which it is in relation, as addressed in subjects like “Phenomenology of the Body.” It may be said that this is a privileging of the mind once more, since it is not physical training per se, to awaken physical consciousness but mental theorizing of physical consciousness. At the ashram for example, a very great emphasis is paid on physical culture, initiated as part of child education but continued through into adulthood. It isn’t as if physical culture is entirely lacking at CIIS, since we teach courses such as Integral Tai Qi or Qi Gong. This, however, brings us to an important aspect of integral education in higher education. Though, whether we look at the model of the integral person in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s teaching or the whole person according to a posthumanist revision, the primacy of the individual mental intelligence or cogito is devalued, both models see it as an important element in a relational whole or assemblage coming into alignment with psychic and cosmic being. In higher education, it is this intelligence which is sought to be illuminated so as to become a facilitator and relational partner of other forms of consciousness, learning and intuiting its own and their right place in the assemblage. This is so even in the Upanishads. A higher or inner mental perception and intuition of subtler realities, whether spiritual or inner physical or vital, is necessary for the adult to coordinate a praxis moving towards its goals of integrality.
Multiple kinds of knowing at CIIS also include cultural forms of knowing that have been subjugated by modernity, such as shamanic and indigenous kinds of consciousness as in ancestral work or awaking to a spiritual presence in Nature. It also includes the study of different forms of yoga, including integral yoga. These forms of pedagogy are not restricted to informational content, but include reflection, meditation, contemplation and dyad and triad work to bring the categories discussed and taught into the range of experience, so that one may choose for oneself the specifics, time, place and duration of one’s spiritual praxis. The mental discipline needed in academics is followed and utilized to develop clarity and quickness of perception and expression. Other than this, the place of mental training is to develop a critical consciousness. This brings us to the question of curriculum. In the ashram implementation, curriculum is selected by free progress choice of students in consultation with mentors. This is appropriate to a goal of predominant inner psychological development. But if one is to conceive the goal as the whole person in its larger worldly contexts, the ability to interpret one’s world and shape it as a participant and leader is equally important. This necessitates a historical, social, cultural and political understanding of our time and place and a critical consciousness in interpreting events and making choices. Our times are one of extreme relativity and plurality, when a variety of cultural traditions co-exist, and not always in harmony or friendliness. Comparative, structuralist and post-structuralist analyses and actions need to be undertaken by the mind if one is to have wise agency in this situation. This must also be thought of as an aspect of mental intuition to be fostered and trained in higher education.
Finally, in coming to the training of the feelings, the co-existence, hybridization and erosion of multiple traditional systems of convention in our times saw the response of cultural modernism in the humanities from the early 20th c. Until close to the second World War, this movement, in its innumerable regional and temporal varieties and in al the arts, explored new principles of creative expression, expressed through individual originality. Languages of abstraction or quasi-abstraction, which challenged conventionalization or canon formation proliferated, demanding an intuitive subjective capacity to appreciate and speak critically. The capacity to do so was an invitation to a universal Subjective Age of culture, where the inner life retained its individual uniqueness, yet was intuited universally due to perceptions of inner experience at the level of feelings. Unfortunately, the post-World War II period has ushered an age of widespread skepticism that continues. It is hoped that an integral education at the higher educational level will play a part in intuitivizing human feelings through exposure to the world of the inner life through the arts.
I started by talking of the need for prioritizing an exposure to psychic and spiritual consciousness in an integral education. This would be equally true whether we see it from the viewpoint of the ashram or whole person education in the larger contemporary world. Relationality with earth, world and/or cosmos, if understood in terms of universal collective egos, is a frightening retrogression to a statistical chaos. It is rather to the earth being, world being or cosmic being that we are called to enter into concrete relation. Today, several intellectuals are speaking about the Earth as Mother Earth or Gaia, a conscious nurturing Goddess, whom we need to become aware of and enter into relation with. Similarly, the cosmos is often seen as the larger evolving Being of which the Earth itself and all its inhabitants are a part. Entering into living relation with this is the substance of Brian Swimme’s course and workshops called Eros and Cosmos. But as humans (or posthumans) participating in making a world of the future that will embody the plural integral person, our spiritual and psychic education should not forget to keep its enduring contemplation on the last New Year message of the Mother, given on January 1, 1973: “When you are conscious of the whole world at the same time, then you can become conscious of the Divine.”
