 Today, I'm going to be sharing with you about my life and experiences guided and inspired and influenced by the thoughts, the words, and the teachings of Sri Aurobindo. I happen to be a teacher. I've been teaching first as a freelancer, a theater and education actor teacher. Then I was with the Delhi University in the Department of Journalism. Now I teach at Pondicherry University in the Department of Electronic Media and Mass Communication. The challenge for me always has been that how do I integrate the thoughts that have guided me personally in my life trajectory to bring those thoughts into the professional application so that what I have learned from Sri Aurobindo I can share with my students. How can we share the joy about integral yoga, integral education with the young generation who have probably never read Sri Aurobindo? How can we help them get in touch with their psychic being so that they know that the most important thing in life is within themselves? It is from that core within them, the psychic being, that when it governs human existence, then life takes on a totally different quality of living and experience. Humanity today is facing a lot of crisis worldwide. There are conflicts happening, there is a lack of communication. I happen to be teaching media and communication. But I am acutely aware of the lack of communication and the lack of presence between humans when they relate to each other and they communicate with each other. How do we resolve these conflicts? How do we overcome these differences? How do we achieve human unity and harmony and peace? How do we coexist together and support the flowering and the being of each psychic being? What I have learned in my journey of following Sri Aurobindo's teachings is that it has to be with egolessness. As we have read, the ego is the helper and the ego is the bar. Yes, so the ego is necessary to a certain extent, but beyond a point we have to shed the ego. And how can we shed the ego if we are not open to the divine energy, to the divine Shakti, to the divine mother? It is with the help of the divine Shakti, the divine mother in her various forms that we can overcome our lower nature, our lower prakriti and be ready for a higher order of manifestation. In my sharing for an hour or so with you, which I am very grateful to be able to do and it is with deep gratitude that I share my ideas. I am no scholar or expert on Sri Aurobindo. I am just a person like you, a very ordinary person, trying to live a life which is not that ordinary, trying to follow the teachings so that I can really try and apply the words of the master. So it changes the quality of my life, the quality of my work and hopefully I evolve a little bit more and I help my students around me and my community wherever I go to help them to evolve so that this human birth is not wasted. I seek your attention so that with me, let's go over some very important writings and words of Sri Aurobindo. I want to use this sharing like a meditation for all of us gathered here. Let's meditate and feel the power, the mantric power of his words and how very clearly, very definitively and very precisely he points out to what is it that we need to pay attention to. Now the question is, we have this great treasure house left to us to humankind by Sri Aurobindo. How much do we integrate these ideas and these words into our day-to-day living as parents, as teachers, as husbands and wives, as students, as administrators, as any person in any walk of life trying to do anything constructive, productive and meaningful on the time that we are here on this planet earth. So I urge you and I invite you for the next 45 minutes or so to meditate on these words of Sri Aurobindo which I have selected and I know that you cannot read them all but they are easily available online in the collected works of Sri Aurobindo and it is just to point your attention to something that he says so I will go a little faster on the slides, you will not really get time to read them cover to cover but the idea is to point in the direction that Sri Aurobindo is pointing us towards. I hope that I am a worthy instrument of the master and that what I have to share you may find helpful in your own journey. So as I just said the presentation is based on Sri Aurobindo's words from the complete works of Sri Aurobindo. My first selection I have done is from the Yoga of Self Perfection and these are his words on the action of the Divine Shakti and as we can see how beautifully he says I will just pick a few words and you know phrases from here and there but you can pay attention on the slide I am not important I am just an instrument and I am the instrument through which these words will once again touch upon your ears and your heart and your presence and let us all invoke what he has said and really pray deeply and earnestly that these words of Sri Aurobindo permeate into each and every cell and each and every part and plane of a being so that we can be transformed and that we can be instruments of that transformation that is so crucial today for humankind. He says here the universal power is apparent to us first on the lower levels of existence as a mental vital and material cosmic energy of which all our mental and vital and physical activities are the operations and he says then it is necessary for a sadhana that we should thoroughly realize this truth in order to escape from the pressure of the limiting ego view and universalize ourselves even on these lower levels where ordinarily the ego reigns in full force to see that we are not the originators of action but that it is rather this power that acts in ourselves and in all others not I and others the doers but the one prakriti which is the rule of the karma yoga is also the right rule here in these words Sri Aurobindo brings our attention to the fact that I said was my learning journey in life how to strive to be in that state of egolessness how do we get out of this limited sense of the ego which is