Being responsive to the psychic and the impact of the collective

Auroville Today: What is your perception of spirituality in action?

Deepti: Sri Aurobindo’s yoga is unique in its aim of comprehensive transformation. An interesting illustration of its action can be found in Book 11, The Book of Everlasting Day, of Sri Aurobindo’s epic poem Savitri. This canto is called The Eternal Day, The Souls’ Choice and the Supreme Consummation. Savitri has vanquished Death, yet now she meets a final test: she is offered a series of sublime choices. Savitri refuses all. Her response: “Earth is the chosen place of mightiest souls”, “the heroic spirit’s battlefield”, and, “Thy servitudes on earth are greater, King, than all the glorious liberties of heaven”. In her unmoved resoluteness the “great unsatisfied godhead” meets at last an equal soul in whom to “do his marvellous works”, build his “golden tower”. In subsequent pages, in lines packed with the most arresting, heart-uplifting images, we discover Sri Aurobindo’s vision of spiritual action to transmute earthly life. She who “embodies the spirit of immortal love” must “bear all things that all things might change”. She is the “Sun-Word [who] shall raise the earth soul to Light and bring God down into the lives of men”. She is his “cord of universal love” through whom spirits will learn the “delight of creation’s oneness sweet and fathomless”. Her task: “to change the earthly life to life divine”.

And isn’t that what we as a collectivity are supposed to embody? Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are the “strong forerunners” who have done the work of consciousness: what is needed now is a critical mass, a holding agency of self-given beings. Mother sums up Auroville’s task in the 6 points: ‘To Be A True Aurovilian’, the very first necessity of which is the discovery and bringing forward of the divine centre – the Psychic Being.

There are many methods of yoga and many approaches to spirituality. But in Sri Aurobindo we discover a unique, never before articulated position. Traditional Indian spirituality has not needed an elaborated delineated concept of the psychic being. Earthly Transformation was not an aim. It is the very purpose of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga. The Mother suggests that it is the psychic being which will probably materialize itself and become the supramental being! And here is a defined purpose for Auroville: for Mother says Auroville is to be the ‘Berceau du Surhomme’ – the cradle of the intermediate being between the human being and the supramental being. And it must come about with the conscious collaboration of Aurovilians!

Auroville is to be a collective realization. Sri Aurobindo has written that a true collectivity – what he terms a gnostic or supramental collectivity – can be based only upon the inner realization of each of its members, each realizing his real, concrete oneness and uniting it with all the other members. Obviously, we are far from that realization but we should not forget this is the purpose of Auroville.

Most likely, many if not most Aurovilians have not made the full discovery of their inner being. What is your experience there?

We have to look at this in two different ways: an inner truth and an outer actuality. There is this wonderful answer Sri Aurobindo gives. Someone writes to him saying that there are many more people turning to Buddhism and Vedanta but relatively few to his yoga. And he replies: “nothing depends on numbers”. The inner beings of the people who come to this yoga, however imperfect still, is often more advanced. The external being still pursues its fixed nature. It is only when this outer person changes that his yoga will have visible result! So this is the present issue we confront.

Apropos my personal way of being, over the years, I have tried to hold onto an increasingly settled sense of well-being which wants to express something deeper. I question myself if I lose that poise. And I have noticed it mirrored outwardly. You remain cheerful; it is a force to which the world responds.

You spoke about Auroville as an inner collectivity

I hope the inner collectivity is in process of being formed. But there are always elements that are missing. To create a collective wholeness you need a critical mass where everybody inwardly is in their right place. We are far from that. Seeing recent problems, I wonder wherefrom comes this self-righteousness that demands others accept one’s views as the truth.

Many years ago, Auroville Today published a hand-written note of February 1968 from The Mother to Manoj Das Gupta. She is answering his question “who is in charge in Auroville.” She replies “Here, no one is in charge – it’s very good for the egos and self wills of people”. I find this the key solution for our overweening external egos. As long as we think we are in charge, that we know better than the other, we live in the shadow of our own egoistic condition.

So there is an inner truth and then there is the outer actuality of all these egos, these shadowy beings that are confronting each other. That is the issue of Auroville, that is indeed its impossibility. But hasn’t Auroville always been impossible? It cannot be built by the human mind – it’s a creation of soul-force. So, however underdeveloped we are, that’s what has been given for the work of the new consciousness by Universal Life in its present material state of development.

From one perspective, we seem to represent collective inconscience. This collapse of values, this arrogance of thinking “I know better than everyone else”. The new consciousness is “digging in this horror of filth and mire” which Sri Aurobindo describes in his poem A God’s Labour. Rather the opposite of the “fraternity of collaboration” envisioned by The Mother!

It is now 50 years since I had Mother’s darshan, and I ask myself: where am I? Where are we? Can I say that we are part of a collective realization? that our souls have chosen to subsume their individual progress in a collective realization? In a collective yoga each is automatically held in place by the measure of growth of the whole. And given outer circumstances, can we truly expect the psychic to act visibly in a world that is so full of dark forces?

Everybody who joins Auroville brings in their own possibilities and impossibilities. What to do about those impossibilities?

Kireetbhai [Dr. Kireet Joshi, eds.] was once asked what to do about an undesirable person in Auroville. He replied that while we shouldn’t invite more problems, once the person is there, you have to work through the problem. Perhaps the Divine acts this way: concentrate the difficulties in one spot to better work on them. Can we truly expect that no negative forces, would be present in Auroville?

A possible view of the present situation in Auroville could be that the yoga has reached a point where the new consciousness can confront and effectively address this kind of darkness. Therefore it has been allowed to come forward. If you read Sri Aurobindo’s writings on the French Revolution, he shows how the action of the revolution, the action of Mahakali harnessing the rakshasi and the yatudhani, always accelerates the process. My most optimistic conclusion is that we are in a moment of acceleration and that at the end of this dark passage something interesting will emerge.

What can we as individuals do?

We have to keep faith and trust. Spirituality in action means having an indestructible faith and trust that we are part of something inevitable, evolutionary, that is going to happen. Our minds have sometimes to accept not to understand, and just “Cling To Truth” – that handwritten message of the Mother you find walking up to Sri Aurobindo’s room.

It seems to me that when we choose this yoga, we have in principle said to the Supreme, “you can do this to us, we are at your service”. Most likely, we are not very serviceable! To be serviceable, the psychic would have to be brought forward. But in principle, our souls have made this choice. If we have signed up for Sri Aurobindo’s yoga, we have offered our outer natures for a most difficult process.

The Austrian holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl once wrote that everything can be taken away from a being, but his personal response to circumstances. We are always free to choose our response; and the measure of our response makes the next step. It is true that our sphere of action in Auroville, because it is a collective yoga, is limited, but not our response. Our response is our own choice. Mother says that receptive is one thing, responsive quite another. Are we receptive, are we open to the forces of the future? And, secondly, are we responsive? There individual choice remains. If we can create a collectivity of responsiveness in our outer natures to the psychic demand, Auroville will become a divine garden.