1. What is Integral Education?
India has or rather had the knowledge of the spirit, but she neglected matter and suffered for it. The west has the knowledge of matter but rejected the spirit and suffers badly for it. An integral education which could, with some variations, be adopted to all the nations of the world, must bring back the legitimate authority of the spirit over matter fully developed and utilised.

The aim of education is not to prepare a man to succeed in life and society but to increase his perfectibility to its utmost. "Education to be complete must have five principal aspects corresponding to the five principal activities of the human being. The physical, the vital, the mental, the psychic and the spiritual. Usually, these phases of education follow chronologically the growth of the individual; this, however, does not mean that one of them should replace another, but that all must continue, completing one another until the end of his life".

I. Physical Education : All education of the body should begin at birth and should continue throughout life. It is never too soon to begin not too late to continue.
Physical Education has three principal aspects.
1. Control and functioning of the body.
2. An integral, methodical and harmonious development
of all the parts and movements of the body and
3. Correction of any defects and deformities.

II. Vital Education : Of all Education, vital education is perhaps the most important the most indispensable.
Vital Education has two principal aspects very different in their aims and methods, but both equally important. The first concerns the development and use of the sense organs. The second the progressing awareness and control and the character, culminating in its transformation.

III. Mental Education : A true mental education which will prepare man for a higher life, has five principal phases :-
1. Development of the power of concentration, the capacity of attention.
2. Development of the capacities of expansion, widening, complexity and richness.
3. Organisation of one's ideas around a central idea, a higher ideal or a supremely luminous idea that will serve as a guide in life.
4. Thought control, rejection of undesirable thoughts, to become able to think only what one wants and when one wants.
5. Development of mental silence, perfect calm, and a more and more total receptivity to inspirations coming from the higher regions of the being.

IV. Psychic Education : The three lines of Education physical vital and mental deal with that and could be defined as the means of building up the personality, raising the individual out of the amorphous subconscious mass and making him a well defined self-conscious entity.
With psychic education, we come to the problem of the true motive of existence, the purpose of life on earth, the discovery to which life must lead and the result of that discovery: the consecration of the individual to his eternal principle.
The integral education can begin only after one has become conscious of one's psychic being.

V. Spiritual Education : A perfect self - expression of the spirit is the object of our terrestrial existence. This cannot be achieved if we have not grown conscious of the supreme reality; For it is only by the touch of the absolute that we can arrive at our own absolute.

VI. Supramental Education : In contrast with the types of education we have mentioned previously, which progress from below upwards by an ascending movement of the various parts of the being, the supramental education will progress from above downwards, its influence spreading from one state of being to another until at last the physical is reached.
This education will culminate in the transformation of the human body into a divine body, leading in the end to the appearance of a divine race upon earth which will not be subject to death, disease and ignorance.(The Mother, Education Part I, II Page Nos. 9, 12, 5, 130).

2. What is Integral Yoga?
A Yoga of integral perfection regards man as a divine spiritual being involved in mind, life and body; it aims therefore at a liberation and a perfection of his divine nature. It seeks to make an inner living in the perfectly developed spiritual being his constant intrinsic living and the spiritualised action of mind, life and body only its outward human expression. In order that this spiritual being may not be something vague and indefinable or else but imperfectly realized and dependent on the mental support and the mental limitations, it seeks to go beyond mind to the supramental knowledge, will, sense, feeling, intuition, dynamic initiation of vital and physical action, all that makes the native working of the spiritual being. It accepts human life, but takes account of the large supraterrestrial action behind the earthly material living, and it joins itself to the divine Being from whom the supreme origination of all these partial and lower states proceeds so that the whole of life may become aware of its divine source and feel in each action of knowledge, of will, of feeling, sense and body the divine originating impulse. It rejects nothing that is essential in the mundane aim, truer meaning now hidden from it, transfigures it from a limited, earthly and mortal thing to a figure of intimate,divine and immortal values.

The integral Yoga meets the religious ideal at several points, but goes beyond it in the sense of a greater wideness. The religious ideal looks, not only beyond this earth, but away from it to a heaven or even beyond all heavens to some kind of Nirvana. Its ideal of perfection is limited to whatever kind of inner or outer mutation will eventually serve the turning away of the soul from the human life to the beyond. Its ordinary idea of perfection is a religion-ethical change, a drastic purification of the active and the emotional being, often with an ascetic abrogation and rejection of the vital impulses as its completest reaching of excellence, and in any case a supraterrestrial motive and reward or result of a life of piety and right conduct. In so far as it admits a change of knowledge, will, aesthesis, it is in the sense of the turning of them to another object than the aims of human life and eventually brings a rejection of all earthly objects of aesthesis, will and knowledge. The method, whether it lays stress on personal effort or upon divine influence, on works and knowledge or upon grace, is not like the mundane a development, but rather a conversion; but in the end the aim is not a conversion of our mental and physical nature, but the putting on of a pure spiritual nature and being, and since that is not possible here on earth, it looks for its consummation by a transference to another world or a shuffling off of all cosmic existence.

