Creative Consciousness
5. Social Creativity
Society is creative and is characterized by periodic moments of momentous creativity. The creativity of society accumulated as the achievements of a succession of creative moments over millennia is civilization. That civilization is the essence of history which is itself the essence of social existence. The distilled essence of civilization is culture. Family is the creative social organization that nurtures the biological child to form the psychological citizen. The mother’s loyalty enriched by the father’s sense of responsibility form the flowerbed on which culture flourishes. The head of a family accepting responsibility for the whole of the family can be called consciousness responsibility. The constitutional responsibility of a cabinet minister for all the actions of those in his department is the national symbol of it. The unwritten constitution places responsibility for whatever happens in the country in the hands of the Prime Minister.
The process of converting raw energy into creative energy for growth, development and evolution is common to all aspects of life. Our bodies convert the food that is consumed into physical energy for growth and transforms it into energy for healthy living and well-being at the physical level. Society converts raw social energy into organized productive energy and transforms it into cultural values such as honor and hospitality. The most advanced enlightened expression of this process is the conversion into cultural essence of life through education. What families, especially affluent aristocratic families, give to their children through private, personal education by tutors can now be made available to all the children of the world with the same flavor of human solicitude and affectionate responsibility. The World University Consortium can provide it to all who seek it. It can devise new courses that can bring to its process of learning by a process of teaching the higher value of learning for the child’s consciousness.
6. Cultural Creativity
The mother is the main source of affection for the child. The wife who enters a man’s life later on is a higher version of the same social emotion, whose highest expression is the sacred emotion of Love. Its birth is commonly vitiated by the social institution of marriage in which property is given central importance. If mercenary motives are not present and the child is raised with full affection, the human relationship formed around the child’s psychological blossoming becomes the human efflorescence in old age. So great is its power that, according to ancient Tamil literature, it can prevent the graying on man’s hair even in advanced age. This is its merest outer expression. Its inner cultural richness expresses as tolerance for the lapses of the younger generation. It is tolerance born out of the soul’s inner freedom. That freedom can express as a playful cheerfulness which we find in the heroine of Pride and Prejudice, whose creative energies raise her whole family to a higher level of social life. Shakespeare’s creativity is rich with subtle truths of life rising to the highest poetic expression, but mostly reflecting darker intensities of life. “Age does not wither” and “Whoever loved that loved not at first sight” are positive expressions of that creativity.
7. Creative Education
Great literature enriches ordinary daily life in many ways possible, but it mainly enriches the subconscious through its subtle faculty. The mind of the child is brilliantly receptive to the accumulated wisdom of the collective. However, formal education often buries this emerging wisdom. Fortunately modern technology can be commissioned to counter these ill-effects, as the iPod has done for music, capturing the world’s imagination. When backed by proper technology, such courses can cater to the spirit of aspiring young humanity and awaken their imaginative faculties to develop inwardly and eventually blossom in full creative freedom.
Online courses for college students can be designed more easily than for lower level students. The lower one descends, the more intricate it becomes for various reasons. First, great care is needed not to spoil the innocence of young minds with organized social superstition. Children’s minds are fresh and therefore can be easily contaminated. Moreover, no course can match the speed of a child’s receptivity. Adult minds cannot appreciate the purity of a child’s innocence of truth in goodness. Like a relay runner, the teacher must readily hand over the baton to the child to run further on its own.
Society evolves by education. Sri Aurobindo called yoga an organized influence designed to take life to its maximum height by the shortest route. ‘All life is yoga’ is his mantra. Education is the next best. Values are the organized capacities of the cultural forces of society imparted to the next generation as an individual possession. Education that imparts values is an evolutionary social organization seeking to be born. The World University Consortium can be the vehicle for that accomplishment.