Too much bureaucracy?

Abha: We are seeing a movement which is centrifugal, widening and widening, getting increasingly externalised and further away from the central truth and goal. But this is the opposite of what Auroville should be doing. We seem to have lost focus on what has brought us here. We should be looking at what we are supposed to do, at the deepest level, at the level of The Mother’s vision that Auroville could become the cradle of the superman. We should focus inward towards this deepest aspiration. That, I feel, is the only way to get out of this outwardness. 

Christine: I share this completely. I was thinking of Satprem’s On the Way to Supermanhood, “From within outward”. Auroville is focusing on the external and to such an extent that I have become pessimistic and have started to wonder if the Auroville experiment is over, or if we still can try the Real Thing, which is to act from inside, with sincerity as the only benchmark. Mother said “No Rules.” She said “Rules are stifling life”, and this is what governments do and what Auroville now is following. Some people say “this is because of the Auroville Foundation,” but I do not think this is fully correct. For sure, the Foundation has brought its own amount of bureaucracy, but we have gone much beyond that. 

The only solution for us is to go within and act from there; otherwise, there is no hope and people may leave Auroville in consequence. Very often I feel like leaving, as I no longer recognize anything we came for. We, who came here more than 40 years ago, have known an Auroville which was not like that. For sure, it was not paradise, it was not ideal, but it was not so full of these stifling rules. 

Tency: I am less pessimistic. We are at that tipping point where we have to try and find ourselves again and say “this is not possible any longer, let us all reflect a little bit.”  Aurovilians come from many different backgrounds and cultures – today there are people from 53 nationalities – and all come with a trunk full of qualities and of shortcomings, weaknesses and dishonesty – you name it, everything is there. That trunk is opened when coming to Auroville and everybody is confronted with their own shortcomings, and those of others. Often, we don’t see a way out of all those messy and chaotic and dishonest things. But coming to Auroville means that a cleaning needs to happen, for Auroville cannot become what it is intended to be when these things remain submerged. 

But how to do this? We experience that when sitting together with three or four people, you can have an in-depth conversation, a rich one, with everybody intently listening to each other. If you are in a group of ten or twenty people, that quality of communication seems to get lost. The dedication, the inner flame, which is there in quite a number of individuals, seems unable to assert itself when we have large meetings. To compensate for that lost aspect is one of the reasons why people come up with rules and regulations, mostly a copy-and-paste job of rules existing outside. Should we not try to do things differently, trying out something else than what has been tried outside? This requires a sincere individual effort. We have to go within and act from there. For that is the real reason why this little place on earth was started. 

Abha mentioned the ideal of Auroville to become the place for hastening the next evolutionary breakthrough. If we Aurovilians could carry the aspiration to follow what Sri Aurobindo and The Mother wanted to achieve, to be open to the supramental vibration which they made descend into the world, and which is becoming stronger by the day, I believe it will have a huge impact. It will become increasingly uncomfortable for all of us, participants in the Auroville adventure, to deny that vibration and forget why we have been invited to come and participate in this unique attempt. The FAMC’s Code of Conduct is an outdated effort to deal with our internal shortcomings of not being able to agree collectively; doing that battle with traditional means is taking a wrong direction. It has been shown not to work – or only to a limited extent – in the outside world, so why would it work here? We have been given the challenge to try something else. We should do our best to look for that something else, and not let it evaporate and slip away again. 

Christine: Over the years, Auroville has created an imposing structure with pages and pages and pages of mandates and regulations and guidelines which are weapons in the hands of legalistically minded people to accuse Auroville of ‘not having followed this or that’. 

Kireet Joshi [a former Chairman of the Auroville Foundation and the author of the Auroville Foundation Act, eds.] once said to me that there is a great virtue in vagueness and I have found this to be true. Rules should be as general and as flexible as possible. Extensive mandates are a madness. What a group should be doing should be said in no more than two lines. And that would also be a safeguard against legalistic questions from outside. 

The regulation overdose is also an issue for Newcomers, who are confronted with a volley of regulations about what they have to pay for a house with this percentage and that percentage added – it’s killing, and it doesn’t encourage generosity. Actually, it encourages the opposite and the same goes for commercial units who are told that they have to contribute 33% of their profits. The strictness is a damper on the generosity. Many units now pay exactly 33% and not a paisa more.

Abha: We have to switch levels entirely. When we come to a place like Auroville, it is an inner choice; and you can’t cheat the Divine. Who are people cheating when they cheat? Their deal is with the Divine, not with the FAMC. If you cheat at that highest or deepest level, it is your problem. I think we should only function at the level where we expect the highest from everyone; and if someone is not at that level, all the worse for that person. The last messages of The Mother for Auroville were all along those same lines: “Do not lie”. She said it at least four times in the last years. What if Auroville groups could simply hold the mirror up of what is expected of each one of us, and have trust? Auroville brings out the worst at times, but we may trust that there will also be moments when it will bring out the best. And that’s what we have to demand from each of us. It doesn’t help to keep looking at the worst and making rules to deal with that.

Tency spoke of the inner flame. I think that flame is there and growing in many of us, and I believe that is the real reason why many people in India respect Auroville. 

When the Prime Minister of India addressed the Auroville residents in February 2018, he said very beautiful things about Auroville. His was an inspirational speech which showed that at one level, India continues to follow Auroville with great hopes. 

In The Agenda, The Mother gave a raison d’être for the creation of Auroville. She said that India has become the symbolic representation of all the difficulties of present-day humanity; that it is in India that there will be the cure; and it was for this reason She had created Auroville – a nucleus whose work would have a sort of influence on India, which in turn would have an influence on the world. To grow towards such a lofty goal, we have to nurture that inner flame in each and every one of us. We have to demand of each other the best that we know a person can be.

A problem is that we don’t know everybody, like we did in the olden days. Then, we used to fight and argue, but in the evening we met for tea and cake. There was a brotherhood. That seems somehow missing today: we have become too individualistic, and doing things together like we used to is no longer there. This should change: we should find ways to meet and come to know each other at that higher or deeper level. It is not about having more of a social life; it’s about deepening our collective life. 

Tency: What we seem to forget is that Auroville has been given an unbelievable Charter with four sections which say it all. It starts at the individual level: if you want to be part of this experiment, you have to be a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness; that is the first effort you have to do as an individual. The other lines give you all the possibilities that you can imagine, and the very last line mentions the collective effort towards a living embodiment of a human unity. It is all listed out, giving the greatest possible freedom within a spiritual framework. Wouldn’t that be enough?

Abha: Yes. The Charter should be our only Code of Conduct. We could add “To be a True Aurovilian”. For it is the same thing. 

Tency: This may be a way out of our present impasse: those who have the inner flame burning could hold up the mirror that Abha was talking about. That requires the growth and blossoming of an intensive collective inner fire in many individuals before we can move further. That may not yet be strong enough, but I trust that this is being prepared at some higher level. Meanwhile, to paraphrase Sri Aurobindo in Savitri, we can act with the truth that saves, and not with the truth that slays and hurts.