to do with me my mind or ours and theirs how do we let go of separation and differentiation and truly move towards the goal of human unity and then he says but then we would rise about to a higher divine life we must loosen the force of the ego and eventually get rid of it and I move on to the next slide if we can do this then the separation of our mental vital and physical consciousness from that of other beings thins and lessons the limitations of his workings remain indeed but they are broadened and taken up into a large sense and vision of the universal working the specializing and individualizing differentiations of nature abide for their own proper purpose but are no longer a prison the individual feels his mind life and physical existence to be one with that of others admit all differences and one with the total power of the spirit and nature in the second stage the individual doer disappears but there is not necessarily any quietistic passivity there may be a full kinetic action only all is done by the Shakti now Shri Aurobindo is not asking us to become passive he is not asking us to let go of the power of action of thought of assertive action instead what he urges us is that we let go of that separate sense of self that makes us think that we are different from the others he is helping us move to that understanding that we all are one and it is in that oneness that we will find ourselves and it is possible even the existence of Auroville the formation of Auroville was for that purpose to realize human unity of course there are differences of course we will agree to disagree and we may not agree with each other however once we know that we are instruments and each one is working with his or her psychic being then we become more compassionate we become more understanding and having these goals of eagolessness and merging with oneness then everything else becomes secondary and then we do not defend our personal point of view to the extent of saying that I am right and you are wrong everybody has a space in this universe and everybody has an opportunity to blossom and grow in the divine light he further talks about the divine Shakti and he says it is her power of knowledge which takes shape as thought in the mind the Sadaka has no sense of himself thinking but of the Shakti thinking in him the will and the feelings and the action are also in the same way nothing but a formation operation activity of the Shakti in her immediate presence and full possession of all the system the Sadaka does not think will act feel but thought will feel action happen in his system here he is pointing in the direction of surrender of receptivity of openness that when we are open it will descend the right thought the right word will come and be delivered through the instrument of this limited being which is a part of the larger self and then as he says very beautifully here the individual on the side of action has disappeared into oneness so beautiful has disappeared into oneness with universal prakriti has become an individualist form in action of the divine Shakti he is still aware of his personal existence but it is as the Purusha supporting and observing the whole action conscious of it in his self-knowledge and enabling by his participation the divine Shakti to do in him the works and the will of the Ishwara the master of the power is then sometimes hidden by the action of the power sometimes appears governing it and a compelling its workings so we have agency as human beings we have agency we have will power we have determination we have choice and we can choose to do something and not to do something we can work with the premise of self-knowledge that self is interested in expanding ourselves and moving to an into a larger area of oneness but it is not to say that I Radhika what I say listen to me or I am right I say Radhika who has learned so much and Radhika who is sharing something that she has learned from so many people is happy to share with you and would be happy if you can also connect with that teaching and learning and you can also make it your own and you can also benefit from it so that the quality of your life also becomes what is we aim for the life divine or the divine life so when we really care for each other we connect to each other in that beautiful feeling of oneness when I am nothing Radhika is nothing Radhika is merely an instrument of her work of the work of the Divine Shakti who gives me the energy the clarity and gives me all that is necessary for me to function and for me to manifest that which is possible through me once I have that understanding that I know that I am not separate and there is no other we all are one when we think like that then it's possible for us to achieve the goal of human unity in spite of any differences that we may face on the mental vital or physical planes now from the yoga of self-perfection I draw your attention to a beautiful book which is my favorite it's a book written by Sri Aurobindo and it's called the mother it's a small little book and if you have not read it I urge you to to read it it's easily accessible there's also recording on YouTube where the mother is reading the mother in her own voice and it is so powerful it is so energizing because I never met the mother you see I was born in 1968 the year Auroville was born is the year I was born on this in this lifetime and I have never met the mother I have not seen her but I feel that what she represented in her earthly existence and what Sri Aurobindo embodied in his earthly existence I can understand what they tried to convey to all of us for our progress and for the progress of humankind for the greater good I can understand it through their words their words are my what would I say my doors and windows to enter into their presence and which is why these words are important for me to share so you directly read what the master had to say and not only a diluted interpretation of somebody an ordinary person like me has to