Consecration
02-09-2014
Consecration
Only China created an intelligentsia a thousand years ago. They directly took charge of the administration of the country. In the early centuries, administration in all countries was with the aristocracy and posts of power went by seniority of age. In England, Oxford and Cambridge were started to prepare the clergymen for the Church. To the aristocratic youth there were three honoured professions. They were the army, politics and the Church. Young men who had prepared for the Church began to enter government service and the intelligentsia came to stay. It was the British Civil Service. At the age of 21 recruits to the service began to shoulder jobs earlier meant for those of 40 or over, sometimes 60. Now education can replace experience is the social belief. Thus all over the world the leadership in every walk of life has access to younger men, if not raw youth. There is a non-academic social phenomenon in the college. The extra curricular activities of a college offer promising youth endowments of leadership in life. More than social political leadership, it offers students a rich capacity to accomplish in life, especially in public life. Oratory, a capacity acquired in the college making political leaders, is one expression. Capable young Men rise in the field of academic administration. Still better, some can enter, because of this experience, directly into the Administrative Service – IAS. Even that is excelled by those who can accomplish in public life in politics or outside it. Those who migrate to business are of this class but of a secondary order. In India for such men only politics and business are open. In Western countries Public Life outside these two fields is vast. All the founders of institutions belong to this category. Such men in the USA become mostly successful retailers. Personal life, in this particular sense of accomplishment, is a miniature of Public Life. Outside educational institutions, this phenomenon is well observed. In India it is a rarity. It is not non-existent. Such an individual is the ‘intelligentsia’ of public life outside government, politics and business. He is one who does not seek a job, but creates jobs for others. He picks up from the live social atmosphere subconsciously the best it can offer him. My theme is, if schools can consciously try to give this capacity to its students, they will mature into full citizens capable of the greatest accomplishment before the age of 15. I strongly feel it can be 10. He who is socially fully conscious can do it in himself. All children of the aristocracy or upper middle class acquire this talent from their families. One who is not born in such families, if endowed with an awakened social awareness, presently acquires more skills and capacities than all the others. Skills make one efficient; capacity endows him with a character in the society.
Skills are acquired by concentration in training. Capacity is acquired from a great number of skills as their essence, by those who have a character to their credit. The endowment I have been endeavouring to describe may, in one right sense, be called Personality. Of course those who have a character acquire a personality through acquiring capacity. To all those who are natively endowed, it comes sooner or later, surely before middle age. Professional courses at best give a professional Personality which at best serves the individual to shun public life. Kurien was offered this extraordinary field of extensive experimentation when he was asked to go to Anand to restore it to efficiency. He was a foreign trained engineer, effectively stifled in his own profession. Skills are consciously acquired by concentration during the period of training. Capacity is acquired by a sense of responsibility. How is this Personality acquired? Subconsciously, it is acquired over time. To do so consciously, is there a principle or strategy or an attitude? There is. One achieves most by exerting at his maximum capacity all the time. It is physical exertion. There is an achievement by NOT exerting oneself. It is a method of not exercising oneself. As in silent will, if one sees the value of Not expressing his capacities, he will see that his personal capacity exercises itself in a wider field, a field in which he works. Exerting himself, he achieves for himself. NOT exerting himself, he achieves for his institution or wider still, his field. One can describe this attitude as his own consecration to his institution.
Spiritually consecration withdraws his own ego and offers his work to the Divine. Conscious consecration of one’s capacities to his own field all over the nation or the globe, shapes in him a Personality to take care of his world. The work in a school is managed by the management now. It can be partly refashioned to be managed by students in varying measure. Complete study of this strategy can give us a complete product so that the pupil will become a finished product before he enters his teens.We witness the Ashram children going into the wider world and shining in any walk of life before 35. It is true of Summerhill and Shantiniketan where this process is NOT fully conscious. Surely their atmosphere enables the students to do better, but there is no comparison with a conscious training. There is something better than a conscious training offered by the school. It is the pupil taking it himself making a conscious training into a Self-conscious value. Those who have consecrated to solve a problem do the least needed. Consecrating an opportunity, though of a higher level, is still addressing a part of life, maybe a passing phenomenon. If not a yogic process, consecration here means consecration of all one’s life in progress. The theory says that such a consecration can readily and immediately help one achieve a little more than what the life of the world so far has achieved. All those like Steve Jobs have resorted to such a strategy unknowingly. A conscious possession of this attitude in life is the very best one can wish for.
The best way to employ consecration is to solve the most difficult problem you have through consecration.
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