Spirituality in Action

Auroville stands out among intentional communities for the largeness of the vision that has continued to inspire it for over half a century. That vision keeps it alive, growing and moving towards the future through all appearances of delay and conflict. The obstacles that have hindered its materialization have been unavoidable concomitants of the leap of faith that brought this microcosm of the world into existence with all the strengths and difficulties contributed by its diverse elements. The audacious experiment goes on because something in us cannot live without ideals – the higher, the better. And however long it may take, the impulse that created Auroville cannot eventually stop short of a concrete realisation of the highest and widest ideals of what life can be.

The source of this irrepressible idealism is to be found in the depths of the human spirit. Among all the strands that go to make up the idea of Auroville, a spiritual motive of some sort is clearly central. But what do we mean by “spiritual”? Shortly after the inauguration ceremony in 1968, The Mother was asked: “How dependent is the building of Auroville upon man’s acceptance of spirituality?” Defying age-old assumptions, she replied: “The opposition between spirituality and material life, the division between the two has no sense for me as, in truth, life and the spirit are one and it is in and by the physical work that the highest Spirit must be manifested.”

As early as 1965,when asked whether one had to be a “student of yoga” to live in Auroville, she answered: “All life is yoga. Therefore one cannot live without practising the supreme yoga.” This radical insight comes, of course, straight from Sri Aurobindo. But it calls for explanation, since neither Sri Aurobindo nor the Mother proposed an “anything goes” understanding of yoga. Their point was not to water down the definition of spirituality, but to elevate our view of the meaning and purpose of life, expanding its scope to encompass previously unimagined possibilities.

Life is the process of emergence of the consciousness that was perceived by the ancient sages to be present everywhere beneath the surface of things, “awake in those who sleep” (Katha Upanishad).When this emergence occurs so slowly as to be imperceptible except in its results, we call it evolution. When it is speeded up and takes place with an awareness of what is happening and a deliberate participation in the process, it is what in India since Vedic times has been called Yoga.

Sri Aurobindo defined Yoga as “a methodised effort towards self-perfection by the expression of the secret potentialities latent in the being.” A great variety of methods have been developed for this purpose. Each takes one or more faculties of our normal nature, such as thought or emotion, and concentrates it on the attainment of its special aims. It is like using a magnifying glass to focus sunlight and start a fire. But many of these techniques cannot be practised seriously without restricting our other activities. What life demands from us today is, on the contrary, an extension rather than a limitation of our field of action.

To avoid this drawback, the solution discovered long ago is Karma Yoga, which can be practised while “doing all actions” – kritsna-karma-krit, as the Gita puts it. But Karma Yoga or spirituality in action can be understood in two rather different ways. We can regard the outer life as a play of ignorant forces and, even in the midst of action, learn to stand back in an inner consciousness untouched by the disturbances on the surface. Traditional Karma Yoga so conceived and practised can lead to liberation, but does not usually aim at transformation. The alternative is to make action itself a means of spiritual development and become instruments of a Force that is working to change us and the world. This dynamic Karma Yoga is evidently what the Mother had in mind when she gave one of her last messages in March 1973: “Auroville is created to realise the ideal of Sri Aurobindo who taught us the Karma Yoga. Auroville is for those who want to do the Yoga of work.”

But how can ordinary activities be converted into the Yoga of work? The key is to act in such a way as to progressively free ourselves from the hold of the ego, the small “I.” The ego, Sri Aurobindo observes, “can only think with itself as centre as if it were the All.” But this ignorance falsifies our relationship to the world: “To recognise that we ... are only a partial movement of this infinite Movement and that it is that infinite which we have to know, to be consciously and to fulfil faithfully, is the commencement of true living.” In the Gita’s teaching of Karma Yoga, the law of sacrifice is invoked as “a symbol of the solidarity of the universe.” Its acceptance, Sri Aurobindo explains, “is a practical recognition by the ego ... that, even in this much fragmented existence, there is beyond itself and behind that which is not its own egoistic person, something greater and completer, a diviner All.”

The difficulty of Karma Yoga lies in its tendency to lapse into ordinary action, from which it is distinguished mainly by a subtle difference in the spirit in which we do things. On the other hand, its power for an integral spirituality derives from the participation of our whole nature in the process. When we are engaged in Karma Yoga, in contrast to more contemplative paths, the ego has to be confronted at every step and cannot withdraw into the background to resurface as soon as we come out of our meditation. This makes for frustratingly slow but, in the end, much more thorough going spiritual progress. Since the idea of Auroville could be expected to serve as a constant reminder that one is living for something larger than oneself, those who have dedicated themselves to it are automatically doing a kind of Karma Yoga. If the complexity of what is being attempted also raises up obstacles and maximises the difficulties to be overcome, that is ultimately an advantage for the integrality of the realisation, since it means that all the elements of human nature have to be dealt with.

Auroville was conceived on a different principle than most spiritual communities in the past, monastic or otherwise. There the world tended to be kept at arm’s length to create favourable conditions for individuals to concentrate on their inner life. Here such a simplification of the problem is not an option. Auroville has to embrace the world in order to be relevant to it. The aim has been to bring together a representative sample of humanity in which the possibilities of our collective future can be worked out. If the experiment succeeds, it would be hard to overstate its global significance. And if that takes more time than we might have wished or expected, it will be worth the wait.