say about them so like I said I meditate on this book usually my day starts with the mother it is a 45 minutes recording in which mother reads out the mother and the first five chapters I listen to them daily and they remind me again and again and again that I must not forget I must not forget in the mundane humdrum ordinary daily you know life that we have where there's always stress there's always deadlines you know things to be done goals to be achieved a lot of stress that is coming to you from various sources we have our own limitations of our own capacities and abilities sometimes people around us may not understand us sometimes we may feel very lonely sometimes we may feel that you know I want to do all of this but nobody understands me where do I go who do I ask for help how do I actually manifest and realize all these beautiful words that Sri Aurobindo has given to us to help us go through this human journey with an aspiration to have a divine life so for me this book is very important and it is helping me on a day to day basis to tackle any issue that comes up to me from morning when I wake up till night when I fall dead on my bed and I have just selected a few words from here and they're so important they're so beautiful please meditate on them I wish I could do it silently and you could just read them but I will speak a few words so in the first chapter he talks about the importance of supreme grace and the supreme grace acts only in the conditions of the light and the truth he says it will not act in conditions laid upon it by the falsehood and the ignorance I will take you to a few important sentences because we can't finish all of them in the time that we have but if you've not read the mother you should be reading it I'm not being able to move this slide I don't know what's happened okay so let me try okay so so he says that you know these are the conditions of the light and the truth and what does he say is a qualifying quality that we need to be open to the grace to the divine grace he says there must be a total and sincere surrender there must be an exclusive self opening to the divine power and there must be a constant and integral choice of the truth that is descending a constant and integral rejection of the falsehood of the mental vital physical powers and appearances that still rule the earth nature. Sri Aurobindo was aware that there are a lot of hostile forces and there are a lot of contradictory forces in play that will defeat you know the work of the divine but we need to be in the in the aura of the divine grace and we have to reject falsehood and we have to be open we have to be surrendered to me the quality of surrender is extremely important and something that I have cultivated over the years since I have been introduced to Sri Aurobindo's thoughts the mother the surrender must be total and sees all parts of the being and there must be nothing in the being that makes her reserve anything that hides behind doubts confusions subterfuges anything that revolts and refuses you see each one of us is human we have different planes and parts of the being and often within us there is going to be a inner churning and an inner kind of a opposition of forces where we want something we want to go here but we are moving in the opposite direction we want to achieve human unity but we are moving towards disharmony we want to achieve that you know the expression of the psychic being but we are working or we are expressing from the mental or the vital being when all the planes and parts of the being are not in harmony with each other within me as a manifestation of the divine I cannot really make that possible in the external circumstances around me it's not possible as a teacher I face a lot of challenges I have students from all over the country coming to me from all diverse backgrounds diverse languages and we're joining a university education for various motivations various purposes how do I surrender to the work or the task that has given to me to be a teacher and to help to bring out the best in them and for them to be open to the grace which is around all of us and also to manifest their psychic being all these chapters of the mother help me to do that they help me to remember what kind of presence I need to cultivate in me first because first and foremost I am a student unless I learn I absorb and I I assimilate all of these words until I do that I cannot express them with my students this is from chapter one then I've selected a few words from chapter two and in chapter two he says in yoga it is the divine who is the sadhaka and the sadhana it is his shakti with her light power knowledge consciousness ananda acting upon the adhara and when it is open to her pouring into it and these divine forces that makes the sadhana possible but so long as the lower nature is active the personal effort of the sadhaka remains necessary the more I surrender the more I'm receptive the more I understand that the divine shakti the divine mother is always there around me guiding me and I can pause go within sense the presence rather than rush into action rush into words and then I will be shown the way that what is the right thing to be done in a particular situation the personal effort required is a triple labor of aspiration rejection and surrender these words are very important each one of us needs to understand these if we want to achieve anything worthwhile in our lives an aspiration vigilant constant unceasing we are not passive we are not in slumber we are not sleeping we are the hero warriors the mind's will the heart seeking the ascent of the vital being the will to open and make plastic the physical consciousness and nature that's the aspiration and what is the rejection the rejection of the movements of the lower nature rejection of the mind's ideas opinions preferences habits constructions so that the true knowledge may find free room in a silent mind how many of us are comfortable with silence most people get