What is really going on here?

Some time ago, a friend asked me to help in writing a history of Auroville for the 50th anniversary. I was very reluctant. At first, I put this down to the paucity of the available material and the impossibility, as I saw it, of getting people to remember what had happened many years ago with any degree of accuracy and without bias.

It was only later that I realized the real reason for my reluctance was the sheer impossibility, as I saw it, of writing the true history of a place like Auroville without something approaching the consciousness of The Mother.

All histories, of course, are heavily biased versions of reality. The fact that history is normally written by the victors or, at the least, from a biased point of view, is evident from almost every school history textbook. But Auroville presents a particular challenge. Because, as Mother explained, this is a site for an experiment in an accelerated evolution of human consciousness and, as such, it will not only face the challenges any new experiment will encounter. It will also attract huge supraphysical forces to participate in what amounts to some kind of cosmic kurukshetra.

In this sense, everything we do here, even the seemingly most trivial, may be weighted with huge significance. As Ruud Lohman, a pioneer Matrimandir construction worker, once put it, if we had really known what we were doing when we knocked in a nail at Matrimandir, we might never have had the courage to continue.

So how can we assess what is really going on here? The instruments we generally use, the predominant one being the mind, mainly tend to register and analyse externalities. So we get depressed because our economy is depressed or because our population is not growing fast enough. We flagellate ourselves over our failure to buy the land or to create a more egalitarian society.

But this may be not the whole story, or even more than a tiny bit of it. To grasp a fuller picture we need to develop another way of ‘seeing’, a way that may lead us to completely change our assessment of what is going on here, of what is important and what is not. Mother gave clues to this other way of seeing. For example, she explained that her ‘blessings’ were not a support for a particular course of action – which is how people’s minds interpreted it – but a means of accelerating an individual’s progress. And such progress may require failure and disappointments on the material plane.

What we are talking about, of course, is the limit of our minds. The mind can understand a degree of complexity, but only superficially. It cannot really grasp that something can be simultaneously ‘true’ and ‘not true’, both ‘helper’ and ‘bar’, or that an action can influence different levels in different ways. It is much better at dividing than integrating, so it prefers people and things to remain neatly pigeon-holed, etched in black or white.

Yet my sense is that this is rarely, if ever, the case in Auroville. Our daily interactions shape and reshape us and, in turn, the larger Auroville in unpredictable ways. Or an individual who lodges up here ‘by chance’ and who, for many years, does not seem to be doing much for Auroville, turns out one day to be the one who can defuse a major community crisis or to have the skills required to solve a technical problem at Matrimandir. Another one joins Auroville for purely material reasons, but her son is touched in his soul. A journalist comes and writes a viciously critical article of this ‘failed utopia’. It is read by someone in a government ministry who comes to investigate. He meets and is inspired by an Aurovilian and subsequently he becomes one of Auroville’s main supporters.

Again, most of us consider dogma to be a bane. Dogma leads people to take extreme positions, to ignore or to attack those who do not share the same orientation, and competing dogmas have knotted up our community process for years. All this is true. Yet what if a larger wisdom uses dogma, during a certain period of our development, to preserve a certain ‘truth’ from dissolution or dilution?

In fact, from one perspective nothing is wasted in this ‘divine ecology’. Everything is made use of; our strengths, weaknesses, our stupidities, our unconsciousness, are all pushing us towards something we can only guess at, but which we assume, among other things, must involve greater knowledge and understanding, and a richer integration of the many facets of this extraordinary experiment.

But how can we become collaborators rather than unconscious puppets in this divine play? How can we base our governance, our planning, our entry policies etc. on a deeper understanding of what is going on here?

If our ordinary mind is a doubtful ally, what can we turn to instead?

Sri Aurobindo explained that the intuitive mind or consciousness is far better able to grasp such complexities; that it can do everything the mind can do, but also much, much more.

“Intuition sees the truth of things by a direct inner contact, not like the ordinary mental intelligence by seeking and reaching out for indirect contacts through the senses.”

“Intuition has a fourfold power. A power of revelatory truth-seeing, a power of inspiration and truth-hearing, a power of truth-touch or immediate seizing of significance, which is akin to the ordinary power of its intervention in our mental intelligence, a power of true and automatic discrimination of the orderly and exact relation of truth to truth.”

“…in its (the intuitive mind’s) higher action it is a first bringing of the supramental truth by a nearer directness of seeing, a luminous indication or memory of the spirit’s knowledge, an intuition or looking in through the gates of the being’s secret universal self vision and knowledge.”

Are we ready to explore this next step?

The recent Retreat may have provided some straws in the wind. The governance group, for example, included some fairly hard-headed individuals, yet one of the main goals that emerged from their discussions was “to bring about a transparent, accountable and effective organization by 2018, increasingly determined by intuitive intelligence”.

Of course, this chimed with what Mother had said about “the government of a few…who have an INTUITIVE(sic) intelligence.” But the fact that this came through strongly in the Retreat process – and not only from the governance group – was perhaps an indication that, at last, we are ‘getting’ it; that we have tried, tried so hard, to organize ourselves with our minds – witness our profusion of groups, mandates and bureaucratic procedures – and we have largely failed. At one stage in our development, the mind had its utility in controlling some of the sub-rational elements, but now it is squeezing out the life-force, blocking spontaneity and creativity, and something else is required.

Of course, there is no easy drop-down menu to click on for the intuitive consciousness. “In fact,” writes Sri Aurobindo, “the change is only possible if there is first a spiritual development on our present level of consciousness and it can only be undertaken securely when the mind has become aware of the greater self within, enamoured of the Infinite and confident of the presence and guidance of the Divine and his Shakti”.

But he also points out that intuition is constantly working within us. It is simply that our minds drown out or distort its guidance and our vital ego pressures it “to work in the service of its own claims and desires”.

If we can get rid of our preferences and go deep within to contact that being “vast, free and knowing”, we can amplify that note.