Synthesis or separation?

It is a truism that Auroville is founded upon very high ideals. But how do we deal with the fact that there is obviously such a big gap between where we are now and what we are asked to become?

Some people feel crushed or, at least, completely inadequate to the realising of these ideals. This often gets reflected in a determination to focus only upon immediate ‘practicalities’ and to adopt conventional methods to organize our lives. 

Another response is to use the high ideals as a magnet to pull us upward. As Robert Browning put it, Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,/ Or what’s a heaven for?

At present, both of these responses can be found in our organization. Our economy, for example, is in many ways a conventional one as it is money-based, yet experiments with providing goods and services ‘in-kind’ reach ‘upwards’ towards the cashless ideal.  Our community decision-making policy contains elements of the conventional approach – voting – but also of a somewhat higher ideal – consensus. And, of course, our high schools represent a very clear choice between conventional education (Future School) and an education that seeks to evoke individual ‘soul’ qualities (Last School).  

However, the trend in Auroville seems more and more to be toward adopting conventional approaches, as in the monetisation of our services and of work (“How many hours have you worked today?”) and in the ever-increasing bureaucracy. It’s a trend reflected in the increasingly heard, “We’re becoming like anywhere else in the world”. 

Why is this happening?

One reason may be that as the challenges we face as a community become more complex, we tend to revert to tried and trusted ways, even if they are at variance with our higher ideals. It’s a kind of atavism, a way of seeing and responding to the world which entered us from birth through parents, teachers, and all the other agents of socialisation. 

For example, many of us are ‘trained’ to see the world as a place of difference, contrasts, separation, polarities. Conflict. This, after all, is the daily ‘click-bait’ of the media and the foundation-stone of modern individualism which stems, at least in the West, from the 18th century Enlightenment movement. This movement elevated certain mental qualities, like analysis, discrimination and categorisation, above the more intuitive and ‘faith-based’ faculties. The resulting specialisation has led to great advances in science, medicine etc. But there has been a cost, which is a loss of a sense of interconnectedness and of a larger whole. Today, this separative tendency has invaded many different fields including, of course, education where different subjects are conventionally studied in isolation rather than in relationship to each other.    

What Auroville’s ideal of an “actual human unity” seems to require, however, is a totally different way of perceiving the world. Instead of focussing upon separation and differences, we are being asked to focus upon the unity. Ultimately, genuine human unity can only achieved through the realization of a shared spiritual identity. But even before we reach this point, we can practise detecting the underlying principles, patterns, energies, which bind together our outer diversity. And this requires the ability to synthesise rather than just analyse, to connect rather than to separate, to think in terms of wholes rather than parts. 

This is not easy. To many of us it seems logical to try to understand and control the world through categorisation, through creating more and more compartments into which to file away that slippery thing called reality. But if we are really to understand unity in diversity, we need to begin studying interrelationships rather than fixed entities (which are rarely, if ever, ‘fixed’). The examples are all around, even within, us. It is the dynamic interconnectedness of the elements of our own bodies, and of the ‘wood wide web’ in which trees and plants ‘speak’ to and nourish each other through subterranean networks of roots, fungi and bacteria.  As Teilhard de Chardin put it, To see life properly we must never lose sight of the unity of the biosphere that lies beyond the plurality and essential rivalry of individual beings.

We can also, of course, draw inspiration from Sri Aurobindo and The Mother who clarified that on the heights of consciousness there are no opposites or polarities, for there all has found its true place in the whole. The mystics knew this. Pilgrimage to the place of the wise, wrote Rumi, is to find escape from the flame of separateness. 

But even at our level we can begin that journey. And, clearly, there is a thirst for this. During the Auroville Retreat of 2015, an attempt was made to name the ‘elephants in the room’, the issues that have divided us for many years, and to propose a higher synthesis for each issue.  Many of the ‘solutions’ were superficial, but the generous applause that followed each synthesising proposal suggested that Aurovilians are keen, even desperate, to find ways forward beyond our historic polarities. 

Can we make that shift? If, as Proust observed, “a change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world, and ourselves”, think how much more dramatically our vision of ourselves and of others could be changed by cultivating a perspective of oneness rather than separation. We would learn to see ourselves – our weaknesses, strengths and aspirations – in others, increasing our capacity for compassion rather than conflict. Viewing them as the play of diversity within a larger unity, we would feel less threatened by apparent differences, and so become more inclusive of diverse perspectives in our planning and organization. 

Above all, we would no longer feel alone, driven to struggle for individual security in a hostile or uncaring world, but an integral part of a larger community of aspiring souls.