]Sri Aurobindo
The Harmony of Virtue
Early Cultural Writings — 1890-1910
The Brain of India [3]
The practice of Brahmacharya is the first and most necessary condition of increasing the force within and turning it to such uses as may benefit the possessor or mankind. All human energy has a physical basis. The mistake made by European materialism is to suppose the basis to be everything and confuse it with the source. The source of life and energy is not material but spiritual, but the basis, the foundation on which the life and energy stand and work, is physical. The ancient Hindus clearly recognised this distinction between kāraṇa and pratiṣṭhā, the north pole and the south pole of being. Earth or gross matter is the pratiṣṭhā, Brahman or spirit is the kāraṇa. To raise up the physical to the spiritual is Brahmacharya, for by the meeting of the two the energy which starts from one and produces the other is enhanced and fulfils itself.
This is the metaphysical theory.
The application depends on a right understanding of the physical and psychological conformation of the human receptacle of energy.
The fundamental physical unit is the retas, in which the tejas, the heat and light and electricity in a man, is involved and hidden.
All energy is latent in the retas.
This energy may be either expended physically or conserved.
All passion, lust, desire wastes the energy by pouring it, either in the gross form or a sublimated subtler form, out of the body.
Immorality in act throws it out in the gross form; immorality of thought in the subtle form.
In either case there is waste, and unchastity is of the mind and speech as well as of the body.
On the other hand, all self-control conserves the energy in the retas, and conservation always brings with it increase.
But the needs of the physical body are limited and the excess of energy must create a surplus which has to turn itself to some use other than the physical.
According to the ancient theory retas is jala or water, full of light and heat and electricity, in one word, of tejas.
The excess of the retas turns first into heat or tapas which stimulates the whole system, and it is for 
this reason that all forms of self-control and austerity are called tapas or tapasyā because they generate the heat, or stimulus which is a source of powerful action and success; secondly, it turns to tejas proper, light, the energy which is at the source of all knowledge; thirdly, it turns to vidyut or electricity, which is at the basis of all forceful action whether intellectual or physical.
In the vidyut again is involved the ojas, or prāṇaśakti, the primal energy which proceeds from ether.
The retas refining from jala to tapas, tejas and vidyut and from vidyut to ojas, fills the system with physical strength, energy and brain-power and in its last form of ojas rises to the brain and informs it with that primal energy which is the most refined form of matter and nearest to spirit.
It is ojas that creates a spiritual force or vīrya, by which a man attains to spiritual knowledge, spiritual love and faith, spiritual strength.
It follows that the more we can by Brahmacharya increase the store of tapas, tejas, vidyut and ojas, the more we shall fill ourselves with utter energy for the works of the body, heart, mind and spirit.
This view of the human soul was not the whole of the knowledge on which ancient Hinduism based its educational discipline.
In addition it had the view that all knowledge is within and has to be evoked by education rather than instilled from outside.
The constitution of man consists of three principles of nature sattva, rajas and tamas, the comprehensive, active and passive elements of universal action, which, in one of their thousandfold aspects, manifest as knowledge, passion and ignorance.
Tamas is a constitutional dullness or passivity which obscures the knowledge within and creates ignorance, mental inertia, slowness, forgetfulness, disinclination to study, inability to grasp and distinguish.
Rajas is an undisciplined activity which obscures knowledge by passion, attachment, prejudgment, predilection and wrong ideas.
Sattva is an illumination which reveals the hidden knowledge and brings it to the surface where the observation can grasp and the memory record it.
This conception of the constitution of the knowing faculty made the removal of tamas, the disciplining of rajas and the awakening of sattva the main problem of the teacher.
He had to train the student to be receptive of illumination from within.
The disciplining of rajas was effected 
by a strict moral discipline which induced a calm, clear, receptive state of mind, free from intellectual self-will and pride and the obscuration of passion, — the famous discipline of the brahmacārin which was the foundation of Aryan culture and Aryan morale1; and the interference of wrong ideas was sought to be removed by strict mental submission to the teacher during the receptive period, when the body of ascertained knowledge or right ideas already in man's possession was explained to him and committed to memory.
The removal of tamas was effected by the discipline of moral purity, which awakened the energy of tejas and electricity in the system and by the power of tapasyā trained it to be a reservoir of mental force and clarity.
The awakening of illumination was actively effected by the triple method of repetition, meditation and discussion.
āvṛtti or repetition was meant to fill the recording part of the mind with the śabda or words2, so that the artha or meaning might of itself rise from within: needless to say, a mechanical repetition was not likely to produce this effect.
There must be that clear still receptivity and that waiting upon the word or thing with the contemplative part of the mind which is what the ancient Indians meant by dhyāna or meditation.
All of us have felt, when studying a language, difficulties which seemed insoluble while grappling with a text suddenly melt away and a clear understanding arise without assistance from book or teacher after putting away the book from our mind for a brief period.
Many of us have experienced also the strangeness of taking up a language or subject, after a brief discontinuance, to find that we understand it much better than when we took it up, know the meanings of words we had never met with before and can explain sentences which, before we discontinued the study, would have baffled our understanding.
This is because the jñātā or knower within has had his attention called to the subject and has been busy in the interval drawing upon the source of knowledge within in connection with it.
This experience is only possible to those whose sattwic or illuminative element has been powerfully aroused or consciously or unconsciously trained to action by the habit of intellectual clarity and deep study.
The highest reach of the sattwic development is when one can dispense often or habitually with outside aids, the 
teacher or the text book, grammar and dictionary and learn a subject largely or wholly from within.
But this is only possible to the Yogin by a successful prosecution of the discipline of Yoga.
Later edition of this work: The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo.- Set in 37 volumes.- Volume 1.- Early Cultural Writings (1890 — 1910).- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2003.- 784 p.
1 2003 ed.: morals
2 2003 ed.: word