Suspended over chasm

It’s not difficult to predict the changes a business consultant would advise to make Auroville a commercially-viable concern. The first step would be to ensure that the potentially-productive units ones are optimally utilised, through ensuring that they received the required funds for development and the best management, while unproductive units would be closed and incompetent managers and employees fired.

Meanwhile, all those ‘business-unfriendly’ agreements – like refusing to allow Auroville entrepreneurs to own their businesses, or making it impossible for Aurovilians to enter into joint ventures with outsiders, or requiring units to contribute a minimum of 33% of their profits to the community – would be ruthlessly eliminated.

And in this new business-friendly ecosystem, no doubt the consultant would also advise us to license the Auroville name as a money-making venture, to fully commercialise our educational and environmental expertise, and to ruthlessly exploit the commercial possibilities of the Matrimandir.

In other words, Auroville would no longer be Auroville.

Why? Because Auroville does not exist for the maximising of productivity or profit. Rather, it is an experiment in human and ‘super-human’ development, an attempt to individually and collectively collaborate in calling a New World.

And this requires very different conditions from those that operate in the marketplace. Mother defined those conditions in ‘The Dream’, ‘The Charter’ and ‘To Be a True Aurovilian’, conditions which, if acted upon, would create the best possible environment for this experiment in consciousness development.

However, as T.S. Eliot put it in The Hollow Men,

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow

And the ‘shadow’, in the context of Auroville, is our inability to make the best use of those conditions.

We should not be surprised. The reality is that most of us are unreconstructed human beings. And if you put people like us into a space like Auroville, where there is such extraordinary freedom to experiment and so little in the way of controls, the likelihood is that some of us, or some aspect of each of us, will take advantage of that freedom to promote personal wellbeing over the larger progress of the whole.

For while, in many ways, we have rejected the old world, we do not yet have the capacity to live the new. And so we hang, suspended, over a chasm.

In this precarious situation the key question becomes, how do we act? How do we move forward?

How, to take a very real and concrete example, should we deal with behaviour that seems to be endangering the integrity of Auroville and its ideals?

Should we adopt the ‘old world’ ways until we are ready for something else? In other words, should we formulate clear rules, set up some form of judiciary, and not hesitate to use strong measures, culminating, if necessary, with ejecting the ‘culprits’ from the community?

Some, perhaps many, Aurovilians feel this is the only way at present as they consider there is already far too much ‘slippage’: too many people taking advantage of the freedom we are given here. In fact, we are in the process of setting up a Review Group that would have expulsion from the community as its ultimate sanction.

But others are less sure about taking this approach. Partly, no doubt, this is based upon a visceral aversion to what is seen as imposition and authority, a remnant of the 60s ‘meme’ still strong in the community. At a much deeper level, it may be based upon the realization that we are all, in some way, responsible for the errant behaviour of individuals as, collectively, we have failed to create an environment where such things are impossible.

But it may also reflect an intuition that by using the old ways we somehow block progress towards the new.

This will cut no ice with those at the rock face of Auroville, the ones who daily have to dirty their hands dealing with our problems. “The people who are blocking the New World are precisely the ones we need to get rid of”, they would doubtless reply.

But it’s worth remembering what Mother replied when asked if we should use organizational methods here that have proved effective elsewhere: “This is a makeshift which we should tolerate only very temporarily”.

In other words, she was not going to make it easy for us. By denying us the old world props of social cohesion – laws, police, jails etc. – all of which are based upon a form of imposition, she was forcing us to find another way. A way beyond the limitations of the mind, a way that is truly transformative.

Is it happening?

It’s very difficult to say. One can point to potential new shoots poking above the surface – experiments in exploring more ‘intuitive’ ways of meeting, decision-making and conflict-resolution, or in strengthening community through providing for basic needs etc. Essentially, these are attempts to find different ways to deal with our difficulties, including our refractory individuals, through creating a different ‘climate’ grounded upon the essential values of Auroville.

At the same time, fewer and fewer people seem to understand, let alone try to live, those values in their daily lives here.

We seem to be engaged in a race between the upward and the downward forces in human nature, and, as in the ordinary world, the gravitational forces seem to be winning in Auroville at present.

But we shouldn’t get sucked into the numbers game, where the assumption is that only the majority win. Sri Aurobindo wrote that for his work to have a solid base, to be actualized, he did not need hundreds of thousands of disciples. It would be sufficient to get “a hundred complete men, purified of petty egoism, who will be the instruments of God”.

We’re not pretending that we are anywhere near achieving this in Auroville. But it’s worth remembering the extraordinary transformative power of a drop of something a little more truthful. And this, perhaps, indicates we may be looking in the wrong direction when we assess Auroville’s progress solely on the basis of community-wide criteria, like how well are dealing with providing the basic necessities for life here.

Perhaps the real progress is happening at the individual, at the micro-level. That every time we overcome our ego, our immediate wants and demands, by listening to the still, small voice of another guidance, we are opening a small crack in the door to that new world. That every time we seek harmony over conflict, compassion over blame, understanding over presumption, we are collaborating in the building of a network, an alternative community within our midst, that may become an increasingly powerful force for the changes that we seek.

In the meantime, it would be irresponsible to ask those at the rock-face to give up the tools that have seemingly worked in other settings and societies.

But we mustn’t lose hope, we mustn’t stop trying new ways, even as we continue to wring our hands over our dysfunctional organization and over people abusing the system; even as we hang over the chasm. We have to believe that this extraordinary experiment where, ultimately, we are required to progress by the force of consciousness alone, is not only possible, but the only way to call in a new world.

And that all the help that we need is there, ready and waiting. If we are humble enough to ask for it.