The return of Don Quixote de la Mancha, the impossible dreams that our times so yearn for

An inward look — Words by Tency

After touring Pablo Picasso’s museum in Barcelona, we could not resist buying a print of his masterly sketch of Don Quixote and his companion Sancho Panza, the characters from Miquel de Cervantes’ novel about the adventures of Don Quixote. The black and white drawing stands out in its simplicity, depicting the two main characters on horse and donkey, against a background of windmills and the sun.

In the novel, Don Quixote unexpectedly starts to fight against turning windmills, which he perceives as his main enemies. Four hundred years later, this particular image still conveys a powerful and fascinating message. Sure, in Auroville we do have our own tribe of windmill storm troopers who, suddenly spotting a moving windmill, identify it as their main enemy, and charge and attack the perceived evil with all their mental force, mostly to receive a beating from the encounter.

Along my journey there have been plenty of encounters with turning windmills, a period when my emotional volcano was emitting smoke, ash and fire; fed and kept active by ignorance. Much later on, when my inner witness programme got installed, the fight against imaginary enemies shifted towards more challenging inner obstacles. Curiously, even today, the volcano is still able to emit plenty of smoke, especially when encountering a relentless growing and self-empowering Auroville bureaucracy. An example of this trend is Auroville’s recently proposed Code of Conduct, a document which specifies a detailed set of logical and calibrated steps that Auroville units are expected to practice. This attempt to introduce regulations, in an ultra-logical document of only 40 pages long, repeats the fatal mistake of assuming that an inner change can be achieved by exclusively using the domain of reason.

Both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother worked tirelessly to establish an integral Truth through the manifestation of a decisive transition from the present rational phase towards the subjective or inner phase, not only on an individual but also on a collective scale. For Auroville this means that we should try to align our thoughts, activities and developments from the inside towards the outside, from the inner to the outer. Actions would start from an inner awareness before they translate themselves according to their own truth in the outer environment.

All participants enter Auroville from separate directions with diverse ideas and aspirations. Each one of us is attracted to a different aspect of the Dream. This voluntary coming together delivers an abundant diversity of everyday activities and opinions, preparing a cross-section of humanity to walk towards a wider goal. Less acknowledged, we also enter with luggage in each hand. One bag contains our possibilities, the other our limitations. The invisible accompanying luggage largely defines our life journey. The bag which is opened the fastest and most easily contains our qualities. The other one, with our shortcomings, is opened less often and with far less enthusiasm.

Accepting to participate in Auroville’s adventure involves taking up the task of self-exploration and self-development for contributing to the aim of Human Unity. While such an effort starts on an individual level, equally we grow through our relationships. Humans share a common life, a common work, an effort, an aspiration, without which we would not be able to expand to our full height and wideness. Importantly, it also means that our individual needs for freedom must be in harmony with the freedom of our fellow-beings.

Once we have been able to establish our inner aim, we can learn to distinguish between reason (to know) and wisdom (to have seen). The solution lies not in the reason but in the soul of man, in its spiritual tendencies. It is a spiritual, an inner freedom that can alone create a perfect human order.

We know that our individual truth bandwidth is extremely limited. However, if we can combine enough individuals putting in a conscious effort to explore the group’s dynamic search for reaching harmony, we contribute to the emergence of the group-soul, a feature described and elaborated by Sri Aurobindo. The nation or society, like the individual, has a body, an organic life. It is the group-soul that must become more and more self-conscious and find itself more and more fully as it develops its corporate action and mentality and its organic self-expressive life.

The group-soul emergence and development is more difficult than the individual soul search: There is only this difference that the group-soul is more complex because it has a greater number of partly self-conscious mental individuals for the constituents of its physical being instead of an association of merely vital sub-conscious cells.

As individuals or participants in groups, we can support the growth of an emerging group soul, contributing to it in a positive way. Sadly, we easily can destroy it, derail it, using various interventions for prohibiting the effort to reach a common solution and harmony. Resistance and confrontations are mostly centred around the sureness that personal ideas, opinions, are the only correct and valid ones.

Are we attempting to explore our group-souls? On the surface, our interaction patterns seem to be more in tune with a textbook study on the sociology of conflict. Our collective meetings and internal communication platforms are barometers for accurately measuring internal storms, typhoons and tsunamis. We witness a continuous ongoing struggle for establishing harmony between the different existing social structures; the individual, the family, the community, the tribes, the classes, the languages, the races, the cultures, the states, the countries. All this is happening while we try to make sense of an ongoing experiment of unparalleled complexity, attracting an accumulation of all possible difficulties. Oppressed by the thousand forces that deny. Could such a chaotic space lead us to that tipping point to ignite the potential richness within?

When our search for finding a common ground of unity is extinguished, when it is forgotten that the experiment has to be lived out on an inward level, when this crucial knowledge is overlooked, or deemed not necessary any longer, we enter the conflict zone of confusion, division, verbal fights. Then the collective inner search retreats, and instead of progress, stagnation occurs and reigns.

While considering the overall resistance to change and inner progress, it must be acknowledged that Auroville did not opt for an authoritarian structure to organize its different activities, but instead tries to find alternative solutions, ways not clearly defined and which often do not work. As each of the participants in the adventure of consciousness and joy explores and travel upon their unique road, this results in an assembly of participants fully aware of their individual rights but unable to take the responsibility to establish, encourage and nurture a collective spirit. If by chance an agreement is reached, it is framed in a mental language awfully inadequate to our inner aspirations, simply because we do not yet have that intuitive ability for organizing and guiding ourselves towards a much-needed higher level. With such huge challenges, it is a sheer miracle that Auroville continues and that we, the fortunate journey travellers, are able to keep the invisible flame alive and burning. It will not be enough, but it will be a commencement, a true gate and not a blind entrance.