Auroville and Publicity

From comments on Auronet and casual conversations, it is evident that quite a number of Aurovilians are not looking forward to the 50th birthday celebrations. Their unease seems to be compounded by a number of factors. One, of course, is the inevitable disruption to daily life that will be occasioned by the visit of VIPs and the flood of visitors. But there are other concerns. Among these is a suspicion that the activities planned for the general public (or a selected audience) – the exhibitions and seminars – will be essentially a propaganda exercise, a way of showing to the world how great we are, rather than a truthful exposition of the far more complex reality that is Auroville today.

Concerns about how Auroville should be presented to the world are nothing new: they have been there from the beginning. Even before the Inauguration, the Sri Aurobindo Society (SAS) and its associates were busy lobbying UNESCO to pass a resolution and organising conferences to publicise the concept. Initially, Mother seemed to support this approach. She originally wanted Auroville to be built within 10-20 years thanks to massive funding from the world’s main powers and, clearly, this would require the concept to be widely publicised. The inauguration ceremony itself, apart from its spiritual significance, was obviously designed to introduce Auroville to the world in a special way.

However, even early on it seemed that Mother began to have misgivings. On 3rd February, 1968, she told Satprem that there was going to be a three day conference of ‘all nations’ in Delhi to present Auroville.

“They have prepared texts – always lengthy, interminable: speeches and more speeches.”

It was then that she had a profound revelation regarding the raison d’être of Auroville.

So then I asked, I concentrated to know what had to be said. And all of a sudden, Sri Aurobindo gave me a revelation. That was something interesting. I concentrated on knowing the why, the how and so on, and all of a sudden Sri Aurobindo said... (Mother reads out a note:)

‘India has become...

It was the vision of the thing, and it instantly translated into French words.

‘India has become the symbolic representation of all the difficulties of modern mankind.

‘India will be the land of its resurrection – the resurrection to a higher and truer life.’

And the clear vision: the same thing which in the history of the universe made the earth the symbolic representation of the universe so as to concentrate the work on one point, the same phenomenon is now taking place: India is the representation of all human difficulties on earth, and it is in India that the... cure will be found. And then, that is why – THAT IS WHY I was made to start Auroville.

It came and it was so clear, so tremendously powerful!

So I wrote it down. I didn’t tell them how or why, I told them, “Put this at the beginning of your paper, whatever it is; you can say whatever you like, but put this first.... And as that whole power was in it, I said, “Put it.” We’ll see – they won’t understand anything, but that doesn’t matter, it will act.”

Clearly, Mother’s view of how Auroville should be presented to the world was very different from that of the SAS. Rather than identifying, as she did, the spiritual underpinnings (and embodying it with her Force), a 1968 brochure put out by the Society described an ambitious research programme for the city to be. This included “Removal of the causes which create disharmony between countries and hinder the growth of the consciousness of human unity,” and removal “of the root causes of population growth.”

A later brochure announced that Auroville “will explore the unfathomed depths and unattained heights of human psychology and the latent capacities and faculties of the individual. It will expand the frontiers of science, medicine and technology at the service of man. It will solve…the problems of management and labour, production and marketing in industries and agriculture…”

Mother became very concerned by this kind of inflation. In a 1971 conversation, Satprem quotes to her the following passage from one of Sri Aurobindo’s letters:

... I don’t believe in advertisements except for books, etc., and in propaganda except for politics and patent medicines. But for serious work it is a poison. It means either a stunt or a boom – and stunts and booms exhaust the thing they carry on their crest and leave it lifeless and broken high and dry on the shores of nowhere – or it means a movement. A movement in the case of a work like mine means the founding of a school or a sect or some other dammed nonsense. It means that hundreds or thousands of useless people join in and corrupt the work or reduce it to a pompous farce from which the Truth that was coming down recedes into secrecy and silence. It is what has happened to the ‘religions’ and it is the reason of their failure.

Mother immediately responded, “That passage should be typed and put up in Auroville. It is indispensable. They all have a false idea about propaganda and publicity. It should be typed in big letters; at the top, ‘Sri Aurobindo said,’ then put the quotation and send it to Auroville. Say I am the one who’s sending it.”

Actually, most of the early Aurovilians, in contrast to the SAS, had little interest in publicising the project: they were far too busy learning how to survive in an alien environment. When they did write about what they were doing, it was not for an outside readership but to improve communication within the community. This was the intention behind the launching of the internal weekly newsletter, Auroville Notes, in December, 1973.

Today, removed from their immediate context, many of the contents of the Notes seem trivial – meeting announcements, firewood availability, etc. – but they provided the residents of the time with factual, unvarnished information about what was going on in the various communities. Reading them now gives one a unique feeling of the ‘texture’ of Auroville life in those early days.

The first book written by an Aurovilian for a somewhat wider readership was Savitra’s Auroville: The First Six Years. 1968-1974. In contrast to the glossy brochures put out by the Society, this was a very simple publication: the text was simple typescript, the photos black and white, the cover Auroville earth-red. And the approach was very different. Savitra chose to write about life as it actually was in the fledgling communities of Auroville rather than simply publicising the ideal and the dreams. Consequently, along with the early achievements, he also noted the difficulties and failures, like the collapse of the first Forecomers dam.

His next book, Auroville: Sun Word Rising, continued this down-to-earth approach for it described, among other things, the messy details of Auroville’s conflict with the Sri Aurobindo Society.