very restless when they have to be silent the first thing everybody does is pick up a mobile or what's happening you know update whatsapp insta facebook you know a reel on instagram maybe i mean everybody is so restless today especially the young generation they constantly want to to engage with social media you know how many likes how many subscriptions you know i need to update this on insta you know i need to do on second all the time we want some activity we want to connect with people around but are we really truly connecting are we giving ourselves the opportunity to go into that state of silence from which then we can have a deep and a meaningful connection with other souls and other other psychic beings do we recognize that everybody whom we contact in our life is a psychic being do i recognize that each and every person that i face in my life is a psychic being manifested in a human form and that i must reach out to her or his psychic being and she or he must hopefully understand the expression of my psychic being do i live life from that quality of consciousness or am i just trying to fill my classroom with some information and content to make them a camera person or to make them a content writer or to make them a journalist or a filmmaker or a photographer or a photojournalist is that my limited aim just to give them employment or give them all that understanding with which they can do much more so we need to let go and reject a lot of things in our lives if we want to be ready for the divine life and the divine life as manifested sorry as manifested in our own lives and so he says here when the grace and the protection of the divine mother are with you what is there that can touch you or whom need you fear a little of it even will carry you through all difficulties obstacles and dangers surrounded by its full presence you can go securely on your way because it is hers careless of all men and unaffected by any hostility however powerful whether from this world or from worlds invisible its touch can turn difficulties into opportunities failure into success and weakness into unfaltering strength for the grace of the divine mother is the sanction of the supreme and now or tomorrow its effect is sure a thing decreed inevitable and irresistible i would like to share with you that my human life is an example of the grace of the divine mother it is not without the grace of the divine mother that i sit here today in this about in in a beautiful space housed in the sabitri bhavan and or will speaking to all of you it is grace that has brought me here and it is grace that will take me to my next destination and when i know that i am in the grace of the divine mother i really have nothing to fear because i know that things are taken care of but that does not take away from me the responsibility to do the right thing at the right moment i cannot leave it to the divine that the divine should do it for me the divine gives me all the support but i must express what my psychic being tells me is the right thing to do in the fourth chapter he talks about money and just a few words i shared here because there's a lot of conflict around possession of money and wealth and resources in today's world a lot of my students when they work they're constantly thinking how much of a pay package will i get will i get 35 000 rupees a month when i leave pondicherry university will i get 70 000 rupees a month no i don't want to work for 20 000 rupees no this is not good enough i want more money so the point is today the whole world is driven by name name fame wealth money position that if what being offered to me is not good enough in terms of economic composition or doesn't give me a good name in society i don't want it so our relationship with resources economic resources and money is something he's pointed our attention to that all wealth belongs to the divine and those who hold it are trustees not possessors it is with them today tomorrow it may be elsewhere all depends on the way they discharge they trust while it is with them in what spirit with what consciousness and the use of it to what purpose make no demand but accept what you receive from her and use it for the purpose for which it is given to you here i bring you back to the beginning of my sharing on egolessness when i am not operating from the limited self of this embodied human you know apparition called radhika and when it's not this human apparition that is reaching out to you but the psychic being of of which is latent within this human form is reaching out to you then i know that i am just a trustee i have been given a laptop or a mobile or i have been given a certain amount of money or i've been given a vehicle or i've given a responsibility to head a department of electronic media and mass communication punch university but i have a tremendous responsibility because i'm a trustee through me i can do a lot of things if i optimally use the resources that i've been given to me because they don't belong to me i have to let go of the ego i have to be selfless which he says further on be entirely selfless entirely scrupless exact careful in detail a good trustee always consider that it is her possessions and not your own that you're handling in the supramental creation the money force has to be restored to the divine power and used for a true and beautiful and harmonious equipment and ordering of a new divinized vital and physical existence in whatever way in whatever way the divine mother herself decides in a creative vision but first it must be conquered back for her and those will be strongest for the conquests who are in part of the nature strong and large and free from ego and surrendered without any claim or withholding any or withholding or hesitation pure and powerful channels for the supreme prusas so we need to become aware this tremendous privilege and a tremendous honor and a tremendous opportunity that she or when those tells is available to all of us that if we can