Why?

For the past weeks I have been struggling with only one question: why is our community being so deeply convulsed, fractured, at present? I find all the ‘explanations’ I have heard so far superficial, for I don’t think they begin to account for the severity of the challenges we are facing. Finally, I found a clue in something Sri Aurobindo wrote over one hundred years ago:

“At present mankind is undergoing an evolutionary crisis in which is concealed a choice of its destiny; for a stage has been reached in which the human mind has achieved in certain directions an enormous development while in others it stands arrested and bewildered and can no longer find its way...”

For I believe that, like humanity as a whole, we are facing an evolutionary crisis in Auroville. A crisis where the ‘tools’ at our disposal are proving entirely inadequate to deal with the challenges we are facing at present on the psychological, material and occult planes. It’s as if we are trying to wage a major battle while struggling to keep our footing on shifting sand.

Some, perhaps many, of these challenges are self-inflicted wounds. However, I don’t believe Auroville has ‘failed’ because after 54 years the city has not been built. We can be proud of our enormous achievements in many fields. And in this community, in spite of our surface dissensions, there is much love, fraternity and aspiration.

But is this enough?

Sri Aurobindo pointed out that the only solution to mankind’s present evolutionary crisis was the replacement of “the imperfect mental constructions of the past” by a new consciousness, “born of a deeper and wider truth of our being”.

Mother made many similar statements, including that Auroville was intended to be the ‘cradle’ of a new consciousness, and that our essential work here involves replacing the mental consciousness with a ‘spiritual consciousness’.

But where are we today?

I have no doubt that there are some, perhaps many, Aurovilians dedicated to this work. But it is challenging, very challenging, for the mind has a very powerful hold upon us. For example, it is very difficult for many of us to believe that our minds are inadequate to deal with the practicalities of life, even though Mother pointed out that a spiritualized consciousness is “capable of governing material things for everyone in a MUCH TRUER, happier and more beneficial way than any material power”. For every day we believe we see many examples of how the mind has solved particular difficulties, or made our lives easier, even though these ‘solutions’ often spawn complications which the mind has to wrestle with anew. 

Moreover, the entrance to that other, spiritualized consciousness is difficult to access. Mother said that the first priority of the ‘true Aurovilian’ should be to discover the “being free, vast and knowing, who awaits our discovery and who ought to become the active centre of our being and our life in Auroville”. But the discovery of the psychic is only the first stage in the full spiritualization of the consciousness. The peaks of the spiritual and the supramental transformations remain to be scaled.  

It’s not surprising, then, that time and again we fall back on material ‘solutions’ to our problems.

Or else we envisage spiritual consciousness as something easier to comprehend and attain, like a nicer version of our present selves. But Sri Aurobindo and Mother were talking about something very different – an absolute change of perception, a ‘reversal of consciousness’ in which the stumbles of the mind are replaced by an intuitive surety of action and thought.

For many of us, it seems a distant prospect. And yet … many of us have also experienced moments of ‘no-mind’ when events seem to have arranged themselves miraculously, or apparent impossibilities have suddenly been resolved. Often this has happened when we felt ourselves pushed to the wall, faced with a situation we had no way of understanding or resolving in the usual way, and we simply called or surrendered to something else.

This is why today, in spite of the terrible hurt and anger generated in the community by recent events, I feel we are also experiencing a moment of Grace. For we are confronted by a situation where the inadequacy of our present means of dealing with it are painfully obvious, and, driven by the urgency of the situation, we are being given a wonderful opportunity to call for something else, and to explore, embrace, this other level of being.

Some Aurovilians may have already attained it, or touched it in moments. But until their efforts permeate our collective consciousness, I’m afraid that we will continue to experience the same challenges, the same convulsions, as we are experiencing today, albeit with different actors and scripts, in the same way that what we are experiencing now may be the consequence of what we failed to learn in the 1970s and 1980s. For while we need to stand up to injustice wherever and whenever we encounter it – just as we did then – I believe that in Auroville we are being asked to do it from a different poise, a different understanding, a different consciousness. 

Otherwise, we will get sucked into the same dynamic and continue circling in the same old round.