Today these two ‘streams’, the ideal and the reality, are more often combined in our public presentations of Auroville. The various exhibitions at the Visitors Center are a good example, providing information about the ideal, Integral Yoga and the next stage of spiritual evolution but also presenting our achievements in education, alternative energy, afforestation, outreach, etc.

Yet, even here there are elisions that subtly distort reality. For example, there is little or no reference to the struggles involved in manifesting these undoubted achievements, or to our many failures to realise the ideal as exemplified, for instance, in the contradictions inherent in our present economy.

In other words, we continue to project a somewhat idealised view of ourselves to the outside world.

One argument is that we should only present the beauty, the fineness of Auroville, as this is one of our highest aspirations. Another justification is that by emphasising the positives rather than the difficulties, we gain support for the Auroville project rather than providing ammunition for those who would like to see us fail. But in a world where almost everybody has the means to be an investigative reporter, seeking to project Auroville as a modern utopia is a forlorn hope. Moreover, our undoubted achievements in many areas actually gain from an understanding of the challenges they had to surmount.

And isn’t there inherent value in telling the truth?

But there are other concerns about the way we tend to project Auroville today. The essential raison d’être of Auroville is to be an experiment in the working out of a new form of consciousness; Auroville “wants to be the cradle of the superman” said Mother in 1969. This aspect is not always mentioned in our publicity – perhaps because we are afraid it will be misunderstood as a new version of the master race, herrenvolk, philosophy, or because we do not want to be accused of creating a new religion.

However, even when it is mentioned, the link between the spiritual raison d’être and the various activities we are engaged in is often not made. The danger then is that these activities – commercial activities, afforestation, sustainable architecture, arts and crafts, renewable energy initiatives, etc. – will be seen as ends in themselves rather than as means to develop and embody this new consciousness. A further danger is that we may succumb to our own publicity and begin believing the simplistic labels – eco-village, green city, etc. – that we sometimes employ to make Auroville more understandable to certain audiences.

Perhaps, finally, the problem is with trying to define Auroville at all, beyond The Mother’s words. For the truth is that, at a fundamental level, we have very little idea about how Auroville really ‘works’. Auroville is a complex mix of people from very different backgrounds and levels of consciousness subject to the play of vast forces of which we have very little understanding.

Yet we can sense that, at this deeper level, Auroville does not seem to function in any kind of linear, logical way. What we perceive as ‘deformations’ or chaos may be the first shoots of a new order; seeming failures can be gateways to new opportunities; a small movement in one individual or area of community life can trigger a cascade of seemingly unrelated consequences; and even the most negative manifestations may be necessary, at a certain stage, as a ‘purge’ or to allow them to be transformed.

From this perspective, the picture is never sharp: it is always fuzzy, always changing, very unlike the simplified, linear view of our development projected by our press releases and exhibitions. Actually, the concept of an evolving Auroville was a familiar one to the early Aurovilians (and one that put them on a collision course with those who wanted to impose fixed structures or concepts). Savitra sounds this note in his introduction to The First Six Years. “Decisions evolve from within Auroville as does the organisation of individual and collective disciplines, rather than arbitrary imposition from without. This is a basic element in the theme and fabric of Auroville’s experiment ... The way is in the making, defining itself through its efforts as it goes along.”

Ruud Lohman, writing in May 1974, gave this another dimension. He noted that the city already exists in a subtle dimension but its materialization depends on the consciousness of the Aurovilians. “To bring the city down, several conditions must be fulfilled…. Maybe we must bring the collective psychic being to a certain level of awareness…” This, of course, is a fundamental tenet of the Integral Yoga: that change proceeds from within to without.

As an Aurovilian put it in the Auroville Notes of 21st November, 1978, “All the problems are only external problems, and merely reflect, manifest, our inner imperfections. The outer progress will automatically follow the inner progress.”

This note is not heard much these days. Perhaps we find it too obvious. Or perhaps, with our regulations and office orders, we have lost the sense that the outer Auroville is plastic enough to reflect the evolving consciousness of its inhabitants. Or, most worryingly, perhaps we have reversed the process by putting greater emphasis today upon manifesting the outer reality than upon our inner development.

Ultimately, of course, it is a cliché that Auroville has to be experienced. As an early Aurovilian put it, “Finally, all that one says, all that one has said and that one will say, is nothing but an extremely clumsy and limited way of expressing something which can be lived but never described.”

In fact, back in the 1970s Ruud Lohman suggested that, “One of the main languages of Auroville of the spiritual age will be silence. The deeper the silence in our hearts and minds the closer we come to the real Auroville.”

It’s a note that resonates still. A few weeks ago, an Aurovilian suggested on Auronet that the most appropriate way to celebrate the 28th February, 2018 would be to spend it in silence and introspection. It received an overwhelmingly positive response.

This, then, is the challenge for those disseminating information about the project (for we cannot avoid doing this: Auroville, as Mother made clear, is in the world, for the world). How to find a language or means to communicate not just the vision but also the texture of the challenge to embody a new form of consciousness? How to present, as part of that larger story, not only our achievements but also our failures, stumblings and inconsistencies? For, in many ways, the quest, the journey, is as important as the achievements.

It won’t be easy to pack all this onto a few exhibition boards or to capture it in a 20 minute video. But, after 50 years, isn’t it worth trying at last to convey the richness and diversity, the madness, contradictions, dreams and aspirations, and, yes, the silence at the core, which make this such a great adventure?