understand all of these qualities and if we let go of the ego and we surrender then we can become strong pure and powerful channels at any place in the world doing any work either just being a mother or a father or a husband or a wife or having a professional profile or reaching out to many many more people and touching many more lives through our works anything and everything is possible if we are worthy instruments of the divine I take you now to fifth chapter which is my my favorite chapter from the mother I this is something I replay again and again I listen to mother reading it out and it's really kind of you know I can feel her voice her energy filling each and every part of my being and helping me understand that do you want to be a true doer of the divine work radhika are you ready do you want to just say radhika says this or do you want to say through radhika a lot can be manifested of the eternal truth goodness and beauty that has always existed exists and will forever exist can I can I be a divine worker can I be a divine instrument can I be a child of the divine mother and let the mother tell me what needs to be done and I should follow so it's he says here if you want to be a true doer of divine works your first aim must be to be totally free from all desire and self-regarding ego all your life must be an offering and sacrifice to the supreme your only object and action shall be to serve to receive to fulfill to become our manifesting instrument of the divine shakti in her works you must grow in the divine consciousness till there is no difference between your will and hers no motive except her impulsion in you no action that is not her conscious action in you and through you please feel these words and this short interaction is not going to be sufficient if you're hearing these words first time in your life you must at your own at your own leisure at your own pace read and listen to these words so that they enter into your being and if you're open and if you're surrendered your life's going to change I will I will skip these slides but he's repeating the same thing all stress of egoistic choice all hankering after personal profit all stipulation of self regarding desire must be extirpated from the nature what do I want I have to let go of that what is to be done I have to focus on that what is my obligatory duty what has to be done for the divine through this instrument has to be my focus a time will come when you will feel more and more that you are an instrument and not the worker okay and it's beautiful about how the divine shakti then is activated in us and governs our life and our actions and then he says they can be no more happy condition than this union independence for this step carries you back beyond the borderline from the life of stress and suffering in the ignorance into the truth of your spiritual being into its deep peace and its intense ananda like I just said in the beginning I'm sure each one of us face a lot of adverse circumstances in our lives we meet people who don't understand us we have conditions we don't which don't support support our dreams what we want to do we have people who are challenging us we have you know lack of resources we don't help us to express what we really dream of in spite of all the difficulties and challenges that we face on this earthly existence if we are living in the state of surrender aspiration and rejection and we align to what the divine mother and the divine shakti has decided is the right thing for us and we are connecting with the divine shakti from our psychic being and not from the mental vital and physical planes and parts of a being then believe me you the human journey is absolutely delightful it is blissful even the pain is a part of that eternal joy and ananda and this you can only experience it if your life is oriented in that direction and it moves beyond the plane of the theoretical words into the real action and again he says the last stage of perfection will come when you're completely identified with the divine mother and feel yourself to be no longer another and separate being instrument servant or worker but truly a child an eternal portion of her consciousness and force i mean these words have really given me a lot of courage a lot of assurance that when i feel i cannot achieve something with my limited instrument and i get a little bit of panic or anxiety or worry that why things are not working out the way i want them to happen in spite of putting in my best efforts and why is it that sometimes it seems that the universe is conspiring against you when things are not going your way stop be silent step back go within and try and connect with all these beautiful thoughts and understand that everything has a place everything has there for a purpose and once i go into that space of silence and i connect with the divine mother the divine shakti then i surrender i said mother it's it's it's your baby it's your project it's your idea i want to do this but i have limitations i will put in my human effort but i need help and then i'll wait and sometimes the answer does not come immediately it comes after weeks or months or years but as in when i feel i am connected and i'm ready i i i then translates those ideas onto the onto the plane of action of the actual realization of these words and from here i go to integral education now because i have only about i think 10 or 12 minutes left and i think all of you know about integral education but shri abhindo has given three principles on integral education as you can see on the slide here and these are beacons of light for all of us who are in the field of education if there's any teacher or administrator or parent either at the school level or college or university these are absolutely again amazing words which help you to reorient the way of shri abhindo he has raised questions which now in india the national education policy is addressing in it was formulated in 2020 it's the national education