Seductive simplicity

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” 

Einstein

Everybody loves simplicity. It makes life easier in so many ways – who doesn’t love the words ‘plug and play’? But there are times, as Einstein points out, when one can over-simplify. However, we seem to be living in a world where over-simplification is a daily fact. Newspapers and TV channels rely upon superficial sound bites when covering complex issues, algorithms lock us into personal echo chambers, and many politicians and activists worldwide espouse simplistic, often extreme, views as a means to garner votes.

Conflict accentuates this tendency to over-simplification. Typically, adversaries in heated debates quickly move towards extreme ends of the spectrum. The middle ground is lost and, along with it, nuance, the awareness of complexity, and the ability to hold differing perspectives and work towards integral rather than exclusive solutions.  

All this may seem a long way from Auroville. Yet we haven’t completely escaped the same tendency. Every time we pigeonhole somebody on the basis of their latest posting on Auronet, or something that happened 20 years ago, we do this. Every time we fall into the ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality (working groups versus ‘residents’), every time we suggest a simplistic motivation for why individuals or groups act in the way they do, (“it’s a power trip”), every time we refuse to listen to a view that challenges our own, every time we echo simplistic formulae found on the internet (“all mainstream news is suspect’), we fall into this trap. 

Of course, it’s comforting to believe that a complex world can be reduced to a few simple formulae, particularly at a time when that world is experiencing so much uncertainty. And it’s often much easier to reduce people to stereotypes than to see them ‘in the round’. 

But we are not one-dimensional entities. Each of us is complex, composed of different, often conflicting, attitudes, inclinations and preoccupations. And we live in an increasingly uncertain world where multiple factors interact in complex and often unpredictable ways.  

Moreover, simplistic explanations tend to spawn simplistic solutions which don’t touch the core of an issue or may even make matters worse. (For example, South African President Mbeki’s refusal to endorse proven AIDS drugs because he believed they were a Western plot to weaken his country cost hundreds of thousands of lives.) 

So what can we do? After all, we don’t have the time or energy or resources to exhaustively investigate every allegation made on Auronet or in the world’s mass media. At the same time, we don’t have to give our immediate assent to any view or allegation that is being propagated. We can practice a certain detachment: we can suspend judgment and be willing to embrace a degree of uncertainty.  

Alternatively, rather than remaining transfixed by happenings in the external world, we can try to step inside ourselves to discover “a being free, vast and knowing, who awaits our discovery and who ought to become the active centre of our being and our life in Auroville.”  For it is here, rather than on websites or in political manifestos, that Mother tells us that the true guidance is to be found.

The inner turn, the inner discovery, is far from easy. As the Katha Upanishad puts it, The Self-Existent made the senses turn outward. Accordingly, man looks toward what is without, and sees not what is within. Yet here, within, lies the simplicity so many of us yearn for. But this is a profound simplicity, one that immediately grasps essence and provides a sure compass through the mazes of the world, not a spurious simplicity that simplifies by eliding inconvenient information or by making illegitimate linkages between unrelated phenomena. For this ‘being free, vast and knowing’ is closer to the Source and able to grasp the truth directly, through identity, rather than through the pirouettes of the mind. 

It’s worth remembering that Einstein himself, the greatest scientist of the 20th century and schooled in the rigours of the scientific method, experienced a mode of knowing beyond  mind, for some of his greatest discoveries came in a blinding flash rather than through prolonged mentalisation. It is why he could affirm, “All great achievements of science must start from intuitive knowledge”, for “the intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness,  call it Intuition or what you will, the solution comes to you and you don’t know how or why.”