Page 11 - All India Magazine Jan-2025

give opportunities to the young to train themselves in the Aryan
tradition, to form by the practice and familiarity of childhood and
boyhood the stuff of which their adult lives must be made?
Every boy should, therefore, be given practical opportunity as
well as intellectual encouragement to develop all that is best in his
nature. If he has bad qualities, bad habits, bad saWskDras whether
of mind or body, he should not be treated harshly as a delinquent,
but encouraged to get rid of them by the Rajayogic method of
saWyama, rejection and substitution. He should be encouraged
to think of them, not as sins or offences, but as symptoms of a
curable disease alterable by a steady and sustained effort of the
will, — falsehood being rejected whenever it rises into the mind
and replaced by truth, fear by courage, selfishness by sacrifice and
renunciation, malice by love. Great care will have to be taken that
unformed virtues are not rejected as faults. The wildness and reck-
lessness of many young natures are only the over flowings of an
excessive strength, greatness and nobility. They should be puri-
fied, not discouraged.
CWSA 1: 390-92 Sri Aurobindo

Conscious aspiration in children
When one is very young and as I say "well-born", that is, born
with a conscious psychic being within, there is always, in the
dreams of the child, a kind of aspiration, which for its child's con-
sciousness is a sort of ambition, for something which would be
beauty without ugliness, justice without injustice, goodness with-
out limits, and a conscious, constant success, a perpetual miracle.
One dreams of miracles when one is young, one wants all wicked-
ness to disappear, everything to be always luminous, beautiful,
happy, one likes stories which end happily. This is what one should
rely on. When the body feels its miseries, its limitations, one must
establish this dream in it — of a strength which would have no
limit, a beauty which would have no ugliness, and of marvellous

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