policy it was revised after the national education policy in 1986 but what he wrote way back more than a century ago he he had anticipated and he had projected and he had warned and he had informed all of us that what is the purpose of education what is the aim of education what is the aim of integral education and these are his words which you can you know always pause the video and you can read them because they are there on your screen from here i go to the psychic being i've already spoken about the psychic being but for some of you this must must be or may be a new concept of the ordinary consciousness is not at first developed and even when developed is not always or often in the front it expresses itself so far as the imperfection of the instruments allows by their means and under the limitations i had foregrounded this in the beginning of my my sharing with you that letting go of the ego striving for a state of egolessness it's not easy but it's possible aspiring to connect to everybody around us and realizing the goal of human unity and oneness that's the second thing that i had i had foregrounded in the beginning and who will do that who's going to do all this work and on this on on this you know human plane in this human existence it's the psychic being that's going to express and realize all these lofty ideas and goals of Sri Aurobindo and he says the psychic part of us is something that comes direct from the divine as an in touch with the divine if we feel and understand what these words imply the whole quality of life is going to be so beautiful it says here it is always this psychic being that is the real though often the secret cause of man's turning to the spiritual life and his greatest help in it it is therefore that which we have to bring from behind to the front in the yoga so we know the common and the popular adage all life is yoga and we all are aspiring to be yogis and when we talk about being yogis it's not about being practicing the physical yoga or hatha yoga but it's going to that understanding that yoga is the union with the divine and if all life is yoga and if we are yogis and we want to be yogis then it is the psychic being within us that's going to do that turning for us and take us on that path just a second I will just pause for a few seconds so the slide is there for you to read on later on and but I will not read from here because I have about five minutes left and I need to conclude and the last slide the psychic being may be described in Indian language as the purusha in the heart or the chettya purusha but the inner or secret heart must be understood and now I quickly when I wrap up I contextualize what Sri Aurobindo said more than 100 years ago to now right now where India is and where India is transforming its fabric of education from the pre primary Montessori level up to the higher education everything is going through a churning there's a big change that has come in into education system it just started with the national education policy 2020 and the national education policy recognizes that the way we had of teaching and learning in our country was a leftover of the colonial you know vestige of the British empire in India and we weren't really following the deep Indian thought and what was the purpose of Indian education or education at large and I have taken a few references of other people who have written about integral education Nelchedi who's from Sri Aurobindo ashram Kiraj Joshi who was actively involved with the the Auroville community and Partho who was the principal of the Mirambika free progress school in New Delhi and who has written this book integral education so I've taken a few culled a few words from here from there commentary or writing on what is integral education and integral education as Partho writes here this process is described further at the deeper plane of the human being as a threefold process self-knowledge awakening of the true center of one's being psychic being and an ongoing process of integration and harmony the work of the individual is to analyze the psychological movements that occur inside oneself and to understand these with a sense of accuracy to know which part or ones being they're coming from psychological tools such as self-observation introspection mindfulness to gain self-awareness self-understanding and self-mastery are at the core of implementation of integral education I conclude my sharing or today with these words of Sri Aurobindo he writes I mean he wrote the past is our foundation the present our material the future our aim and summit so as we move towards the future of humankind and we we we we design we carve the tragic tree of what is it that we want to realize and manifest in the time that we are here on on earth we have a limited lifespan it could be 50 years 60 years 70 80 90 if you're lucky or we are healthy maybe 100 but in the lifespan that I have in my lifetime what is my aspiration what is it that I really really want to fulfill through this instrument and I urge each one of you who are with me today that if you can go within yourself and get in touch with that little voice within yourself which is your psychic being and let that psychic being within you tell you what is good for you and or what is it that you can really do which can help uplift the quality of your life beyond living for money or living to pay or rent or you know living to just go to work and come back from work or raise your children or teach your students so that they can give an exam and they give an exam and they get a degree please do not underutilize the opportunity that you have to create a lot of wonder and a lot of magic when you're around in this earth as a as a human your students can experience what is the psychic being your students can lead their lives from their psychic being if you are the teacher and an educator can show them the way I hope that all of us offer ourselves to Sri Aurobindo and become worthy of his grace thank you so much