But the integral Yoga founds itself on a conception of the spiritual being as an omnipresent existence, the fullness of which comes not essentially by a transference to other worlds or a cosmic self extinction, but by a growth out of what we now are phenomenally into the consciousness of the omnipresent reality which we always are in the essence of our being. It substitutes for the form of religious piety its completer spiritual seeking of a divine union. It proceeds by a personal effort to a conversion through a divine influence and possession; but this divine grace, if we may so call it, is not simply a mysterious flow or touch coming from above, but the all-pervading act of a divine presence which we come to know within as the power of the highest Self and Master of our being entering into the soul and so possessing it that we not only feel it close to us and pressing upon our mortal nature, but live in its law, know that law, possess it as the whole power of our spiritualised nature. The conversion its action will effect is an integral conversion of our ethical being into the Truth and Right of the divine nature, of our intellectual into the illumination of divine knowledge, our emotional into the divine love and unity, our dynamic and volitional into a working of the divine power, our aesthetic into a plenary reception and a creative enjoyment of divine beauty, not excluding even in the end a divine conversion of the vital and physical being. It regards all the previous life as an involuntary and unconscious or half-conscious preparatory growing towards this change and Yoga as the voluntary and conscious effort and realization of the change, by which all the aim of human existence in all its parts is fulfilled, even while it is transfigured. Admitting the supracosmic truth and life in worlds beyond, it admits too the terrestrial as a continued term of the one existence and change of individual and communal life on earth as a strain of its divine meaning.

To open oneself to the supracosmic Divine is an essential condition of this integral perfection; to unite oneself with the universal Divine is another essential condition. Here the Yoga of self-perfection coincides with the Yogas of knowledge, works and devotion; for it is impossible to change the human nature into the divine or to make it an instrument of the divine knowledge, will and joy of existence, unless there is a union with the supreme Being, Consciousness and Bliss and a unity with its universal Self in all things and beings. A wholly separative possession of the divine nature by the human individual, as distinct from a self - withdrawn absorption in it, is not possible. But this unity will not be an inmost spiritual oneness qualified, so long as the human life lasts, by a separative existence in mind, life and body; the full perfection is a possession, through this spiritual unity, of unity too with the universal Mind, the universal Life, the universal Form which are the other constant terms of cosmic being. Moreover, since human life still accepted as a self-expression of the realized Divine in man, there must be an action of the entire divine nature in our life; and this brings in the need of the supramental conversion which substitutes the native action of spiritual being for the imperfect action of the superficial nature and spiritualises and transfigures its mental, vital and physical parts by the spiritual ideality. These three elements, a union with the supreme Divine, unity with the universal Self, and a supramental life action from this transcendent origin and through this universality, but still with the individual as the soul-channel and natural instrument, constitute the essence of the integral divine perfection of the human being.
- Sri Aurobindo
(The Synthesis of Yoga, Cent.Ed.Vol.21, pp. 590-96)

3. What is new in Sri Aurobindo's teachings?

It is new as compared with the old Yogas:
1. Because it aims not at a departure out of world and life into Heaven or Nirvana, but at a change of life and existence,not as something subordinate or inceidental, but as a distinct and central object. If there is a descent in other Yogas, yet it is only an incident on the way or resulting from the ascent - the ascent is the real thing. Here the ascent is the first step, but it is a means for the descent. It is the descent of the new consciousness attained by the ascent that is the stamp and seal of the Sadhana. Even the Tantra and Vaishnavism end in the release from life; here the object is the divine fulfillment of life.

2. Because the object sought after is not an individual achievement of divine realization for the sake of the individual, but something to be gained for the earth-consciousness here, a cosmic, not solely a supra-cosmic achievement. The thing to be gained also is the bringing in a of a Power of Consciousness not yet organized or active directly in earth nature, even in the spiritual life, but yet to be organized and made directly active.

3. Because a method has been preconized for achieving this purpose which is as total and integral as the aim set before it, viz., the total and integral change of the consciousness and nature, taking up old methods but only as a part action and present aid to others that are distinctive. I have not found this method(as a whole) or anything like it professed or realized in the old Yogas. If I had, I should not have wasted my time in hewing out a road and in thirty years of search and inner creation when I could have hastened home safely to my goal in an easy canter over paths already blazed out, laid down, perfectly mapped, macadamized, made secure and public. Our Yoga is not a retreading of old walks, but a spiritual adventure. 5-10-1935,SABCL, Vol. 26

4. What is NEWRACE?
A race of supremental being, being for above the human race.

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